The Jane Austen Book Club (10 page)

The other children had not behaved as well as Prudie had. Someone had been pushed down the slide and needed a Band-Aid. Someone had been called a chicken noodle and cried over it. And her mother provided all of this detail with a conspiratorial twinkle. “Don't you remember?” she would ask periodically, inviting Prudie to join her inside the rich, rewarding world of the imagination.

Prudie held out less than a week. She was drinking orange juice from a little plastic orange that her mother had said they would rinse out and she could keep after. The prospect had her charmed almost to the point of sedation. “I remember a clown,” Prudie offered carefully. “At my birthday.” She was, in fact, beginning to recall the party, or bits of it. She could close her eyes and see: wrapping paper stamped with stars; the cheese sliding in a sheet off her pizza slice; a fat girl with sparkly glasses she'd once seen at the park winning the ring toss. She'd already told Roberta at day care about the piñata. But the clown was a gambit, one last attempt to resist. Prudie hated nothing so much as clowns.

Once again her mother eluded the trap. She gave Prudie a
hug, her chin pressing into the top of Prudie's head and then retracting, like a pen point. “I would never bring a clown into this house,” she said.

The stratagem had been such a success it was reemployed on Halloween, and then whenever it suited her mother's purposes. “I got milk at the store this morning,” she might say. “You already drank it.” Or, “We've seen that movie. You didn't like it.” Always with a smile, as if it were a game they were playing together. (When they did play games, Prudie's mother let her roll the dice and move her token for her. She always let Prudie win.)

Sometimes it seemed to Prudie that she'd had a childhood filled with wonderful parties, trips to Marine World, dinners at Chuck E. Cheese, where grownup-sized rodents played guitar and sang Elvis songs to her. Surely some of these things must have happened. But she was often not certain which. She began to keep a diary, became a maker of lists, but it proved surprisingly hard to write things down accurately.

It was especially hard to be honest about her own behavior, and she began to feel, long before she could put it into words, that there was something manufactured about her, not just in the diaries, but in the real world. (Whatever the hell that was.) The years receded behind her like a map with no landmarks, a handful of air, another of water. Of all the things she had to make up, the hardest was herself.

One evening when she was eight or nine, during a commercial break in the middle of
The Greatest American Hero
(Prudie's mother was a sucker for the sad, guilt-ridden lives of superheroes. In
The Greatest American Hero
, a high school teacher was given a magical red suit and superpowers, which he then used to battle spies and criminals; as if the classroom isn't the place superpowers are really needed), her mother recalled a Christmas when they'd gone to meet Santa at Macy's. “We had breakfast there,”
she said. “You ate chocolate chip pancakes. Santa came and sat at the table with us and you asked him for Matchbox cars.”

Prudie paused with her dinner (spoonfuls of peanut butter taken with milk) softening in her mouth. Something unfamiliar bloomed inside her chest, expanding until it took up all the empty space around her heart. This something was a conviction. She had never, in her whole life, wanted Matchbox cars. She swallowed, and the peanut butter rolled down her throat in a life-threatening clump. “That wasn't me,” she said.

“The menus were shaped like snowflakes.”

Prudie gave her mother what she imagined was a look of steel. “I'm a poor orphan. No one takes me to see Santa.”

“Santa had just eaten a Christmas cookie. He had red and green sugar sprinkled all through his beard.
I'm
your mother,” Prudie's mother said. She blinked once, twice, three times. She took the low road. “What would I do without my little crumble-cake?”

But an eight- or nine-year-old has no heart, except maybe where baby animals are concerned. Prudie was unmoved. “My mother is dead.”

“What of?”

“Cholera.” Prudie had
The Secret Garden
very much in mind. If she'd been reading
Irish Red
it would have been rabies. (Not that anyone in
Irish Red
got rabies. They nearly died of starvation in a snowstorm on a mountain when they went out hunting martens. Rabies was not even mentioned. It was just that any dog book made one think of
Old Yeller.
)

Her mother was in no mood for small mercies. “I see,” she said slowly. Her face was melted sadly around the eyes and lips. “Cholera. That's a nasty death. Vomiting. Diarrhea. Really, really painful. Like you're turning inside out. Puking your guts up.”

