The Time of Her Life (7 page)

Farther on across the meadow was the Secret Feather River, which was a drainage ditch that, over the years, had cut deep,
grassy banks down the hill. Two miles away water streamed off the carefully laid planes of the golf course, running off the
greens and fairways into
unobtrusively placed red clay pipes, through which it was channeled into a cement tunnel and carried along underground, until
it poured out into the culvert at the top of the hill and flowed beautifully clear all the way to the Lunsbury Sand and Gravel
Works and into the Missouri River. When Jane and Diana had first discovered this stream, it, too, had been hard to name. Jane
had first said to Diana that it was the River of Paradise, but that had been met with such condescension on Diana’s part—she
had not even acknowledged it as a serious notion—that for a while it had been the Blue Feather River. Diana had suggested
that one day when she had found a jay’s feathers strewn mysteriously along the bank. It was a good name, but Jane was always
chagrined to give any amount of control to her best friend.

“If we just call it The Secret Feather,” she said, “then no one would even have any idea that it’s a river or anything. It
would be a code, you see?”

“Why ‘secret’?” Diana had said, and Jane had taken that chance to use impatience to get her way.

“Because, Diana, it’s
our
secret that it’s a river!” And that had been all right.

Along the banks of The Secret Feather, Jane and Diana were sometimes early settlers. They stored provisions in the high coves,
and Jane took charge because she had read
Little House on the Prairie
and the other Wilder books, too. She assured Diana that the television show was simplistic and revoltingly sentimental.

“It’s really just awful,” she said. “My father calls it Little Shack.” She instructed Diana in ways of gathering wood for
winter and berries and nuts. Of course, when winter came, the land died; the grass was flattened under the weight of snow,
and Jane and Diana traveled to each
other’s houses in the front seats of their parents’ cars, driving the three miles around.

But on that Saturday in late fall, before the ice storm, as Jane entered her own territory and spotted Diana waiting in the
meadow, a slight expansion of herself took place. When she saw her friend sitting patiently under the Four Trees waiting for
her, she began to have weight in the world, and will, and determination of a sort. There remained a persistent sullenness
within her, but by the time she reached Diana sitting there on the grass, Jane had begun to get a picture of her own self
in her mind. She was so much a part of what her parents were as a couple that when she was within her own house, it was almost
as if she were entirely erased, although this concept manifested itself only as a feeling she had; it was not a clear thought.
Now there ran a picture in her head of herself walking down the hill while Diana waited. In this picture all the future—all
the moments which she could see falling one upon another like a line of dominoes—was dependent just upon her own actions,
on what she would do next. She was filled for one instant with an enormous sense of power and importance in the scheme of
things. She continued to walk toward Diana, but she moved now with more intention, and Diana saw her and got up to meet her.

They made an interesting twosome. Separately neither one of them was particularly remarkable. They were young girls of an
indeterminate age. When they were side by side, Jane looked quite awkward and bony, and Diana looked like a miniature adult.
All the parents in Lunsbury with children in this age-group said to each other that Diana would be a beauty, and she was such
a nice girl, too, and smart. But when Jane and Diana
were together, it was instinctively to Jane that people addressed a collective question: “What can I do for you girls?” “What
flavor ice cream cone do you two want?”

It was to Jane with her stern, slender face and sensibly cut hair that people became attuned to, as people do with a constant,
subliminal sensoring. It was an unreasonable attention Jane attracted. Who could tell about her? Her schoolwork was erratic,
but her teachers admired her. Her clothes weren’t always coordinated; her tongue was unreliably sharp; her honesty was questionable.
She was a puzzle to the parents of children in her orbit because she
was
stellar. She was a puzzle and perhaps a threat, although grudgingly they, too, admired her. And those baffled grown-ups courted
her on behalf of their daughters and even coveted her approval for themselves, as much as they thought about such things.

