in which we gather at Jocelyn’s to discuss Emma
We sat in a circle on Jocelyn’s screened porch at dusk, drinking cold sun tea, surrounded by the smell of her twelve acres of fresh-mowed California grass. There was a very pretty view. The sunset had been a spectacular dash of purple, and now the Berryessa mountains were shadowed in the west. Due south in the springtime, but not the summer, was a stream.
“Just listen to the frogs,” Jocelyn said. We listened. Apparently, somewhere beneath the clamor of her kennel of barking dogs was a chorus of frogs.
She introduced us all to Grigg. He had brought the Gramercy edition of the complete novels, which suggested that Austen was merely a recent whim. We really could not approve of someone who showed up with an obviously new book, of someone who had the complete novels on his lap when only Emma was under discussion. Whenever he first spoke, whatever he said, one of us would have to put him in his place.
This person would not be Bernadette. Though she’d been the one to request girls only, she had the best heart in the world; we weren’t surprised that she was making Grigg welcome. “It’s so lovely to see a man taking an interest in Miss Austen,” she told him. “Delightful to get the male perspective. We’re so pleased that you’re here.” Bernadette never said anything once if it could be said three times. Sometimes this was annoying, but mostly it was restful. When she’d arrived, she seemed to have a large bat hanging over her ear. It was just a leaf, and Jocelyn removed it as they hugged.
Jocelyn had two portable heaters going, and the porch hummed cozily. There were Indian rugs and Spanish-tile floors of a red that might hide dog hair, depending on the breed. There were porcelain lamps in the shape of ginger jars, round and Oriental, and with none of the usual dust on the bulbs, because it was Jocelyn’s house. The lamps were on timers. When it was sufficiently dark out, at the perfect moment, they would snap on all at once like a choir. This hadn’t happened yet, but we were looking forward to it. Maybe someone would be saying something brilliant.
The only wall held a row of photographs—Jocelyn’s dynasty of Ridgebacks, surrounded by their ribbons and pedigrees. Ridgebacks are a matriarchal breed; it’s one of their many attractive features. Put Jocelyn in the alpha position and you have the makings of an advanced civilization.
Queenie of the Serengeti looked down on us, doe eyes and troubled, intelligent brow. It’s hard to capture a dog’s personality in a photograph; dogs suffer more from the flattening than people do, or cats even. Birds photograph well because their spirits are so guarded, and anyway, often the real subject is the tree. But this was a flattering likeness, and Jocelyn had taken it herself.
Beneath Queenie’s picture, her daughter, Sunrise on the Sahara, lay, in the flesh, at our feet. She had only just settled, having spent the first half-hour moving from one of us to the next, puffing hot stagnant-pond smells into our faces, leaving hairs on our pants. She was Jocelyn’s favorite, the only dog allowed inside, although she was not valuable, since she suffered from hyperthyroidism and had had to be spayed. It was a shame she wouldn’t have puppies, Jocelyn said, for she had the sweetest disposition.
Jocelyn had recently spent more than two thousand dollars on vet bills for Sahara. We were glad to hear this; dog breeding, we’d heard, could make a person cruel and calculating. Jocelyn hoped to continue competing her, though the kennel would derive no benefit; it was just that Sahara missed it so. If her gait could be smoothed out—for Ridgebacks it was all about the gait—she could still show, even if she never won. (But Sahara knew when she’d lost; she became subdued and reflective. Sometimes someone was sleeping with the judge and there was nothing to be done about it.) Sahara’s competitive category was Sexually Altered Bitch.
The barking outside ascended into hysteria. Sahara rose and walked stiffly to the screen door, her ridge bristling like a toothbrush.
“Why isn’t Knightley more appealing?” Jocelyn began. “He has so many good qualities. Why don’t I warm to him?”
We could hardly hear her; she had to repeat herself. The conditions were such, really, that we should have been discussing Jack London.
Most of what we knew about Jocelyn came from Sylvia. Little Jocelyn Morgan and little Sylvia Sanchez had met at a Girl Scout camp when they were eleven years old, and they were fifty-something now. They’d both been in the Chippewa cabin, working on their wood-lore badges. They had to make campfires from teepees of kindling, and then cook over them, and then eat what they’d cooked; the requirement wasn’t satisfied unless the Scout cleaned her plate. They had to identify leaves and birds and poisonous mushrooms. As if any one of them would ever eat a mushroom, poisonous or not.
For their final requirement they’d been taken in teams of four to a clearing ten minutes off and left to find their own way back. It wasn’t hard, they’d been given a compass and a hint: The dining hall was southwest of them.
Camp lasted four weeks, and every Sunday Jocelyn’s parents drove up from the city—three and a half hours—to bring her the Sunday funnies. “Everyone liked her anyway,” Sylvia said. This was hard to believe, even for us, and we all liked Jocelyn a ton. “She was attractively ill informed.”
Jocelyn’s parents adored her so, they couldn’t bear to see her unhappy. She’d never been told a story with a sad ending. She knew nothing about DDT or Nazis. She’d been kept out of school during the Cuban missile crisis because her parents didn’t want her learning we had enemies.
“It fell to us Chippewas to tell her about communists,” said Sylvia. “And child molesters. The Holocaust. Serial killers. Menstruation. Escaped lunatics with hooks for hands. The Bomb. What had happened to the real Chippewas.
“Of course, we didn’t have any of it right. What a mash of misinformation we fed her. Still, it was realer than what she got at home. And she was very game, you had to admire her.
“It all came crashing down on the day we had to find our way back to camp. She had this paranoid fantasy that while we were hiking and checking our compass, they were packing up and moving out. That we would come upon the cabin and the dining hall and the latrines, but all the people would be gone. Even more, that there would be dust and spiderwebs and crumbling floorboards. It would be as if the camp had been abandoned for a hundred years. We might have told her too many Twilight Zone plots.