Prudie had pictured something less rude. “I loved her very
much,” she offered, but it was too late, her mother was already rising.

“I didn't know you liked to pretend you were an orphan,” she said, and bull's-eye! How many times had Prudie imagined her mother dead? How many ways? Riptides, car crashes, kidnapping by bandits, misadventures at the zoo. She began to cry with the shame of being such a horrible daughter.

Her mother went to her room and closed the door, even though the show had come on again—William Katt, who, her mother always said, was hot, hot, hot, and anyone who preferred Tom Selleck wasn't using the eyes God gave them. If they
had
been playing a game, Prudie couldn't have told if she'd just won or just lost. But if it was a game, that was the sort of game it would be, the kind where you wouldn't know.

For her tenth birthday Prudie saved her allowance for four months in order to buy her own invitations, which she then addressed herself, and an ice cream cake, which she served on Ewok plates with matching napkins. She asked seven girls she knew from school, and on the day she gave out the invitations she had one lunchtime in which she was the center of attention. This turned out to be more alarming than enjoyable.

On the day of the party, because her mother had measured her for a dress she'd seen in the Sears catalogue, but then not gotten around to ordering it, she let Prudie wear her pearl-drop necklace from Hawaii. The chain was too long for Prudie, so they strung the pendant on a black cord that could be tied at any length she liked.

Prudie was given three books, all too young for her, a kite, children's Trivial Pursuit, a bicycle bell, and a plastic goldfish in a plastic goldfish bowl, none of which she gave back. The presents and the party struck her as lame. The girls behaved very nicely. It was all a sad comedown from what she was used to.

It was a very proper wedding. The bride was elegantly dressed—the two bridesmaids were duly inferior . . . her mother stood with salts in her hand, expecting to be agitated—her aunt tried to cry—
(
MANSFIELD PARK
)

Prudie had brought a magazine to read in the teachers' lounge at lunch. She was prepared to socialize if there was interesting conversation, but two of the teachers had developed bunions and were commiserating over it. Prudie was too young to be told that shopping for shoes could ever become a nightmare. Nurses' shoes were suggested. Orthotics. It was horrible. Prudie opened her magazine. She saw that Dean had already taken the quiz, a set of questions to determine which of the
Sex and the City
girls you were most like. She checked out his answers:

To make a good impression on a Saturday night, Dean would “(a) wear a flirty top and a pencil skirt.” If a hot guy stood next to him at a bar, Dean would “(d) tell him he has great biceps—and ask him to flex.”

Prudie and Dean had first met at a bar. She was in college, out with her friends Laurie and Kerstin, celebrating something or other. Finals or the week before finals or the week before that. “We just need some girl time,” Kerstin had told him warningly, but the words had no impact. Dean leaned past her without so much as a look and asked Prudie to dance.

Everyone else was dancing fast. Dean put his arms around her, pulled her in. His mouth was right beside her ear; his chin brushed her neck. Al Green's “Don't Look Back” was playing. “I'm going to marry you,” he told her. Laurie thought it was weird. Kerstin thought it was scary. It wasn't their ear; it wasn't their neck.

Dean had that specific confidence that comes from nothing else but being popular in high school. He had been a high school
jock, made the college soccer team as a freshman, was a scoring left wing with a fan section. He was the sort of guy who, a few years before, wouldn't have even seen Prudie standing in front of him. Now he picked her out in a crowded bar. She was flattered, though she assumed she was not the first woman he'd vowed to marry in this fashion. (She found out later that she was.)

Didn't matter. His heavy-lidded eyes, his cheekbones, athlete legs, orthodontic teeth—none of it mattered. Forget the fact that he would look
so good
walking in next to her at her high school reunions. Some people would be so surprised.

