Thrift and responsibility. Tight straps, she thought, that Jane was using to keep herself from flying apart. When they’d met nearly thirty years earlier, Jane was the girl from Modesto who as a joke had kept a framed photo of her prize 4-H pig in their dorm room, who had ached through the long northeastern winters, fleeing campus at the end of every May for bright Capitola, three months in a swimsuit, bonfires, reading Rilke on the beach, screwing around with surfers under the pier.
She’d had no fascination for the seafaring life, no lobster pot at the foot of her bed. She hadn’t been the sort that went around promoting Moby-Dick as the cure for twentieth-century ills. What, my mother wondered, did it matter? No one was the sum of her parts. It all went askew. So what was it that was so annoying about Jane’s manufactured fidelity to this house and the grim ghosts who haunted its rafters? She was a grown woman and she could do as she pleased. She could do as she pleased, but Erwin had been right. It grated, all of it.
Through the window my mother watched Jane in her big Wellingtons slopping around in the driveway with the wheelbarrow full of gravel, her Kreeger & Sons coat open and flapping in the wind, like Hepburn out there with her hair piled atop her head, a crown awarded for her inexhaustible dedication to ending the scourge of potholes. Did Jane take adulthood more seriously, was that it? Had she simply done it better, with more foresight and more alacrity? They’d both left girlhood far behind. Their futures were as predictable as anyone else’s. At least they were neck and neck on that one. They’d crossed the dividing line. When you stopped believing yourself to be beyond the grasp of death, you became an adult. And if that didn’t make you want to pretend to be someone else, what would?
Yet Jane never mentioned suffering any of the questions that ate my mother up, the nightmare-inducing inadequacies, the fear of fraudulence and certain failure that riddled her existence. Jane was, after all, a doctor. Perhaps, having taken her dose of medical-grade confidence, there wasn’t much room left for questions. But that wasn’t it. For god’s sake, she’d been one of only two women in her class at med school. She’d been confident at eighteen and she was confident now, and really, my mother thought, that was the momentous accomplishment; plenty of fools were confident simply because they didn’t know any better, but Jane was capable of introspection. She was well equipped to delve into the dark questions that haunted her existence. The question was, when had she ever found need to? Perhaps Jane was some sort of statistical anomaly, a person who never bet wrong and had avoided all the corrosive mistakes that had caused my mother to question her own ability to navigate the world, much less pass along any useful information to me. But wasn’t that the definition of a safe life, the avoidance of failure? Weren’t we to believe that failure shapes character? Well, so does success.
Maybe this could all be part of the pitch.
Erwin said they were pseuds. Usually my mother didn’t bother arguing with him. The standard low-grade sniping she had to put up with in order to get him out of the house. And it’s not like she disagreed, not entirely, but weren’t she and Erwin huge pseuds, too? Wasn’t everyone? My father, by his own admission, was just playing at being a writer all day; who was she but a woman playing painter? The difference was, he’d been rewarded financially and she hadn’t.
You didn’t do it yourself. It wasn’t all your own fault. It was the people who surrounded you who truly made the playacting possible. The older she got, the less convincing she found her own performance, yet every year her students became more reverent. If they were buying it, maybe she should, too. So she kept showing up in a turtleneck and suede boots, waving her glasses around like she knew what the hell she was talking about, and they kept packing into the studio three days a week. Inexplicable. It seemed possible that they were getting younger, too, as if they were trapped together in a time-space continuum anomaly, infinitely receding from each other. Before she knew it she’d be a hundred years old, waving her cane at a roomful of crying babies.
She wondered, though, wriggling to get her socks on underneath the covers, what it was all about, my father’s, and her own, aversion to cracks in the façade. Why did they expect so much of their friends? Life was flux, a swirl of cellular degradation and regeneration. To demand consistency of a person’s character, then, contradicted our most basic biological state. Why did it grate so when Jane and Bo smiled beatifically across their faux-wormwood table at their guests? Was it because their feelings were fake? No! They believed. They ratified their feelings by believing they felt them. They believed every word they spoke, they believed every fish they pulled out of the sea, every nail they hammered, every vegetable they harvested, every fire they built. Yes, it was a stage play, and they were playing characters. But it worked backward. Jane and Bo were constructing outer lives that might confer some meaning upon their inner lives. They had made themselves into exactly who they wanted to be. And wasn’t that commendable?
Wasn’t it? Why did it make her sick?
And who are you, she
