The Time of Her Life (21 page)

“God damn it!” Maggie said. “God damn it! That
could have killed one of us! That could have killed us!” And there was a hurried rush of people around them, waiters and a
man from the next table, but all Claudia did was watch them in a daze and in mounting horror as she grew more and more certain
of what had happened. The table had been whisked away, but Claudia had not moved at all. She sat with her legs neatly crossed
and one hand resting on the napkin in her lap while with the other she still held her fork poised in midair. Maggie had gone
from tender solicitation to a state of utter terror at having an event occur that was not at all within her control—and Claudia
sat there positive that she had wished that pot down on Maggie’s head. Claudia believed that for a single powerful and concentrated
moment she had hated Maggie to death.

The maître d’ hovered over them and helped Claudia to her feet, gently taking the fork from her hand and passing it to someone
behind him. After a moment he turned to Maggie, leaving Claudia to drip soil and lettuce onto the little straw rug on the
red-tiled floor. In fact, a small cluster of people had gathered around Maggie, whose voice had dropped into intense anger.
“No, no! I won’t stay in this place for a second longer than I have to. My God! I wouldn’t sit at another one of those tables
for a million dollars!” Claudia saw that the tip of Maggie’s nose had grown red, and a flush was spreading across her white,
white face. Even her eyelids were rimmed around with pink, and she looked rabbity and hysterical.

“But I’ll call my husband, who’s a lawyer. I will do that! I’ll stay here until my husband gets here with a photographer,
and if you clean away one bit of this mess
before I get pictures, I swear I’ll call every guest in this room as a witness!” There was distress everywhere in the restaurant,
and Claudia had become just another bystander. She edged up to Maggie and got her attention for a moment.

“I’m going on, Maggie. I want to go home. I’m covered with food.” Maggie only noticed her enough to nod in her direction.
When Claudia got into her old blue Volvo and glanced around at all the little Mazdas and Toyotas, she began to tremble as
violently as Maggie had. She had to lean her head down on the steering wheel for a while until she was calm enough to drive.
She was sure that Jane was far too cautious and too honest ever to steal anything from Maggie. Jane adored Maggie. She knew
that Jane would surely never take things from the Tunbridges’ house. Claudia didn’t think that Jane would do that to her.

She drove along the roads banked with snow on either side, and suddenly she was so exhausted by her increasing perception
of the barrenness of the world that tears slipped down her face. She arrived home with her cheeks shiny and wet and every
bit of color drained away. Immediately she saw that she had alarmed Jane, and it made her cross.

“Oh, there was this stupid, stupid accident,” she said. “At the restaurant. It’s nothing. I’m just really tired.” Jane didn’t
say anything, but she looked on at Claudia with her grave glance, and Claudia became infuriated all at once. All the safe
days she had spent with her daughter fell away from her, and she was unsure about things and angry and shaken.

“Jane, for God’s sake! You don’t have to watch me every single minute! You make me feel like I live in a
fish tank. You ought to call some of your friends, or something, and not just mope around after me!”

And this time Claudia went to bed and pulled the quilt up around her ears and hugged her pillow to herself and didn’t care
if Jane was in the house or not. She slept without any inner or outer disturbance.

It was Jane, in fact, who felt as though she lived underwater. In these past quiet and gentle days the time had been without
tension, muted and silky and languid. Suddenly the current had shifted and she was losing her bearings. Even the day after
her lunch with Maggie, her mother was still cross and uncommunicative and brittle. It was worrying, and it made Jane restless.
She couldn’t concentrate on her music or even on a book with her mother’s nervously grim disposition afoot in the house. To
counteract this, Jane took one of Maggie’s pills in the afternoon so that the delicate sensation of safety and optimism would
come upon her, and if her mother became mysteriously angry or critical or irritated, Jane could be in the same room with her
and yet be away from it. Then she would look on beatifically at her mother, who was either a whirling dynamo of bristling
energy or limp with absolute but equally irascible languor. In either case, when Jane was in that state in which she felt
she embodied contentment, her mother was satisfying to observe. It made Jane happy and calm to have her mother nearby, and
in that
becalmed state she practiced her music and watched television and didn’t dwell on anything else.

A few days after the luncheon at which there had been that mysterious accident that had so altered her mother’s mood Jane
was left on her own in the house. Her mother had been so glum that she had retreated to her bedroom, again, to lie down, and
when Jane looked in on her, she saw that Claudia had fallen soundly asleep and was completely still under the quilt. Jane
felt so separate from her that it made her quite desolate and lonely.

Jane went to her own room and sat cross-legged on the bed just staring up through the skylight for some time. She was sad
and restless. Finally she got up and swallowed two of Maggie’s pills and sat on the bed again, leaning against the wall and
waiting for them to work. She became dreamier and dreamier, sitting there, settling into a feeling of euphoric idleness. Her
thoughts wandered and turned and drowsed. Eventually she was slightly bored by her own contentment, and from the table beside
her bed she took up her school notebook, in which she had laboriously diagrammed sentences. She read them over with some attention.
She studied the little lines of verbs and nouns and adjectives branching off at right angles and slants, and finally she reached
for a pen and began to write on a fresh page. She watched the letters as she formed them and was pleased with each new shape;
they opened up into large, looping swoops and curls instead of the tight, small script that crawled across the pages of her
writing assignments. She wrote:

I am falling down the hole like Alice.

