The Jane Austen Book Club Part 7

If only she'd said it in French! Trey made a delighted noise. "Nessa Trussler. A girl. Or something."

Prudie looked at Nessa again. There was, she could see now, a certain plump ambiguity. Maybe Trey wouldn't tell anyone what she'd said. Maybe Nessa was perfectly comfortable with who she was.

Maybe she was admired throughout the school for her mu-sical ability. Maybe pigs could jig.

The best thing you could say for Nessa was that she had only three years here. Then she could go as far away as she liked. She could never come back if that was what she wanted. Prudie was the one staying.

She had a sudden revelation that this was Brigadoon, where nothing would ever change. The only people who would age were the teachers. It was a terrifying thing to think.

She had a more practical idea. "I'm not wearing my contacts," she offered. Lamely and late.

"Yes you are." Trey was looking deep into her eyes; she could smell his breath. It was slightly fishy, but not in a bad way. Like a kitten's. "I can see them. Little rings around your irises. Like little dinner plates." Prudie's heartbeat was quick and shallow. Trey lifted his chin. "And a good thing. PD of A to starboard."

Prudie turned around. There, right there, in the wings, with the stage empty but a fair number of kids still scattered about the auditorium, Mr. Chou, the music teacher (unmarried) slipped his hands over Ms. Fry (married)'s b.r.e.a.s.t.s, squeezed them as if he were testing cantaloupes. And clearly not for the first time; those hands knew those b.r.e.a.s.t.s. What was it about this school! Prudie's headache upped its tempo. The bagpipe exhaled for-lornly.

Prudie's second reaction was to calm down. Maybe this was not so bad. It would distract Trey from her unfortunate faux pas about Nessa. Nessa was an innocent here; Prudie didn't regret the exchange.

As for Ms. Fry and Mr. Chou, Prudie couldn't even pretend to be surprised. Ms. Fry had large b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Take pheromones, add music, rehearsals day and night, people dying for love. What could you expect?

One of the things that troubled Prudie aboutMansfield Park was the way things ended between Mary Crawford and Ed-mund. Edmund had wished to marry Miss Crawford. It looked to Prudie as if, whatever other excuses he might offer, he'd fi-nally cast her aside because she wished to forgive her brother and his sister for an adulterous affair. Edmund accused Mary of tak-ing sin lightly. But he himself preferred to lose his sister forever rather than forgive her.

Prudie had always wanted a brother. It would have been nice to have someone with whom to cross-check memories. Had they ever been to Muir Woods? Dillon Beach? Why were there no pictures? She'd imagined that she would love this brother very much. She'd imagined he would love her in return, would see her shortcomings-who would know you better than a brother did ?-but with fondness and charity. In the end, Prudie disliked Edmund so much more than she disliked his scandalous, selfish, love-stricken sister.

Of course, att.i.tudes changed over the centuries; you had to allow for this. But an unforgiving p.r.i.c.k was an unforgiving p.r.i.c.k. "Oo-la-la," Trey said.

Prudie's own feelings on adultery were taken from the French.

"The evergreen!--How beautiful, how welcome, how won-derful the evergreen!"(MANSFIELD PARK).

The climate in the Valley was cla.s.sified as Mediterranean, which meant that everything died in the summer. The native gra.s.ses went brown and stiff. The creeks disappeared. The oaks turned grey.

Prudie got into her car. She rolled down the windows, started the AC. The seat burned the backs of her bare legs.

Some bird had shat on the winds.h.i.+eld; the s.h.i.+t had cooked all day and would have to be scoured off.

Prudie couldn't face doing this in the full sun. Instead she drove home while peering around a largecontinent-Greece, maybe, or Greenland. Using the water and wipers would only make things worse.

None of the driving was freeway, and she had mirrors, so it wasn't really as reckless as it sounded.

