The Evolution of Jane Read Online Free PDF Page B

drawing designs in the sand with a stick. I knew the girl I'd met yesterday would see me, and I knew she would come out when she saw me. I imagined what a tempting sight I was to a new girl in the neighborhood, one who had not yet made any friends. At least I would have been a tempting sight to myself, a girl squatting in the dirt, doodling. And indeed the new girl soon materialized, squatted beside me, and began her own design. We neither of us spoke at first. She may have felt shy, but I was simply happy. The sticks scratched in the sand, scraping a soft message, a code of random swirls that both of us understood perfectly. We could have been drawing up legal papers, signing a declaration, writing a poem.
    "I'm in third grade," said the girl.
    I was about to say, "Me too," but then she added, "Going into fourth."
    "Oh,"
    She stopped drawing and pointed the stick at me.
    "I'm going into third," I said.
    "I know," she said. "Your name is Jane. You're my cousin."
    "I am?"
    "Yeah. But let's be friends."
    I don't remember what I said to this proposition. Probably I just stared with my mouth open.
    "I'm not really going into fourth grade," she added.
    Her name was Martha, she said, Martha Barlow. See the mailbox? It says "Barlow" right there. Just like the name of the street. I noticed that she called our road a street. I remember that it sounded so urban. We were distant cousins, she said. Her great-grandfather used to live at 27 Barlow Street. Her parents had decided to fix up the old house, to rescue it to use as a summer house. I remember that too, that they had come to the country to rescue the house, as if Barlow were the country and not a town, as if one couldn't live there in the winter, as if their house needed to be rescued.
    "They came to the country to rescue the house," I said to my mother that afternoon. "For the summer."
    "Oh, please."
    "You didn't tell me we're cousins."
    My mother didn't answer me, but she pulled me over to her and gave me a hug. She kissed the top of my head. In this way she communicated to me that while Martha was very much at fault for being my cousin, I was in no way to blame for it myself. My mother was an amazing combination of the critical and the accepting. She shimmered back and forth, like a color you can't quite name. Is it teal or slate or gray, or threadbare black?
    I asked my father that night what was going on. My father had big ears. I mention this because his ears were very dear to me as a child. They were comforting. My father was not the gentlest person of my acquaintance. He was compact and muscular, he spoke in a growl. Most children were afraid of him. I knew him, so of course I wasn't afraid one bit, but when he seemed particularly gruff, I would look at his ears, and I would be reassured. I found my father sitting on the porch, having a drink. His tie was off, draped with his jacket over the railing, and his white shirt was damp and wrinkled. Unlike most of the fathers I knew, mine always wore penny loafers, buffed to an impossible shine, though they were so old that they were as wrinkled as a face. I loved his shoes and I looked at them tenderly, looked at his nice, big ears and, ignoring the tinkling ice of his drink, the sound of an adult relaxing, an adult who wanted to be left alone, I climbed onto his lap.
    He kissed me and offered me his drink, even though my mother was nowhere to be seen and so could not benefit from this provocation. My father always offered me coffee or Scotch or a puff on his pipe. My mother knew it was a joke and knew I never accepted, but she couldn't help herself and she would glare at him, and say, "Carl!" in her most severe voice. Then my father and I would laugh the laugh of collusion.
    "Oh, Daddy," I said, pushing the drink away.
    He shrugged.
    "Daddy?"
    "Mmm?"
    "Daddy?" I said again. I knew this was a mistake. I knew he would now sigh in that weary parental way. I knew I should just say what I had to say. "Daddy?"
    He sighed the sigh I