The Evolution of Jane Read Online Free PDF

and scowled. I know when I scowl because my whole face stretches down in a most satisfying way. And by the age of seven, my scowl was already quite accomplished. I had been practicing in the mirror for years.
    "You're squirming," my mother said.
    "There's a new girl," I said. "At the new house."
    "It's not new," my mother said, and turned back to her roses without another word.
    I tried again to get her interested at dinner that night, but she ignored me, smiling and saying something in Spanish to my father.
    "I don't speak Spanish," he said.
    "And it
is
new," I said. "To
them.
"
    My brothers gave each other looks at the sound of the word
them,
looks that meant they knew something interesting to which I was not, and was not going to become, privy.
    "What?" I said.
    "Nothing," said my father.
    Sometimes in these situations I had to wait a long time until someone cracked or accidentally let a word drop or spoke thinking I was in bed when I was sitting on the stairs, my knees up to my chin beneath my nightgown. It took almost a month to learn about Cousin Edna's abortion, and almost a year after that to discover what an abortion was. But often all I required was a minute or two, a caesura of calm. My family's attention usually wandered away from me very easily, in truth. So I waited at the table, quiet and inconspicuous.
    "You shouldn't speak Spanish to me, my dear."
    "Oh, pooh. Why not?"
    "
Parce que le pickup ne marche pas,
" said my brother Andrew. He was thirteen and had just started French in school.
    My mother shrugged. She drank some wine. A whole glass of wine. I was more and more hopeful. With even one glass of wine, her cheeks would turn pink, as pink as one of my mother's Bourbon Queen roses. She rarely had two, for she might become sleepy and dreamy. But with this one glass, I thought she might at least get flushed and cheerful and talkative. I looked at Fred, my oldest brother. He was going to college next year and I would miss him. I thought Fred was extraordinarily handsome and had always wished that I looked like him. When he developed a twitch a few years before, I was so impressed that I began to twitch, too, in imitation, and had been sent home from school by a worried nurse. It seemed so urbanely adult that I refused to stop blinking until he stopped, which luckily he did after only a week or two.
    "Let's forget it," Fred said. "All of it."
    "Fine with me," my father said. "It's not my family."
    That was all I got that night, though I sat motionless and silent, as patient as a post. It wasn't until the next morning that I understood that the family that was not Daddy's family was Mommy's family. I saw their new mailbox, which had the number 27 on it. That had always held some interest for me, for ours was number 17 and between our two houses there was only the meadow and the line of trees. Why had the town numbered ten nonexistent houses? There was a subdivision across the street full of split-levels, but it had its own road, Jennifer Circle, named after the builder's odious daughter Jennifer, who told everyone that my house was haunted. I suppose the town had numbered the houses in that way because it foresaw the land being sold off to developers someday and wanted to save everyone the trouble of fractions on their mailboxes. I would sit on the side of the road and pretend I was looking at the ten phantom houses, looking in their windows, at the cars in their driveways. Number 18, number 19, number 20—who would live there? Number 21, 22, 23, 24. Would they have children? 25, 26. Would they have a dog? On hot days when I was too enervated to do anything but sit by the road and pout and throw stones, I would populate the entire area with imaginary friends and foes. But now here was a real family in number 27, and on their mailbox in black letters was the name "Barlow."
    At first I thought Barlow referred to the name of our road. I waited at the mailbox, sitting in the gravel on the side of the road and