“But here’s the weird part. On the last day, her parents came to pick her up, and on the drive back, they told her that they’d gotten divorced over the summer. In fact, she’d been sent off just for this purpose. All those Sunday drives together bringing the funnies, and they couldn’t actually stand each other. Her dad was living in a hotel in San Francisco and had been the whole month she was gone. ‘I eat all my meals in the hotel restaurant,’ he told her. ‘I just come down for breakfast and order whatever catches my fancy.’ Jocelyn said he made it sound as though that were the only reason he’d moved out, because restaurant eating would be so swell. She felt she’d been traded for shirred eggs.”
One day several years later he called her to say he had a touch of the flu. Nothing for her to worry her darling head about. They had tickets to a baseball game, but he didn’t think he could make it, he’d have to take a rain check. Go, Giants! It turned out the flu was a heart attack. He didn’t get to the hospital until he was already dead.
“No wonder she grew up a bit of a control freak,” Sylvia said. With love. Jocelyn and Sylvia had been best friends for more than forty years.
There’s no heat with Mr. Knightley,” Allegra said. She had a very expressive face, like Lillian Gish in a silent movie. She frowned when she was making a point, had done this since she was a tiny girl. “Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax meet in secret and quarrel with each other and make it up and lie to everyone they know. You believe they’re in love because they behave so badly. You can imagine sex. You never feel that with Mr. Knightley.” Allegra had a lullaby voice, low, yet penetrating. She was often impatient with us, but her tones were so soothing we usually realized it only afterward.
“That’s true,” Bernadette agreed. Behind the lenses of her tiny glasses her eyes were round as pebbles. “Emma is always saying how reserved Jane is, even Mr. Knightley says so, and he’s so perceptive about everyone. But she’s the only one in the whole book”—the lights came on, which made Bernadette jump, but she didn’t miss a word for it—“who ever seems desperately in love. Austen says that Emma and Mr. Knightley make an unexceptional marriage.” She paused reflectively. “Clearly she approves. I expect the word ‘unexceptional’ meant something different in Austen’s day. Like, nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing to set tongues wagging. Neither reaching too high nor stooping too low.”
Light poured like milk over the porch. Several large winged insects hurled themselves against the screens, frantic to find it, follow it to the source. This resulted in a series of thumps, some of them loud enough to make Sahara growl.
“No animal passion,” said Allegra.
Sahara turned. Animal passion. She had seen things in the kennels. Things that would make your hair stand on end.
“No passion at all.” Prudie repeated the word, but pronouncing it as if it were French. Pah-see-ohn. Because she taught French, this wasn’t as thoroughly obnoxious as it might have been.
Not that we liked it. The month before, Prudie’s beautician had removed most of her eyebrows; it gave her a look of steady surprise. We couldn’t wait for this to go away. “Sans passion, amour n’est rien,” Prudie said.
“Après moi, le deluge,” Bernadette answered, just so Prudie’s words wouldn’t fall into a silence that might be mistaken for chilly. Bernadette was really too kind sometimes.
Nothing smelly outside. Sahara came away from the screen door. She leaned into Jocelyn, sighing. Then she circled three times, sank, and rested her chin on the gamy toe of Jocelyn’s shoe. She was relaxed but alert. Nothing would get to Jocelyn that didn’t go through Sahara first.
“If I may.” Grigg cleared his throat, held up his hand. “One thing I notice about Emma is that there’s a sense of menace.” He counted off on his fingers. He wore no ring. “The violent Gypsies. The unexplained pilferings. Jane Fairfax’s boat accident. All Mr. Woodhouse’s worries. There’s a sense of threat hovering on the edges. Casting its shadow.”
Prudie spoke quickly and decisively. “But Austen’s whole point is that none of those things is real. There is no real threat.”
“I’m afraid you’ve missed the whole point,” said Allegra.
Grigg said nothing further. His eyelashes dropped to his cheeks, making his expression hard to read. It fell to Jocelyn as hostess to change the subject.
“I read once that the Emma plot, the humbling of a pretty, self-satisfied girl, is the most popular plot of all time. I think it was Robertson Davies who said so. That this was the one story everyone was bound to enjoy.”
When Jocelyn was fifteen, she met two boys while playing tennis at the country club. One of them was named Mike, the other Steven. They were, at first glance, average boys. Mike was taller and thinner, with a prominent Adam’s apple and glasses that turned to headlights in the sun. Steven had better shoulders and a nice smile but a fat ass.
Mike’s cousin Pauline was visiting from New York, and they introduced themselves to Jocelyn because they needed a fourth for doubles. Jocelyn had been working on her serve with the club pro. She wore her hair in a high ponytail that summer, with bangs like Sandra Dee in Take Her, She’s Mine. She had breasts, pointy at first, but now rounding. Her mother had bought her a two-piece bathing suit with egg-cup shaping, in which Jocelyn was exquisitely self-conscious. But her best feature, she always believed, had been her serve. Her toss that day was perfect, taking her to full stretch, and she spun the ball into the service court. It seemed she couldn’t miss. Her spirits, as a consequence, were high and wild.
Neither Mike nor Steven spoiled things by being particularly competitive. They split games sometimes, and sometimes they didn’t; no one really kept score but Jocelyn, and she did so only privately. They traded partners. Pauline was such a little snot, accusing people of foot faults in a friendly game, that Jocelyn looked better and better by comparison. Mike said she was a good sport, and Steven said she wasn’t a bit stuck-up, not like most girls.
They continued to meet and play after Pauline went back home, even though three was such an awkward number. Sometimes when they rallied, Mike or Steven would try to run from one side of the net to the other to play on both teams at once. It never worked and they never stopped trying. Eventually some adult would accuse them of not being serious and throw them off the court.