She wrote that because she felt a little the way she had felt when she had been anesthetized to have her tonsils out and had
experienced the strange sensation of tumbling slowly and helplessly through the ocean. And now she began writing the things
that she had thought then to stop herself; she wrote down the thoughts she had used to fight the anesthesia:

My mother will catch me.

She wrote that in such a large hand that it filled a whole line, and she sat back against the wall to study it with satisfaction.
She skipped down two lines and wrote:

My father will catch me.

Somehow this upset her. Those lines bothered her in conjunction with the words sprawling luxuriantly above them.

Who will catch me

She wrote, and then thought for a long moment about whether to put a period or a question mark, but in her large, dopey script
those four words just exactly crossed the page from the dark red line on the left to the pale reminder of a line at the right-hand
margin, so she put a period. There was no room for a question mark, and when she studied the effect, she was amused because
she saw what that did to the words and to the intention of them, and she went on writing, carefully skipping one line between
each sentence. Now her page looked like this:

Who will catch me.

I don’t know who.

Who could be Maggie.

Who could be Dad.

Who could be Mom.

Who could be Alice.

Who. Who. Who. Who.

She had had to call Miss Jessup Alice so the message would have exactly four words; that was very important to her. She read
over the page several times and then carried her notebook to her desk and took her scissors from the drawer and cut all the
little messages into separate slips like papers from fortune cookies. She was vastly pleased when she spread them all before
her, and a grand idea came into her mind. She folded each slip in half and in half again so that she could not see the words,
and she hid them in secret places all around her room. She put one in her pillowcase and one in each dresser drawer. When
she noticed the little vial of Maggie’s pills that she had put back in her bottom drawer, she paused a moment and replaced
it with one of the notes. She slipped the bottle into her pocket and distributed the rest of the folded papers in other parts
of her room. She decided that when she was her other self, whichever of the notes she came upon first would be an important
clue to know about her life. She stood still in the center of the room for a while, savoring the mystery she had created,
glad that the sun was beaming into her little cavern, illuminating everything but not uncovering any of her secrets.

She wandered off after a while to her father’s study, where she had set up her music stand, and she practiced for about a
half an hour, but she had discovered
that when she took any of the pills, the sound of the music she played was, to her own ear, muffled and distant, and she put
her violin away and curled up in the Eames chair that faced the window and the long stretch of snow-covered meadow that rose
up beyond her line of vision. Her thoughts became muddled in a comforting and pleasant way, and she finally let herself go
into sleep.

When she woke up, it was dark; the afternoon was long gone, and high in the black sky was a perfect crescent moon and the
North Star. She was aware of a heavy, unpleasant, muzzy feeling behind her eyes, and she was very careful when she got up.
Although she could see fairly well in the light reflected off the snow and through the windows, she still extended her arms
on either side to help her navigate. She made her way through the dark house to the light that was on in the kitchen. Her
mother was there in her long red robe in a flurry of activity at the sink, rinsing dishes and stacking them in the dishwasher
with a great deal of clattering and in sudden, jerky movements. But Jane wasn’t sure about this; she often saw the world in
rapid motion just after the pills wore off.

“Do you want me to fix some soup, or something, for dinner?” she asked her mother. Claudia scarcely turned and did not answer;
she went on working through the pile of dishes.

Jane went to the refrigerator and opened it. She stood before it, assessing its contents and feeling slightly queasy but hungry
at the same time. Behind her there was a sudden crash, and she turned around to see her mother holding two edges of a china
plate that seemed to have exploded in her hands. She dropped the two pieces on
the floor and took up another plate, which she brought down with terrific force on the porcelain edge of the sink.

Jane was horribly startled, and she stood back against the open door of the refrigerator and stared at her mother. Claudia’s
face was contorted into the most frightening expression Jane had ever seen. She was truly filled with a sickening fear because
at eleven years old Jane was mostly a child, and she looked at Claudia and thought that her mother was irrevocably large and
wild in the compact kitchen.

“God damn you!” Claudia said, and her voice began to rise. “God damn you! You could have told me the truth!” She kicked the
mess around her feet and sent little pieces of glass flying all over the room. “I just want you to tell me what you’re doing!”
Claudia was shrieking, and Jane was very conscious of her mother’s height and fury. She could only stare back with her glance
aimed directly at her mother in terror. Her body felt as if it were sinking into itself.

“Look! Look! What are these? What do these mean?” And Claudia pulled from her pocket a handful of Jane’s little notes she
had written to herself, unfolded, but bent in angles where they had been so carefully creased.

“God damn it! What
are
these? What are you doing all by yourself in your room? What do these mean?” But Jane stood there paralyzed, seeing that
her mother was crying and flushed.