No, the only thing that turned out to matter was that the first time he laid eyes on her he thought she was pretty. Love at first sight was as ridiculous as it was irresistible. In fact, Prudie wasn't pretty. She just pretended to be.

She'd assumed from this beginning that Dean was a romantic sort of guy. Her mother saw him clearer. “There's a young man with his feet on the ground,” she had said. Prudie's mother didn't much care for young men with their feet on the ground. (Though she turned out to really like Dean. They both watched
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
every Tuesday night and phoned each other afterward to discuss the week's developments. Dean was a sucker for the sad, guilt-ridden lives of superheroes. Now he had her mom rooting desperately for the no-superpowers-at-all U.S. soccer team and talking about offside traps as if she knew what they were and when to use them.)

Prudie heard the criticism implied in her mother's assessment and forced it in Dean's favor. What was wrong with a solid sort of guy? Did you want a marriage full of surprises, or did you want a guy you could depend on? Someone who, when you looked at him, you knew what he'd be like in fifty years?

She asked Laurie, because Laurie had a theory about everything. “It seems to me,” Laurie had said, “that you can marry
someone you're lucky to get or you can marry someone who's lucky to get you. I used to think the first was best. Now I don't know. Wouldn't it be better to spend your life with someone who thinks he's lucky to be there?”

“Why can't you both be lucky?” Prudie asked.

“You can wait for that, if you like.” (But Laurie was the one who hadn't married yet.)

Of course Prudie had to plan the wedding herself. It was a modest affair in her mother's backyard. She heard later that the food had been good, strawberries and oranges and cherries with chocolate and white chocolate dipping sauces. She was too busy to eat any of it. Too dazed. When she looked at the pictures—her pleated dress, the flowers, Dean's politely drunken friends—she hardly remembered being there. It was a very nice wedding, people said afterward, and the minute they said it, Prudie realized she hadn't wanted a very nice wedding. She'd wanted something memorable. They should have eloped and never told anyone.

But it was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding. Prudie had married Dean, who, for no reason that Prudie could see, thought he was lucky to get her.

She was still learning how lucky she was. Dean was so much more than solid. He was generous, friendly, easygoing, hard-working, good-looking. He shared the housework and he never complained and you never had to ask. For their wedding anniversary, he'd bought two tickets to Paris. This very summer Prudie and Dean were going to France.

And that was the problem. Prudie loved France; she'd made a life out of loving France. She'd never been, but she could imagine it perfectly. Of course, she didn't want to actually go. What if the trip was a disappointment? What if, once there, she didn't like it
at all? Then what? It seemed to her that her husband, the love of her life, should have understood her well enough to know this.

Kerstin's husband did impressions. He could do people, but he could do objects as well—lawn mowers, corkscrews, cake beaters. He could do the whole cast of
Star Wars
, especially an excellent Chewbacca. Dean was a thoughtful lover with no objections to oral sex, even when it was
his
mouth. Even so—if Prudie had an itch one night for Chewbacca, there wasn't a thing Dean could do about it. He was always himself.

Prudie had thought that was what she wanted. Someone dependable. Someone with no pretense. Most of the time she was deeply in love with Dean.

But just occasionally she felt more lucky in her marriage than contented with it. She could imagine something better. She knew who to blame for this, and it wasn't Dean. The girl on
Sex and the City
that Dean was most like was Miranda.

It would be the last—in all probability the last scene on that stage; but he was sure there could not be a finer. The house would close with the greatest éclat.
(
MANSFIELD PARK
)

Prudie had a terrible headache. The air was so hot all the oxygen seemed to have been squeezed out of it. She took two aspirin and drank lukewarm water from the only fountain whose nozzle wasn't blocked with a wad of gum. Careless of her makeup, she splashed some water on her face. By the time she arrived at her fifth-period class, her headache was survivable, though she still felt it in her temples like a distant drum.