After tennis, they’d change into their swimsuits and meet at the pool. Everything about Jocelyn changed with her clothes. When she came out of the women’s locker room, her movements were cramped and tight. She’d wrap a towel around her waist and remove it only to slip into the water.
Still, she liked when they stared; she felt the pleasure of it all over her skin. They came in after her, touching her under the water, where no one could see. One or the other would swim down to put his head between her legs and surface with her knees hooked around his shoulders, the water from her ponytail streaming into the cup over her breast. One day one of them, she never knew which, pulled the knot of her top loose. She caught it just as it began to drop. She could have stopped this with a word, but she didn’t. She felt dangerous, brazen. She felt all lit up.
She had no desire for anything further. She didn’t actually like Mike or Steven that much, and certainly not in that way. When she lay in her bed or the bath, touching herself more intimately and successfully than they did, the boy she pictured was Mike’s older brother, Bryan. Bryan went to college and worked summers as a lifeguard at the pool. He looked the way a lifeguard looks. Mike and Steven called him the boss, he called them the squirts. He had never spoken to Jocelyn, possibly didn’t even know her name. He had a girlfriend who rarely got wet, but lay on a beach chair reading Russian novels and drinking Coca-Cola. You could tell how many she’d drunk from the maraschino cherries lined up along her napkin.
In late July there was a dance, and it was girl-ask-boy. Jocelyn asked Mike and Steven both. She thought they knew this, assumed they would talk about it. They were best friends. She thought it would hurt someone’s feelings if she asked one and not the other, and she didn’t want to hurt anyone. She had a strapless sundress to wear; she and her mother went out and bought a strapless bra.
Mike showed up at her house first, in a white shirt and a sports jacket. He was nervous; they were both nervous; they needed Steven to arrive. But when he did, Mike was shocked. Hurt. Furious. “You two have a great time,” he said. “I got other things to do.”
Jocelyn’s mother drove Jocelyn and Steven to the club and wouldn’t be picking them up again until eleven o’clock. Three whole hours had to pass somehow. Glass torches lit the pathway to the clubhouse, and the landscape flickered. There were rose wreaths and pots of ivy animals. The air cool and soft, the moon sliding down the sky. Jocelyn didn’t want to be with Steven. It felt like a date now, and she didn’t want to date him. She was rude and miserable, wouldn’t dance, hardly talked, wouldn’t take off her cardigan. She was afraid he might get the wrong idea, so she was trying to clarify things. Eventually he asked some other girl to dance.
Jocelyn went out by the pool and sat in one of the lounge chairs. She knew that she’d been unforgivably mean to Steven, wished she’d never met him. She wasn’t wearing stockings and her legs were cold. She could smell her own Wind Song perfume mixing with the chlorine.
Music floated over the pool. “Duke of Earl.” “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” “There is a house in New Orleans.” Bryan sat down on the end of her chair, making her blood skip. Probably she was in love with him.
“Aren’t you the thing?” he said. The only light around them came from under the water and was blue. He was turned away, so she didn’t see his face, but his voice was full of contempt. “There’s a word for girls like you.”
Jocelyn hadn’t known this, hadn’t even known there were girls like her. Whatever the word was, he didn’t say it.
“You had those boys in such a fever. Did you like that? I bet you liked it. Did you know they used to be best friends? They hate each other now.”
She was so ashamed. She’d known all summer there was something wrong with the way she was behaving, but she hadn’t known what it was. She had liked it. Now she understood that the liking it was the wrong part.
Bryan gripped one of her ankles hard enough so that the next morning she had a bruise where his thumb had been. He slid the other hand up her leg. “You asked for this,” he said. “You know you did.” His fingers grabbed at her panties, pushed them aside. She felt the slick surface of his nails. She didn’t tell him not to. She was too ashamed to move. His finger found its way inside her. He shifted his weight until he lay over her. He was wearing the same bay aftershave her father had worn.
“Bryan?” His girlfriend’s voice, over by the clubhouse. “True Love Ways” playing on the turntable—Jocelyn would never like Buddy Holly again, even though he was dead, poor guy—the girlfriend calling. “Bryan? Bryan!” Bryan slid his finger out, let go of her. He stood up, shaking his jacket into place and smoothing his hair. He put his finger into his mouth while she watched, took it out. “We’ll catch up later,” he told her.
Jocelyn walked down the watery path through the torches and out to the road. The country club was in the country, up a long hill. It took twenty minutes to drive there. The roads twisted and had no sidewalks and were surrounded by trees. Jocelyn started home.
She was wearing sandals with one-inch heels. She’d painted her toenails, and in the moonlight, her toes looked as if they’d been dipped in blood. Already there was a raw spot on the back of one heel. She was very frightened, because ever since camp she’d lived in a world with communists and rapists and serial killers. Whenever she heard a car coming, she stepped away from the road and crouched until it passed. The headlights were like searchlights. She pretended she was someone innocent, someone who hadn’t asked for anything. She pretended she was a deer. She pretended she was a Chippewa. She pretended she was on the Trail of Tears, an event Sylvia had recounted in vivid if erroneous detail.
She thought she’d be home before her mother left to pick them up. All she had to do was go downhill. But in the beam of a passing car, suddenly she didn’t recognize anything. At the bottom of the hill was a crossroads she never came to, and now she was going up, which she shouldn’t be doing, even for a short time. There were no street signs, no houses. She kept going forward only because she was too ashamed to go back. Hours passed. Finally she found a small gas station, which was closed, and a pay phone, which was working. As she dialed she was sure her mother wouldn’t answer. Her mother might be out, frantically looking for her. She might have packed all her clothes into the car while Jocelyn was at the dance, and moved away.
