The Evolution of Jane Read Online Free PDF Page A

cabbage without noticing them, the way my father did, and my brothers, and my mother, all of them wading through the field without a thought, the jungle no jungle at all to them, the sky theirs for the looking. I glimpsed patches of blue, breathed in the damp, flowery air, smiled a secret smile hidden by green, and allowed myself to feel the thrill of new, sudden intimacy.
    Much of the facade of our house was adorned by lilac bushes, and between their gray stems, as thick as little trunks, and the weathered white paint of the house, were several indentations in the packed dirt where the dog went to rest when the sun was high, and where I often joined him. I crawled past the porch's edge to the first dip in the ground, and there he was, silently thumping his tail. I suddenly knew I would spend less time crouched beside him in our hiding place and I felt disloyal and sad and, at the same time, as happy as if I'd fallen in love, which, of course, I had.
    "Good-bye," I said, formally, politely.
    When I got inside, into the soft, caressing gloom of our house on a sunny day, I passed my father in the hall and told him about the little girl in the house next door.
    "Uh-oh," he said. Then he laughed and offered me a puff of his pipe, a little joke between us which annoyed my mother, who seemed to think, each and every time, that I would actually take him up on it.
    I pushed past him, and said, "Not just now, thank you. I'd prefer a cigar," which is what I always said, though this time I was impatient to be off to my mother. "Cuban."
    Perhaps this is the place to tell you that my mother, my mother the Barlow of Barlow, is actually, like those imaginary cigars we used to torture her with, Cuban herself. She was born there, anyway, and lived there until she went to Vassar. My father is a Schwartz of Brooklyn. I was never sure why they lived in Barlow because both of them spoke with such tender nostalgia of their former residences, and yet I could not imagine them anywhere but Barlow.
    "We are the closest extant Barlows they've got," my mother said.
    "You know, they really ought to rename the town Schwartz," my father said.
    Then Martha's Barlows came. But Martha's family, according to my mother, were interlopers.
    "We are endemic," she said. "They are introduced."

    On the day I met Martha, I went looking for my mother and I found her in the garden. She tended her garden with maternal care. Seeds were tucked gently into little cardboard cups before the snow melted. The ground was combed and nourished in spring, blanketed with pine needles in winter. In return for her care, the garden gave her roses and, more important, lilacs. Every kind of lilac grew around our house, deep purple, pale violet, white, even the rare yellow lilac. My mother ordered plants from nurseries sometimes, but often she just scoured the gardens of the neighboring towns, surreptitiously taking cuttings when she found some variety that was really worthwhile ("You simply
can't
buy this," she would say, triumphant, holding the purloined bloom in her arms like a baby).
    My mother sometimes said that the only reason she stayed north was the lilac, that you couldn't grow lilacs in Cuba, though you could grow anything else and everything else, things to eat, papayas dropping of their own free will into your open hands, golden bananas lining the streets.
    The lilacs bloomed only in spring, for a few short weeks, which made them even more precious. For the rest of the growing season, my mother contented herself with roses. I watched her now as she stooped among them, then stood up to face me, a narrow figure in jeans and an old blue shirt of my father's: a pole of blue reaching up to the straw hat from which an enormous circle of shade spread around her. I often thought my mother looked like a tree. Today, the tree she looked like was a palm tree. And from up there, in her highest branches, she spoke.
    "Jane, do you have to pee, honey?"
    Horrified, I put my hands on my hips