Without any particular affection for her eldest cousin, her tenderness of heart made her feel that she could not spare him; and the purity of her principles added yet a keener solicitude, when she considered how little useful, how little self-denying his life had (apparently) been.(MANSFIELD PARK)

The curtains were drawn and the air conditioner was on, so Prudie walked into a house that was dark and tolerably cool. She took two more aspirin. Now that it came to it, she didn't have the energy for further cleaning. Her lists were a comfort to her, an il-lusion of control in a turvy-topsy world, but she was no prisoner to them. Things came up, plans changed. Holly, the house-keeper, had been by last week. The place was clean enough by anyone's standards but Jocelyn's. Prudie would have to go out shopping again, there was no help for that, or serve a salad made from a romaine already browned at the edges.

She took a cold shower, hoping that would pep her up, and dressed in a sleeveless T-s.h.i.+rt and cotton pyjama pants printed with various sorts of sus.h.i.+. Someone rang the doorbell while she was towelling her hair.

Cameron Watson stood on her porch, sweat running down the peak of his sharp nose. "Cameron,"

Prudie said. "What's this about?"

"I said I'd clean up your machine."

"I didn't know you meant today."

"You want to be able to e-mail," he said, in surprise. How could anyone go twenty-four hours without e-mail?

There was a time when Prudie had worried that Cameron had a little crush on her. Now she knew better. Cameron had a little crush on her computer, which he had, of course, picked out himself.

Cameron had another little crush on Dean's video games. Cameron didn't even see that she was wearing nothing but her pyjamas. If this were a Jane Austen book, Prudie would be the girl courted for her estate.

She stood aside to let Cameron in. He had cords and periph-erals slung across his body like a bandolier, disks in a plastic case. He went straight to the family room, began running his diagnos-tics, working his magic. She'd thought to take a nap, but she couldn't do that now, not with Cameron in the house. She dusted instead, indifferently, even resentfully. This was certainly a poor trade for sleeping.

Because she didn't feel the grat.i.tude Cameron deserved- really this was very nice of him-she made a show of it. She brought him a gla.s.s of lemonade. "I'm downloading you some deadware," he said.

"Emulator programs." He took the lemon-ade, set it aside to sweat in its gla.s.s all over the top of the desk. "We should get you Linux, too. n.o.body uses Windows any-more." (And pigs can jig.) She looked down on the white line of scalp that showed through at the part in his hair. He had large,dead flakes of dan-druff. She felt an impulse to dust him. "What do emulator pro-grams do?"

"You can play old games on them."

"I thought the point was new games," Prudie said. "I thought the games were just getting better and better."

"So you can play thecla.s.sics," Cameron told her.

Perhaps that was a bit like rereading. Prudie returned to the living room. She was chasing a thought now about rereading, about memory, about childhood. It had something to do with how Mansfield Park seemed a cold, uneasy place to f.a.n.n.y until she was banished back to her parents'. The Bertram estate be-came f.a.n.n.y's home only when she was no longer in it. Until then, she'd never understood that the affection of her aunt and uncle would prove more real in the end than that of her mother and father. Who else but Jane would think to turn the fairy tale this way? Prudie meant to get the index cards from her purse, write some of this down. Instead, in spite of Cameron, she fell asleep on the couch.

She woke up with Dean stroking her arm. "I had the strangest dream," she said, and then couldn't remember what it had been. She sat up. "I thought you said you'd be late." She looked at his face.

"What's wrong?"

He picked up both her hands. "You need to get right home, honey," he said. "Your mom's been in an accident."

"I can't go home." Prudie's mouth was dry, her head fuzzy. Dean didn't know her mother the way she did, or he'd know there was nothing to be concerned about. "I have my book club coming."

"I know. I know you've been looking forward to that. I'll call Jocelyn. You have a plane reservation in an hour and a half. I'm so sorry, darling. I'm so sorry. You really have to hurry."

He put his arms around her, but it was too hot to be hugged. She pushed him off. "I'm sure she's fine.

I'll go tomorrow. Or this weekend."

"She hasn't been conscious since the accident. The Baileys called my office. No one could get through to you. I've been try-ing the whole way home. Busy signal."

"Cameron's on the computer."