It was midnight. Her mother made a horrible to-do about it, but Jocelyn convinced her that she’d only wanted some fresh air, some exercise, the stars.
But I think what we’re supposed to see,” said Prudie, “is not the lack of passion so much as the control of it. That’s one of Jane’s favorite themes.” She smiled and her lips waned.
We exchanged secret looks. Jane. That was easy. That was more intimate, surely, than Miss Austen would wish. None of the rest of us called her Jane, even though we were older and had been reading her years longer than Prudie.
Only Bernadette was too good to notice. “That’s very true,” she said. She had her fingers laced and was fiddling with which thumb should be on top. “Sense and Sensibility is all about that, and it’s Austen’s first book, but then she returns to it in Persuasion, and that’s the last. An enduring theme. Good point, Prudie. Knightley is violently in love—I believe those are the words used, violently in love—but he’s so much the gentleman that even this can’t make him behave badly. He’s always a gentleman first. Jocelyn, your tea is excellent. So flavorful. I could swear I was drinking the sunshine itself.”
“He’s a scold,” Allegra said. “I don’t find that so gentlemanly.”
“Just to Emma.” Grigg sat with one foot resting on the other knee. His leg was bent in two like a chicken wing. Only a man would sit that way. “Just to the woman he loves.”
“And of course that makes it all right!” Prudie cried out. “A man can do anything to the woman he loves.”
This time it was Sylvia who changed the subject, but she was acting as Jocelyn’s agent; we saw Jocelyn look at her just before she spoke. “Forget Knightley,” she said. “Emma’s the hard one to defend. She’s adorable, but she’s also an unrepentant snob.”
“But she’s the only one of Austen’s heroines who gets the book named after her,” Jocelyn said, “so I think she must be the favorite.”
One of the dogs in the kennel was barking steadily. There was a long enough pause between outbursts to trick us into thinking each was the last. The barks were frayed—deceptively, cunningly weary. What fools we were, poised there above our books for a silence that would never come.
“I do believe the fog is rising.” Allegra’s tone expressed satisfaction, her lovely mobile face joy. The moon shone down unimpeded, but its time was coming. Out over the fields the air was beginning to seep. Between barks we heard the sound of a distant train. “Didn’t I say so, Mother? Didn’t I say we should meet in town instead of out here? We’ll be lucky to get home now. Nothing more dangerous than these country roads in the fog.”
Grigg was instantly on his feet. “I should probably go, then. My car’s not too reliable. I’m not used to driving in the fog.”
Bernadette, too, was standing.
“Please, no,” said Jocelyn. “Not yet. We’re in a hollow here. On the road there’ll be no fog at all. The moon is so bright. I have refreshments, please stay for them, at least. I’ll get them right now. We haven’t even talked about Harriet.”
In her junior year Sylvia transferred to Jocelyn’s high school. They hadn’t seen each other since camp, had written two letters each, the first very long, the second much less so, and then both stopped writing. But this was neither one’s fault more than the other’s, and they were excited to find each other again, sitting in Mr. Parker’s English class only two rows apart, equally bewildered by what was the deal with Ibsen. It was an enormous relief to Sylvia to discover that she already knew someone at her new school.
Now it was Jocelyn who was the expert, knowing where you were allowed to smoke, and who was cool to hang out with, and who, even if you secretly liked them, would make your reputation suffer. She had a boyfriend with a car and quickly arranged a boyfriend for Sylvia so they could all go to the movies together, or the shopping center, or the beach on weekends when the weather was nice enough. When they were out as a foursome, mostly Sylvia and Jocelyn talked to each other. Daniel and Tony drove, and when they went to the movies, Daniel and Tony paid.
Tony was Sylvia’s boyfriend. He was a swimmer, and during the competitive season, he shaved every hair off his body so he was smooth as plastic. Sylvia got him at this time, somewhat marked down. After they’d been dating several weeks, he let his hair grow back. It was lovely hair, soft and brown. He was a good-looking guy.
Jocelyn was dating a boy named Daniel. Daniel had an after-school job at a bike shop called Free Wheeling, and adult responsibilities. His youngest brother was retarded, a Mongoloid child with big ears, sticky affections, and a careless gravity so powerful the rest of the family had fallen into orbit about him.
Jocelyn had quit the country club right after the dance. Even so, she made the tennis team her junior year, in the fourth spot. The first and second girls were ranked sixth and eleventh in the state; it was a powerful team. No one in the school cared about girls’ sports, though. More people came to see the boys’ team play, when they weren’t nearly so good, and no one, even among the girls, thought this wasn’t the way it should be.
One day during an away match Jocelyn noticed Tony sitting in the stands. It had begun to cloud; the match stopped and started and stopped for good. “I came because of the weather,” Tony told her. “Daniel asked me to drive you home if it rained.”
This was a lie. Ten minutes after they left the courts it was pouring so hard that Tony couldn’t see. He pulled over to wait for it to ease up. Jocelyn was still sweaty from the match, and he kept the heat going for fear she’d chill. The car steamed like a teakettle, the windows coated so no one could look in. Tony began to write with his finger in the water on the glass. I love you, he wrote. Again and again. All over the driver’s-side window and above the steering wheel. He hadn’t said a word. The rain clattered on the roof, bounced on the hood. Tony’s face was white, his eyes unnaturally large. Silence inside the car and the din without.
“Sylvia couldn’t come with you?” Jocelyn asked. She was still hoping the words on the windows weren’t for her.
“I don’t care about Sylvia,” Tony said. “I don’t think you care about Daniel.”
“I do.” Jocelyn spoke quickly. “And Sylvia is my best friend.”
“I think you like me,” Tony said.