Diana brushed grass and debris from the legs of her jeans and walked along beside Jane, attending her in the way any two children
can be observed as leader and devotee. They had known each other since kindergarten, and they knew each other’s moods. Diana
recognized at once, on that Saturday afternoon, that Jane had about her a bleakness that might transform itself at any moment
into mild contempt for Diana or any of her plans. To the west the sky lowered toward them, gray and gloomy. Diana wanted Jane
to cheer up; she wanted the sleepover to be fun; she wanted to engage her friend’s interest.

“Did you see what happened in math lab yesterday?” Diana said, leaning around to observe Jane’s face as they walked. She chatted
on, knowing not to wait for a reply. “God! It was Chris Barraclough. Didn’t you see what
he did? I couldn’t believe it. I had on my plaid wrap-around skirt. You know. That ties in back. He was already sitting down
at the back of the room when I came in, and when I went by his desk, he took hold of one end of the bow!” She paused but got
no reaction from Jane. “And then he keeps saying, ‘Diana, you’re in my way. Come on, Diana, I can’t see. What’re you standing
around for? Aren’t you going to sit down?’ “ She had imitated Chris Barraclough’s singsong of mockery. Now her voice dropped
back into its regular scale. “He really did! What do you think that means?”

Jane only glanced at Diana with a quick frown of disparagement.

“Well, Jane! I couldn’t move or my skirt would have come untied and just fallen off. I mean, it was tied in a plain bow. And
I couldn’t do anything, because you know how Mrs. Dehaven is. Oh, my God. I was so mad.”

Jane still didn’t say anything, and they walked a little farther before Diana tried again. “Have you finished
The Secret Garden
for Great Books? We have to have a report on it by Monday.”

“The Secret Garbage,”
Jane said.

“I know,” said Diana. “Well, are you reading
The Summer Birds
instead? I started it, but it was really strange.”

“The Secret Garbage
and
The Summer Turds,”
Jane said. “Christ!”

“Oh, come on, Jane!” Diana was finally irritated. Jane could be so tiresome. “Maggie said that
The Secret Garden
was her favorite book when she was growing up.”

Jane’s attention was completely engaged for a moment. She so much admired the familiarity of the Tunbridge family, in which
the parents were not Mom and
Dad but Maggie and Vince, their real names. By an unasked-for and special dispensation she, too, as Diana’s closest friend,
had been urged to address them by their first names, and she did this often and with gusto, especially if she was with them
in public. It seemed to her that such an intimacy conferred upon her a superior status.

Diana was in front of Jane on the path now, where it narrowed on the steepest part of the hill, and they continued down the
slope without any more conversation, each one mulling over one thing or another. When they drew abreast, though, Jane was
more animated.

“Your hair looks good like that,” she said to Diana in the cautious way she gave compliments. Diana’s mother had carefully
braided her daughter’s hair in a single thick brown rope that intertwined luxuriously from the crown of her head to the middle
of her back. Green grosgrain ribbons were woven through it to match Diana’s green sweater.

“It’s a French braid. I really wanted to try it, but it takes hours. I’ll never be able to wear it to school like this.” Diana
wasn’t at all worried about that, really, because at the moment she was simply glad that Jane had cheered up.

They went on to talk about their teachers and their friends and their enemies. To a great extent it was school that shaped
their lives and how they spent them, and that was what they were discussing, not frivolously. As their conversation wound
out, they became more intense, bending their heads close together, chins down in contemplation. The subtleties and complications
of the days at school were endless and delicate.

And in any case, here were two children who watched
the news with attention every night, who knew all the nations of the world and their capitals and their forms of government.
Those two girls were beginning to fall in and out of love on a minor scale; they took computer science every other day; they
did posters supporting a nuclear freeze for their art project; they were on the verge of having reproductive ability. It might
be that they said any number of things that had been said time and time before. They might have a conversation that would
bore any thoughtful adult, but what in the world could they have talked about that would not be important?