"I'll send him off."

Dean packed Prudie's bag. He told her that by the time she got to San Diego he'd have a car waiting for her, to look for a driver with her name on a card in baggage claim. He said he'd call the school for a subst.i.tute, cancel his own appointments. Find someone more responsible than Cameron to feed the cat.

He'd think of everything. She should think only about her mom. And herself.

He'd follow as soon as he could. He'd be at the hospital with her by tomorrow morning at the latest.

Late tonight if he could man-age it. "I'm so sorry," he kept saying, "I'm so sorry," until she fi-nally got the message that he thought her mother was dying. As if!

A year earlier Dean could have accompanied her to the gate, held her hand while she waited. Now there was no point in even going in. He dropped her at the curb, went home to make the rest of thearrangements. A man went through security in front of her. He had a gym bag and a cell phone and he walked on his heels the same way Trey Norton did. He was pulled aside, made to remove his shoes.

Prudie's fingernail clippers were confiscated, and also her Swiss Army knife. She wished she'd remembered to give this to Dean; she liked that knife.

Her reservation was on Southwest. She'd gotten a boarding pa.s.s in the C group. She could still hope for an aisle seat, but only if she was right at the front, and maybe not even then.

While fis.h.i.+ng her identification out of her purse again to board the plane, her index cards spilled. "Do you want to play fifty-two card pick-up?" she'd asked her mother once. She'd learned this trick at day care.

"Sure thing," her mother had said, and then, after Prudie had scattered the cards, she asked if Prudie would be her little helper-elf and pick them up for her.

Prudie dropped to her knees to collect her cards. People stepped over her. Some of these people were impatient, unpleas-ant. There was no hope of an aisle seat now. By the time she stumbled onto the plane she was crying. Later, over the compli-mentary c.o.ke, as a Zen exercise to calm herself down, she counted her cards. She'd been preparing for so long she had forty-two of them. She counted them twice to be sure.

She did the crossword in the in-flight magazine for a while. Then she stared out the window at the empty sky. Everything was fine. Her mother was perfectlysain et sauf, and Prudie ab-solutely refused to be sucked into pretending otherwise.

Prudie's dream:

In Prudie's dream, Jane Austen is showing her through the rooms of a large estate. Jane doesn't look anything like her portrait. She looks more like Jocelyn and sometimes she is Jocelyn, but mostly she's Jane. She's blond, neat, modern. Her pants are silk and have wide legs.

They're in a kitchen decorated in the same blue, white, and copper as Jocelyn's kitchen. Jane and Prudie agree that fine cooking can be done only on a gas stove. Jane tells Prudie that she herself is considered a decent French chef. She promises to make something for Prudie later, and even as she says so, Prudie knows she'll forget.

They descend to a wine cellar. A grid frame along a dark wall holds several bottles, but more of the cubby-holes have cats inside. Their eyes s.h.i.+ne in the dark like coins. Prudie almost mentions this, but decides it would be rude.

Without actually ascending a staircase, Prudie finds her-self upstairs, alone, in a ball with many doors.

She tries a few, but they're all locked. Between the doors are life-sized portraits interspersed with mirrors. The mirrors are ar-ranged so that every portrait is reflected in a mirror across the hall. Prudie can stand in front of these mirrors and po-sition herself so that she appears to be in each portrait along with the original subject. Jane arrives again. She is in a hurry now, hustling Prudie past many doors until they suddenly stop.

"Here's where we've put your mother," she says. "I think you'll see we've made some improvements."

Prudie hesitates. "Open the door," Jane tells her, and Prudie does. Instead of a room, there is a beach, a sailboat and an island in the distance, the ocean as far as Prudie can see.

June

CHAPTER FOUR.

in which we read Northanger Abbey and gather at Grigg's

Prudie missed our next meeting. Jocelyn brought a card for everyone to sign. She said it was a sympathy card, which we had to take her word for, as it was all in French. The front was sober enough-a seascape, dunes, gulls, and drift. Time and tide or some such cold comfort. "I was so sad to hear that she had to cancel her trip to France," Sylvia said, and then looked away, em-barra.s.sed, because that was hardly the saddest part.