Jocelyn was dumbstruck. She couldn’t think of a single thing she’d done that might give that impression. “I don’t.”
The weather hadn’t let up, and the windows were still sealed with steam. Tony began to drive again anyway, inching forward, peering through the I love yous written above the dash. They were already filling in. He accelerated.
“Don’t drive if you can’t see,” Jocelyn told him. She herself could see nothing of the road, only the rain sliding by in sheets. There was a crash of thunder right above.
“I can’t sit here with you and not kiss you,” Tony said. “If you won’t let me kiss you, then I have to drive.” He accelerated again. The car tipped as he left the shoulder, righted as he straightened. “That was a close one,” he observed. “There was a tree right there.” He accelerated.
Jocelyn was squeezed into the door on her side, holding on with both hands. Once again she was barely dressed—short, short tennis skirt, sleeveless shirt cut away from the shoulders. Why, in these situations, was she always so disadvantageously clothed? Tony began to sing. “In the chilly frozen minutes oven certain tea, I long to be . . .” He was completely unhinged, so nervous he couldn’t even carry a tune. The speed of the car, the crash of the thunder—nothing frightened Jocelyn as much as his singing.
She snapped the radio on to the pearly voice of the d.j. “ . . . out to a special, special lady in the South Bay.” Tony singing, the heater puffing, rain and more rain. Thunder.
“Dee dee, dee da la da, dee da dee dee.” Tony accelerated again. “Dee—da dum.”
“Stop,” Jocelyn said. “Pull over this instant.” She used the same tone she used with Daniel’s brother when it was really important that she be obeyed.
Tony wouldn’t look at her. “You know my price.”
He had obviously laid his plans carefully. He tasted of breath mints.
Jocelyn made everyone a bowl of oatmeal. A nice basin of gruel, she said. We enjoyed the joke as soon as we understood that it was a joke and that slices of Kentucky bourbon cake, both lemon and crème de menthe squares, and almond crescent cookies were waiting for us in the kitchen as well. We told Jocelyn it was the best gruel we’d ever had, neither too thick nor too thin, too hot nor too cold. We all said we would be the better for eating it, though only Grigg did.
We had forgiven him by now for whatever it was that had set us off; in truth we couldn’t remember what it had been. “You’ve said very little,” we told him encouragingly. “Speak up! Speak out!”
But he was frowning and fetching his jacket. “I’m afraid the fog is getting worse. I really think I should go.” He took two almond crescents for the road.
Bernadette gave us all a stern look. Even her unkempt hair was suddenly sternly unkempt. “I hope he’ll be back next time. I hope we didn’t run him off. We could have been a bit nicer, I think. It must have been awkward to be the only man.”
Prudie took a tiny, affected bite of oatmeal. “I’m sure I enjoyed his interesting opinions. But then, I’ve always been a person who likes a bit of provocation. Anyone who knows me will tell you that!”
Jocelyn knew that she had to tell Daniel and Sylvia what had happened, but she was afraid. At the time she’d seemed to have only two choices—she could kiss Tony repeatedly, or she could die in a tragic rainy-day car crash, like the girl in “Last Kiss.” But she couldn’t think how to tell the story in a way that made this clear enough. She didn’t even believe it herself, and she’d been there.
Two days later she still hadn’t said anything. She was dressing for school when the doorbell rang. Her mother called to her, and her voice had a pinched sound. Someone, her mother couldn’t imagine who, had left a puppy on the doorstep, in an orange crate, with a big bow threaded through a card that said “I belong to Jocelyn.” The handwriting was unmistakable when you’d seen so many samples of it in the condensation on a car’s windows.
“Who would take it on themselves to give someone a puppy?” her mother demanded. “I thought Daniel was a sensible boy. I must say I’m quite surprised, and not in a good way.” Jocelyn had never been allowed to have a dog. A dog, in her mother’s opinion, was just a story with a sad ending coming.
The puppy was of mixed parentage, white and curly-haired, and so excited to see them that he stood on his hind legs and balanced, his front paws paddling in the air. When Jocelyn picked him up he went straight for her face, sticking his tiny tongue up her nostril. There was no talk of giving him away. In two seconds Jocelyn had fallen head over heels.
Sylvia and Tony, Jocelyn and Daniel met that day, as usual, on the high school’s south lawn for lunch. “Who would give you a puppy?” Tony kept asking, long after the others would have let it drop.
“It’s got to be your mother,” Daniel said. “Whatever she says. Who else would presume? A dog is a big responsibility.”
Tony gave Jocelyn a conspiratorial smile, let his knee fall carelessly against her leg. She remembered the feel and taste of kissing him. When he wasn’t smiling at her mischievously, he was staring pleadingly. How could the others not notice? She had to say something. The more time passed, the worse things became.
Sylvia opened her lunch bag to find that her mother had packed two pieces of bread with nothing between them. It was hard to think of new things to pack in a lunch day after day after day. Her mother had cracked under the pressure. Jocelyn had a Hostess cupcake and a hard-boiled egg. She tried to give them to Sylvia, but she wouldn’t take them.
That evening, on his way home from work, Daniel came to meet the dog. “Hey, little guy,” he said, holding out his fingers for a good chew, but he seemed less enchanted than distracted. “Here’s the thing,” he said to Jocelyn, and then said nothing else for a long time. They were at opposite ends of the couch so the puppy could race over the flowered surface between them. This distance also prevented Daniel from kissing her, which Jocelyn had decided she couldn’t allow until she’d told him everything.
“I hope that dog’s not on the furniture,” Jocelyn’s mother called from upstairs. She respected Jocelyn’s privacy too much to come in, but she often listened.
“The thing is,” Daniel said.
