The Jane Austen Book Club (12 page)

She took a cold shower, hoping that would pep her up, and dressed in a sleeveless T-shirt and cotton pajama pants printed with various sorts of sushi. Someone rang the doorbell while she was toweling 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 pajamas. 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 peripherals slung across his body like a bandolier, disks in a plastic case. He went straight to the family room, began running his diagnostics, 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 gratitude Cameron deserved—really this was very nice of him—she made a show of it. She brought him a glass of lemonade. “I'm downloading you some deadware,” he said. “Emulator programs.” He took the lemonade, set it aside to sweat in its glass all over the top of the desk. “We should get you Linux, too. Nobody uses Windows anymore.” (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 dandruff. She felt an impulse to dust him. “What do emulator programs 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 the
classics
,” 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 Fanny until she was banished back to her parents'. The Bertram estate became Fanny'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 trying 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 substitute, 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 manage it. “I'm so sorry,” he kept saying, “I'm so sorry,” until she finally 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 the arrangements. 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 pass 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 fishing 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, unpleasant. There was no hope of an aisle seat now. By the time she stumbled onto the plane she was crying. Later, over the complimentary Coke, 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 perfectly
sain et sauf
, and Prudie absolutely 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 cubbyholes have cats inside. Their eyes shine in the dark like coins. Prudie almost mentions this, but decides it would be rude.

Without actually ascending a staircase, Prudie finds herself upstairs, alone, in a hall 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 arranged so that every portrait is reflected in a mirror across the hall. Prudie can stand in front of these mirrors and
position 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.

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

P
rudie 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, embarrassed, 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 grass, 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 elegant 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 plummy lipstick and had her eyebrows shaped. We were pleased to see that she'd reached that drop-dead stage of the divorce proceedings. She was on her feet and dressed to kill.

Allegra was, as always, vivid. Jocelyn was classic. Grigg was casual—corduroys and a green rugby shirt. Bernadette had already spilled hummus on her yoga pants.

The pants were spotted with olive and blue flowers, and now there was a hummus-colored 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 glasses 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.

T
he 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 the
Northanger Abbey
meeting at his house, because he was probably the only one in the group who liked
Northanger 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 balls and Andy Warhol.

We got chili-string lights and Beatrix Potter. Grigg had rented a cozy brick cottage in a pricey part of town. It had a tin roof and a porch overhung with grapevines. Inside was a sleeping loft and the smallest wood-burning stove we'd ever seen. During February, Grigg said, he'd heated the whole place with it, 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, especially when they've been transferred into pots with no holes for drainage. It made us begrudge him the rug less. Of course, the violets 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 paperbacks, and well read. Allegra went to check them out. “Lots of rocketships 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 fiction and the people who read it.

Grigg wasn't fooled. “Always have,” was all he said. He continued 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.

G
rigg 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.

He was always way too easy to tease. Sometimes they told him not to be such a boy and sometimes not to be such a baby. It didn't seem to leave a whole lot of things for him to be.

If Grigg had been a girl, his name would have been Delia. Instead he was named after his father's father, who'd died just about the time Grigg was born and already no one seemed to remember him very well. “A man's man,” Grigg's father said, “a quiet man,” which was a movie Grigg had seen on television and so he always pictured his grandfather as John Wayne.

Even so, it was hard to forgive the name. Every year at school, the first time his new teacher would take attendance, she would call for Harris Grigg instead of Grigg Harris. All year Grigg anticipated the next year's humiliation. And then he found out that his grandfather's real name was Gregory and that his parents had known this all along. Grigg was just a nickname and not a family name, not until Grigg's own parents had made it one. He repeatedly asked them why, but never got an answer he felt settled the question. He told them that from then on he, too, would go
by “Gregory,” but no one ever remembered, even though they could remember to call Caty “Cat” easily enough.

Grandpa Harris had worked for the electric company as a lineman. It was a dangerous job, Grigg's father told him. Grigg had every hope of having a dangerous job himself someday, though more secret agent than crack utility worker. His own father was a meter reader and had been in the hospital four times with dog bites. He had two shiny scars on the calf of one leg and another scar somewhere no one saw. The Harrises had never owned a dog, and as long as his father was alive they never would. Grigg was five the first time this was explained to him, and he still remembered his reaction, how he thought to himself that his father couldn't live forever.

Grigg was the only one of the children with his own bedroom. This was a continual source of resentment. The room was so tiny the bed barely fit and his chest of drawers had to be put in the hall. Still, it was all his. The ceiling slanted; there was a single window, and wallpaper with yellow rosebuds, which Amelia had picked because the room had been hers until Grigg came along. If he'd been a girl she would have gotten to keep the room.

When the wind blew, a branch tapped against the glass like fingers, but that surely wouldn't have scared Amelia. Grigg would lie in the dark, all by himself, and the tree creaked and tapped. He would hear his sisters laughing down the hall. He knew when it was Amelia laughing and when it was Bianca and when it was Cat, even if he couldn't hear the words. He guessed they were talking about boys, a subject on which they had nothing pleasant to say.