In their grammar school, rumors were always circulating that Lunsbury was targeted for a first hit by the Soviet Union in
the event of nuclear war. In fact, when all the children were gathered in the classrooms together, or crowding each other
in the lunch lines, they took special relish in reminding each other of that very fact in loud voices. It was now and then
passed among them as a trophy, a source of some excited civic pride. At night, in their own homes, each child sometimes brooded
about the possibility of the vaporization of his or her own parents, siblings, and pets. Each year a few children experienced
an early crisis of the awareness of mortality, but they received outpatient treatment at the university mental health facility,
and they weathered it as well as anyone does.

There was no doubt about the fact that being blown to dust was not a good way to die. In the lunchroom over their tacos they
weighed it against the desirability of perishing slowly from radiation poisoning or cancer, or even being hit by a car, as
a student from their school had been two years ago—“Oh, my God!” they said. “He
was just a vegetable for two months before he finally died.” And it came down to the fact that it was only death they were
considering, and one way or another it was a subject they were bound to consider eventually. The possibility of annihilation
didn’t ever, for more than an instant, lessen the immediate concerns of those sophisticated children.

And it was never the thought of death that bothered Jane. She spent her energies battling a peculiar hollowness that often
rendered before her a setting devoid of depth. Today she finally caught refractions of herself from her friend, Diana, from
the tensile grass, from the old oaks too thick to bend but rolling their heads like pinwheels in a crazy spinning of leaves
and branches.

And under the old trees, so buffeted by a low turbulence that their tops seemed to be turning on a fixed stem—under the trees
as Diana and Jane walked through the meadow in Lunsbury, Missouri, those two girls were as much a part of the destiny of the
earth as the nuclear power plant that lay fifteen miles away in Fairhill, or the ICBM base seventy miles away in Sheldon.
There they were, two girls who might have remarkable lives or might not, might be happy or might not. They were just two eleven-year-old
girls walking across a meadow who might do anything at all.

At the Tunbridges’ that afternoon Jane could not settle down to anything. She was giddy with the effort of trying to appease
the odd sense of yearning that had come over her as soon as she had caught sight of the broad brick hull of the Tunbridge
house when she and Diana had curved across the meadow. There it sat on the bluff with its wooden appendages of porches, garages,
and gabled extra rooms that had been added over the years to meet the family’s needs or to comply with various architectural
upheavals. Maggie said that the main house was essentially a “center hall Georgian,” but Vince had laughed and said that it
was “just a basic dog run. The hounds run in the front door and out the back.”

To Jane, the house bespoke continuity. The Missouri River could be seen from the upstairs windows, and across the river trains
passed at intervals on tracks that had carried the first train from St. Louis to St. Joe, tracks which the house predated
by fifty years. Vince’s family had built this house, and he had filled Jane and Diana with tales of all its terrifying history
and secret places when they were little girls, and Jane could never enter the building without wanting to reacquaint herself
with every room, its every mystery. But finally the two girls settled down with Vince in his study, where he was watching
a football game with Diana’s brother, Mark, who was five years older than Diana.

The Tunbridge family was divided by appearance into two factions that didn’t seem to be related. Mark, and Diana’s nineteen-year-old
sister, Celeste, were their mother’s children, with her amiable lankiness, light hair, and wide-boned friendly face. Vince
was shorter than his wife, but he was also perfectly proportioned so that he seemed better made, more carefully put together.
His eyes were blue, like Maggie’s, although otherwise he was dark and intense, and Diana, who was so much younger than her
siblings and so resembled her father, was like an afterthought that only he had had. But while Diana’s energy was precociously
controlled and meted out with care, that same trait in Vince always made Jane anxious
when she was in his company. His restraint, his discretion, was tense and palpable. In spite of herself, she was never comfortable
with her friend’s father, although he flirted with her and singled her out in any group. Now, when the girls settled in front
of the television, he turned his attention to Jane immediately.