He seemed to be trying to tell her something. Jocelyn was not ready for an exchange of secrets. She told him how Mr. Parker had tried to lecture on the class issues in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People but they’d managed to make him talk about the Smothers Brothers instead. She made a long story of it, and the punch line was “Stupid chickens!” When she could think of nothing more to add on that subject she moved on to math class. She only had to keep talking without pause for twenty minutes or so. Daniel would never put his mother, who had enough to deal with, through the worry and trouble of his being late to dinner.
Bedtime had come to the kennels at last. There was still an occasional bark, but it led to nothing, no one took it up. The dogs were dreaming in their houses. We women were deep inside the fog now, floating in the warm, bright porch as if encased in a bubble. Sahara crawled closer to one of the heaters and lay with her head between her paws. We could see the stitching of her spine, rising and falling with her breath. In the cottony peace outside we heard the stream rinsing and spitting. Jocelyn gave us coffee in cups painted with tiny violets.
“I feel,” she said, passing among us with the cream, but not stopping at Sylvia since she knew how Sylvia liked her coffee, and had already fixed it that way, “I feel Austen working hard to persuade us that Frank Churchill’s behavior is less repulsive than it is. Too many good people in the book would be hurt if he were felt to be as bad as her usual handsome, charming villain. The Westons would be hurt. Jane Fairfax.”
“He’s neither a good man like Knightley nor a bad one like Elton,” Bernadette said. When she nodded, her glasses slipped ever so slightly down her nose. We couldn’t see this; we knew only because she pushed them back. “He’s complicated. I like that about him. He should come to see Mrs. Weston immediately and he doesn’t, but he’s attentive and thoughtful when he does. He shouldn’t encourage Emma into speculations about Jane that will embarrass her later, but he doesn’t hold them against her. He shouldn’t flirt so with Emma, but he knows somehow that she is safe from him. He needs the subterfuge, and he can see that Emma won’t misunderstand it.”
“That’s just what he can’t know!” Jocelyn’s anguished tone made Sahara get up and come to her, tail wagging tentatively. “That’s just exactly what people are always misunderstanding,” she added, with an apologetic lessening of intensity.
She offered the sugar to Allegra, who shook her head, frowning and gesturing with her spoon. “Harriet thinks that Knightley likes her. Emma thinks that Elton doesn’t like her. The book is full of people getting that wrong.”
“Elton doesn’t like Emma,” Prudie said. “His real interest is money and position.”
“Even so.” Jocelyn returned to her place on the couch. “Even so.”
We thought how the dog world must be a great relief to a woman like Jocelyn, a woman with everyone’s best interests at heart, a strong matchmaking impulse, and an instinct for tidiness. In the kennel, you just picked the sire and dam who seemed most likely to advance the breed through their progeny. You didn’t have to ask them. You timed their encounter carefully, and leashed them together until the business was done.
On the weekend after the aborted tennis match, the weather was so lovely Jocelyn’s mother suggested a picnic. They could go to the park with the puppy, now named Pride and called Pridey, and then he could piss and shit anywhere he liked and no one who had never wanted a dog in the first place would have to clean it up. Ask Sylvia, she suggested, since Sylvia had hardly been over to play with Pridey yet.
In the end they all went, Pridey, Sylvia, Tony, Daniel, Jocelyn, and Jocelyn’s mother. They sat on the grass on a scratchy plaid car blanket and ate chicken legs fried while wrapped in strips of bacon, and finished the meal by dipping fresh berries in sour cream and brown sugar. The food was good but the company awkward. Every word out of Jocelyn’s mouth was a guilty word. Tony played it bright and brittle. Sylvia and Daniel hardly spoke. And why in the world had her mother come along?
Pridey was so happy he blurred at the edges. He ran up the seesaw and did not weigh enough to tip it until the very end. The downward plunge frightened him, and he jumped straight into Jocelyn’s arms, but two seconds later, completely recovered, he wiggled his way loose, grabbed a leaf in his teeth, and raced off, dropping it only when he found a dead robin in the grass. Pridey lived in the moment, and a moment with a dead robin in it was a very good moment. Jocelyn had to pick up the bird with a paper napkin and put it in the trash, where it lay on a half-eaten ham sandwich and a moldering apple. She never touched it, but its weight in her hand was so—well, dead—so stiff but rubbery, and the black eyes were filmed over like a window slick with steam. She went to the restroom and washed. On the wall someone had written “Ride the train” in blue ballpoint and drawn a locomotive with the name Erica on it, and then a phone number. Of course, this might be about a train, though Jocelyn knew what Sylvia would say.
When she got back, Pridey was so happy to see her again he pissed himself. Even this didn’t cheer Jocelyn up. Her mother had lit a cigarette and was breathing smoke out of her nose as if she intended to stay to the bitter end. Sometimes she drove Jocelyn crazy. She wore these slippers at home and some evenings just the sound of them shuffling in the hall was more than Jocelyn could stand.
“I was thinking,” Jocelyn said. “Isn’t it funny that I feel so dirty now, because I picked up a dead bird, but a dead bird is exactly what we all ate for lunch.”
Her mother tapped the ash loose. “Honestly, dear! Those were drumsticks.”
“And delicious,” Tony said. “I like that way of cooking them.”
He was an idiot, Jocelyn decided. They were all idiots. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” she asked her mother. “Errands to run? A life?”
She watched her mother’s face fall. She had never thought about that phrase before, but it was exactly right. Everything slid downward.
Her mother put out her cigarette. “I do, actually.” She turned in the general direction of Daniel and Sylvia. “Thanks for letting me tag along, kids. Daniel, you’ll bring Jocelyn home for me?” She packed up the picnic things and left.
“That was kind of mean, Jocelyn,” Daniel said. “After she cooked all that food and all.”