“You girls go to sleep now,” his mother would shout from downstairs. She often played the piano after the children were in bed, and if she could still hear them over her beloved Scott
Joplin, then they were too loud. The girls might respond with a temporary silence, or they might not bother. Individually they were governable. As a unit, not so much so.

Grigg's father couldn't stand up to them at all. They hated the smell of his pipe, so he smoked only in his toolshed. They hated sports, so he went out to his car to listen to games on the radio. When they wanted money, they flirted for it, straightening his tie and kissing his cheek until, helpless as a kitten, he pulled his wallet from his back pocket. Once Grigg did the very same thing, blinked his heavy lashes and pouted his lips. Cat laughed so hard she choked on a peanut, which could have killed her. Amelia had heard of that happening to someone, and how would Grigg have felt then?

Grigg was always being laughed at. He'd been the only boy in his first-grade class who could go all the way around the world in jacks, but that, too, turned out to be a social misstep.

One day when he was in the fifth grade, Grigg's father stopped him after breakfast. “Come out back with me,” he said, in a low voice. “And don't tell the girls.”

“Out back” meant the little room his father had made for himself in the old toolshed. Out back was strictly invitation-only. There was a lock on the door, and a plaid La-Z-Boy Grigg's mother hated and wouldn't have in the house. There was an old Tupperware dish with an endless supply of Red Hots. Grigg didn't like Red Hots much, but he ate them when they were offered; they were still candy, after all. Grigg was happy to hear that the girls were not invited, were not even to be told. It was not an easy thing, keeping a secret from three older sisters while still making sure everyone knew there was a secret being kept, but Grigg had studied with the masters, who were the girls themselves.

Grigg went to the toolshed. His father was waiting, smoking
a cigarette. There was no window in the shed, so it was always dark, even with the lamp on, and the smoke was thick; because no one knew about secondhand smoke then, no one thought anything about it. The lamp had a bendable neck and a glaring bulb, as if someone was about to be interrogated. His father was sitting in the La-Z-Boy with a stack of magazines in his lap.

“This is strictly boy stuff,” his father said. “Top-secret. Got it?”

Grigg took a seat on an upended apple crate, and his father handed him a magazine. On the cover was the picture of a woman in her underwear. Her black hair flew about her face in long, loose curls. Her eyes were wide. She had enormous breasts, barely contained by a golden bra.

But best of all, unbelievably best, was the thing unhooking the bra. It had eight tentacled arms and a torso shaped like a Coke can. It was blue. The look on its face—what an artist to convey so much emotion on a creature with so few features!—was hungry.

This was the afternoon that made a reader out of Grigg.

Soon he had learned:

From Arthur C. Clarke, that “art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with love.”

 

From Theodore Sturgeon, that “sometimes the world's too much to live with and a body sort of has to turn away from it to rest.”

 

From Philip K. Dick, that “at least half the famous people in history never existed,” and that “anything can be faked.”

What Grigg liked best about science fiction was that it seemed to be a place where he was neither alone nor surrounded by girls. He wouldn't have continued to like it as he grew, if it really had
been as girl-free a world as he initially thought. His first favorite author was Andrew North. Later he learned that Andrew North was a pen name for Andre Norton. Later still he learned that Andre Norton was a girl.

G
rigg didn't tell us any of this, because he thought we wouldn't be interested. “Those books with rocketships on the spine were the first books I fell in love with,” is what Grigg said. “You never do get over your first love, do you?”

“No,” said Sylvia. “You never do.”

“Except for sometimes,” said Bernadette.

“I was at a science fiction convention when I first met Jocelyn,” Grigg told us.

We all turned to look at Jocelyn. Perhaps one or two of us had our mouths open. We would never have guessed she read science fiction. She had certainly never said so. She hadn't gone to any of the new
Star Wars
movies, and she'd never stood in line for any of the old ones.

“Oh, please.” Jocelyn made an impatient brushing motion with her hand. “As if. I was at the Hound Roundup. Same hotel.”

T
he evening had hardly begun and already there was a second story we weren't being told.

Almost a year earlier, Jocelyn had gone to Stockton for the annual meeting of the Inland Empire Hound Club. In celebration of a whole weekend free from dog hair (not that Ridgebacks were great shedders: they kept their hair to themselves more than most dogs, this was one of their many attractive features), Jocelyn packed a great many black clothes. She wore a black
beaded vest under a black cardigan. Black slacks and black socks. She attended panels entitled “Sight Hounds: What Makes Them Special?” and “Soothing the Savage Beast: New Modification Techniques for Aggressive Behaviors.” (Which was sad, as the proper quote was about savage breasts. Now that would be a panel!)

On the same weekend and in the same hotel was a science fiction convention known as Westernessecon. In the lower-level conference rooms, science fiction fans were gathering to talk about books and mourn dead or dying TV shows. There were panels on “Why We Once Loved
Buffy
,” “The Final Frontier: Manifest Destiny Goes Intergalactic,” and “Santa Claus: God or Fiend?”