Jocelyn spoke up quickly. "You know she's never been."

We had, most of us, also lost our mothers. We spent a moment missing them. The sun was blooming rosily in the west. The trees were in full leaf. The air was bright and soft and laced with the smells of gra.s.s, of coffee, of melted Brie. How our mothers would have loved it! Allegra leaned over and picked up Sylvia's hand, traced around the fingers, let it go. Sylvia was looking uncommonly el-egant tonight. She had cut her hair as short as Allegra's and was dressed in a long skirt with a Chinese-red fitted top. Applied a plumy lipstick and had her eyebrows shaped. We were pleased to see that she'd reached that drop-dead stage of the divorce pro-ceedings. She was on her feet and dressed to kill.

Allegra was, as always, vivid. Jocelyn was cla.s.sic. Grigg was casual-corduroys and a green rugby s.h.i.+rt. Bernadette had al-ready spilled hummus on her yoga pants.

The pants were spotted with olive and blue flowers, and now there was a hummus-coloured spot as well on the ledge of her stomach. You could go a long time without noticing the stain, however. You could go a long time without looking at her pants. This was because she'd broken her gla.s.ses sometime after our last meeting and patched them together with a startling great lump of paper clips and masking tape.

It was possible they weren't even broken. It was possible she'd merely lost the little screw.

The meeting was held at Grigg's. Some of us had wondered whether Grigg would ever be hosting us, and some of us had thought he wouldn't be and were already cross about the special arrangements men always expected: how they never made the big meals, the holiday meals, how their wives wrote their thank yous for them and sent out the birthday cards. We were working ourselves into something of a state about it when Grigg said we should have theNorthanger Abbey meeting at his house, because he was probably the only one in the group who likedNorthanger Abbey best of all the books so far.

This was not a position we could imagine anyone taking. We hoped Grigg wasn't saying this just because it was provocative. Austen was no occasion for displays of ego.

We'd been curious about Grigg's housekeeping. Most of us hadn't seen a bachelor pad since the seventies. We were picturing mirror b.a.l.l.s and Andy Warhol.

We got chilli-string lights and Beatrix Potter. Grigg had rented a cosy brick cottage in a pricey part of town. It had a tin roof and a porch overhung with grapevines. Inside was a sleep-ing loft and the smallest wood-burning stove we'd ever seen. During February, Grigg said, he'd heated the whole place withit, but by the time he'd chopped the logs into the tiny splinters that would fit inside, he didn't need a fire anymore; he'd be sweating like a pig.

There was a rug by the couch that many of us recognized from the Sundance catalogue as something we ourselves had wanted, the one with poppies on the edges. The sun glanced off a row of copper pots in the kitchen window.

Each pot held an African violet, some white, some purple, and you have to admire a man who keeps his houseplants alive, espe-cially when they've been transferred into pots with no holes for drainage. It made us begrudge him the rug less. Of course, the vi-olets could all have been new, bought just to impress us.

But then again, who were we that we needed impressing?

The wall along the stairs was lined with built-in bookcases, and these were stuffed with books, not just upright, but teepeed across the tops of other books as well. They were mostly paper-backs, and wellread. Allegra went to check them out. "Lots of rocket s.h.i.+ps in this collection," she said.

"You like science fiction?" Sylvia asked Grigg. From her tone of voice you might have thought she was interested in science fic-tion and the people who read it.

Grigg wasn't fooled. "Always have," was all he said. He con-tinued to arrange cheese wedges on a plate. They made a sort of picture of a face when he was done, a cheese-wedge smile, two pepper-cracker eyes. We may have just been imagining that, though. He may have been laying out the cheese with no artistic intent.

Grigg had grown up in Orange County, the only boy in a family with four children, and the youngest. His oldest sister, Amelia, was eight when he was born, Bianca was seven, and Caty, who was called Catydid when she was little and Cat when she was older, was five.