“Bits of dead bird. Dead bird legs. It just bugged me that she wouldn’t admit it. You know how she is, Sylvia.” Jocelyn turned, but Sylvia wasn’t even meeting her eyes. “She always has to put such a gloss on everything. She still thinks I’m four years old.”
Pridey had forgiven her for the robin. He chewed through Jocelyn’s shoelace as a gesture of forgiving and forgetting; he was so fast Jocelyn hadn’t noticed it was happening. She had to limp to Daniel’s car in order to keep the shoe on.
We are not the saints that dogs are, but mothers are expected to come a close second. “That was fun,” was the only thing Jocelyn’s mother ever said to her about the afternoon. “You have such nice friends.”
Daniel drove her home, Pridey standing on her lap with his little paws barely reaching the window, his breath making a small, sticky cloud on the back of Jocelyn’s hand. She was sorry now for having been rude to her mother. She loved her mother. She loved her mother’s chicken fried with bacon strips. The guilt she was feeling over Tony was coming to a boil, and the easiest thing in the world would have been to start to cry. The hardest thing would have been to stop.
“The thing is,” Daniel said, “that I really like Sylvia. I’m sorry, Jocelyn.” The words came from a distance, like something that had been said several days before and was just now sinking in. “She feels terrible about it.” Daniel came to a standstill at an empty intersection. He drove so carefully and responsibly. “She can hardly face you. We both feel terrible about it. We don’t know what to do.”
The next day at school, Daniel was Sylvia’s boyfriend and Tony was Jocelyn’s. It was much talked of in the halls. Jocelyn had made no objection, because if she went along, it would be the first time in the history of the world that such a rearrangement suited all parties equally, and also because she wasn’t in love with Daniel. Now that she thought about it, Daniel really was perfectly suited to Sylvia. Sylvia needed someone more serious than Tony. Someone who would calm her down on those occasions when she saw that the world was too awful to live in. Someone who wouldn’t spend an afternoon kissing her best friend.
Besides, Tony had given her Pridey. And kissing Tony hadn’t been too foul. It probably would be worse, though, without the rain and the steam and the guilt. Jocelyn had figured out enough about the way things worked to know that.
What makes me unhappiest about Emma,” said Allegra, “are the class issues about her friend Harriet. In the end, Emma, the new, improved Emma, the chastened Emma, understands that Harriet wasn’t good enough to marry the odious Elton after all. When there was some hope that her natural father was a gentleman, she would have been, but once it’s established that he was in trade, then Harriet is lucky to get a farmer.”
It was now late enough that the heaters never cycled off. They hummed and puffed, and those of us seated next to them were too hot, the rest too cold. No coffee remained but the nasty bits at the bottoms of the cups, and the crème de menthe squares were gone—clear signs that the evening was coming to an end. Some of us had headaches.
“The class stuff in Emma is complicated.” Bernadette was settled back in her chair, her belly mounding under her dress, her feet tucked up like a girl’s. She had taken yoga for years and could put her feet into some astonishing places. “First, there’s the fact of Harriet’s illegitimacy, about which Austen seems quite liberal.”
She was by no means finished, but Allegra interrupted. “She says it’s a stain if unbleached by nobility or wealth.” We had just begun to suspect that Allegra might not like Austen as much as the rest of us. So far it was only a suspicion; nothing she’d said had been unfair. We were keeping watch, but honi soit qui mal y pense.
“I think Jane is being ironic there,” Prudie suggested. She was next to a heater. Her pale, polished cheeks were delicately flushed. “She has an ironic wit, I think some readers miss that. I’m often ironic myself, especially in e-mail. Sometimes my friends ask, Was that a joke?”
“Was that a joke?” Allegra asked.
Bernadette went steadily on. “Then there’s the case of Robert Martin. Surely we’re intended to take Mr. Knightley’s side on the question of Robert Martin. Only a farmer, but at the end Emma says it will be a great pleasure to get to know him.”
“We all have a sense of level,” said Jocelyn. “It may not be based on class exactly anymore, but we still have a sense of what we’re entitled to. People pick partners who are nearly their equal in looks. The pretty marry the pretty, the ugly the ugly.” She paused. “To the detriment of the breed.”
“Was that a joke?” Prudie asked.
Sylvia had spoken very little all night and Jocelyn was worried about it. “What should we read next?” Jocelyn asked her. “You pick.”
“I’m in the mood for Sense and Sensibility.”
“I love that one,” Bernadette said. “It’s maybe my favorite, except for Pride and Prejudice. Though I love Emma. I always forget how much until I reread it. My very favorite bit is about the strawberries. Mrs. Elton in her hat, with her basket.” She thumbed through the pages. The relevant corner had been folded back, but so had several other corners; it was little help. “Here we have it,” she said. “ ‘Mrs. Elton, in all her apparatus of happiness, her large bonnet and her basket, was very ready. . . . Strawberries, and only strawberries, could now be thought or spoken of . . . “delicious fruit—only too rich to be eaten much of—inferior to cherries . . . ” ’ ”
Bernadette read us the whole thing. It was a wonderful passage, though quite long when done aloud.
Jocelyn’s relationship with Tony lasted into their senior year, and its end was unfortunately timed so as to make her miss the Winter Ball. She’d already bought a dress, a tiered, lacy, off-the-shoulder silver thing that she loved so much she would have made things go another couple of weeks if she’d been able. But by then every word he said was an irritation to her, and he did insist on continuing to talk.
Three years later Sylvia and Daniel married, and it was a formal affair, not quite their style. Jocelyn always suspected it had been planned that way so she would finally have a place to wear her dress. She brought a date, one in a series of boyfriends and lasting no longer than the others, but immortalized in the wedding pictures—raising his glass, standing with his arm around Jocelyn, seated at a table with Jocelyn’s mother, the two of them deep in serious conversation.
Sylvia and Jocelyn were in college now, and they joined a consciousness-raising group that met on campus, second floor of the International House. At their third meeting, Jocelyn spoke about the summer of Mike and Steven. She hadn’t meant to take a great deal of time with it, but she’d never told anyone, not even Sylvia, much about the night of the dance. She found herself crying all through the telling. She’d forgotten, until she was in the midst of it, how Bryan had looked at her to be sure she was watching, and then stuck his finger into his mouth and pulled it out.
The other women were outraged on her behalf. She’d been raped, some of them argued. It was a shame no charges had been pressed.
A shame. After the initial relief, now that the story existed in the open air and could be looked at, what Jocelyn noticed most was how unresisting she’d been. She saw, as if from above, her own inert body in the strapless dress and thin cardigan, reclining on the lounge chair. The suggestion that Bryan should have been made to face some consequences came at her like an accusation. She should have done something. Why hadn’t she put up a fight? The whole time Bryan was fingering her, she was still hoping to win his good opinion!
No one else blamed her. Culturally programmed passivity, they said. The fairy-tale-princess imperative. But Jocelyn grew more and more humiliated. There were two women in the group who really had been raped, one of them by her own husband and repeatedly. Jocelyn felt she’d made a big deal over nothing. With her silence, she’d given Bryan a power he didn’t deserve. She wasn’t about to let some frat-boy asshole have a thing to say about who she was.
Who was she?
“What’s wrong with me?” she asked Sylvia later. It wasn’t a question for the group. “The simplest thing. Falling in love. Falling. Why can’t I do that?”
“You love dogs.”
Jocelyn waved that angrily away. “It doesn’t count. That’s too easy. Hitler did that.”
She didn’t go back to a fourth evening. Raising her consciousness had turned out to be one more thing that left her feeling ashamed, and she was done with feeling ashamed.
Daniel became a lobbyist in Sacramento, for an Indian tribe, a wild-river group, and the Japanese government. He was urged, from time to time, to run for office, but this was easily resisted. Politics, he said, was a foot-to-mouth occupation. Sylvia worked at the state library, in the California History Room. Jocelyn managed accounts at a small vineyard; her own dog kennel was still some years in her future and would never provide for her complete support. Pridey lived to be sixteen, and his last day on earth, it was Sylvia and Daniel who took off work to drive him to the vet with Jocelyn. They sat with her on the speck of grass outside the office, where Jocelyn held him while he died. Then they all sat in the car together. No one was able to stop crying long enough to see the road home.
How are you doing?” Jocelyn asked Sylvia. They had one minute alone together in the kitchen and a hundred things to say that could not be said in front of Allegra. Allegra was Daniel’s darling, his only daughter, and though she’d immediately taken her mother’s side and stuck there, it was unnatural and made us all sad.
The kitchen was, of course, beautifully done, with counters of blue and white tile, brass fixtures, and an antique stove. Sahara sat by the sink, turned to show her fine African profile. After everyone had gone and there was no one to see, Sahara would be given the plates to lick, but this was a secret and Sahara could keep a secret.
Jocelyn was rinsing the glasses. The water in town was so hard that they got scratched if they were put in the dishwasher, and therefore had to be done by hand.
“Dead woman walking,” Sylvia said. “You know how Daniel used to drive me crazy? It turns out I was very happily married. For thirty-two years. I miss him like my heart has been torn from my chest. What are the odds?”
Jocelyn put down a glass and took Sylvia’s cold hands in her own slippery, soapy ones. “I’ve been very happily unmarried all those same years. Everything is going to be all right.” It was occurring to her for the first time that she was losing Daniel, too. She’d handed him over, but she’d never given him up. Now, while she was breeding her dogs and dusting her lightbulbs and reading her books, he had packed his bags and moved away. “I love you very much,” she told Sylvia.
“How could I have let myself forget that most marriages end in divorce?” Sylvia asked. “You don’t learn that in Austen. She always has a wedding or two at the end.”
Allegra, Prudie, and Bernadette appeared as she spoke, carrying their coffee cups, napkins, plates. There was something, perhaps created by Sylvia’s words, of the bridal procession about it. The way the golden light reflected in the windows. The silence of the fog outside. The women coming, one after another, into the kitchen, with their dirty dishes held before them, until we were all gathered together.
“Le monde est le livre des femmes,” Prudie offered.
Whatever that meant. We could still see her lips, so she might have been perfectly serious, unless it was more of her ironic wit. Either way, we could think of no polite response.
“My dearest, most beloved Sylvia,” Jocelyn said. A tiny, ladylike drop of drool plinked from Sahara’s mouth to the stone floor. Our forks and spoons slid under the foam of soap in the sink. Allegra put her arms around her mother and her head on her mother’s shoulder. “We haven’t come to the end yet.”
Jocelyn explains the dog show:
The judge generally begins by asking all handlers to gait their dogs around the edge of the ring and then stack them in a line along one side. As the dogs move, the judge stands in the center, assessing grace, balance, soundness.
When the dogs are stacked—a pose designed to display the dog to best advantage—the judge conducts a hands-on examination of the bite, depth of chest, spring of ribs, shoulder angulation, coat, and body condition. On males, the judge manually confirms two testicles.
After this, the handlers gait their dogs again, each in turn now, first moving away so the judge can evaluate from behind, then coming back so the judge can see from the front. The judge watches for movement faults: Does the dog move true, or do his feet cross over? Is his stride free or tight, easy or restricted? In the final stages, the judge may ask competing handlers to gait two at a time so a direct comparison can be made, before selecting a winner.
The dog show emphasizes bloodline, appearance, and comportment, but money and breeding are never far from anyone’s mind.