in which we read Mansfield Park with Prudie
Her perfect security in such a tête-à-tête . . . was unspeakably welcome to a mind which had seldom known a pause in its alarms or embarrassments. (MANSFIELD PARK)
Prudie and Jocelyn had met two years before, at a Sunday matinee of Mansfield Park. Jocelyn was sitting in the row behind Prudie when the woman to Prudie’s left began a whispered monologue to a friend about high jinks at some local riding stable. Someone was sleeping with one of the farriers—a real cowboy type, boots and blue jeans and a charm that seemed unstudied, but anyone who could gentle horses knew perfectly well how to get a woman into bed. The horses, of course, were the ones to suffer. Rajah was not eating at all. “Like he thinks he’s hers,” the woman said, “just because I let her ride him from time to time.”
Prudie was pretty sure this was about the horse. She hadn’t spoken up. She sat and seethed over her Red Vines and thought about moving, but only if it could be done without an implied accusation; she was, ask anyone, courteous to a fault. She was just beginning to take an unwelcome and distracting interest in Rajah’s appetite when Jocelyn leaned forward. “Go gossip in the lobby,” Jocelyn said. You could tell that she was not a woman to be trifled with. Send her to deal with your cowboy types. Send her to feed your oh-so-sensitive horses.
“Excuse me,” the woman responded resentfully. “Like your movie is so much more important than my real life.” But she fell silent, and Prudie didn’t really care that she was offended, an offended silence being just as silent as a flattered one. This silence lasted the whole movie, which was all that mattered. The gossipers left at the credits, but the true Janeite was truly gracious, and stayed for the final chord, the white screen. Prudie knew without looking that Jocelyn would still be there when she turned to thank her.
They talked more as they threaded through the seats. Jocelyn turned out to like fiddling about with the original story no better than Prudie did. The great thing about books was the solidity of the written word. You might change and your reading might change as a result, but the book remained whatever it had always been. A good book was surprising the first time through, less so the second.
The movies, as everyone knew, had no respect for this. All the characters had been altered—Fanny’s horrid aunt Mrs. Norris was diminished simply by lack of screen time; her uncle Mr. Bertram, a hero in the book, was now accused of slave-dealing and sexual predations; and all the rest were portrayed in broad strokes or reinvented. Most provocative was the amalgamation of Fanny with Austen herself, which scraped oddly at times, as the two were nothing alike—Fanny so shrinking and Austen so playful. What resulted was a character who thought and spoke like Jane, but acted and reacted like Fanny. It made no sense.
Not that you couldn’t understand the screenwriter’s motivation. No one loved Austen more than Prudie, ask anyone. But even Prudie found the character of Fanny Price hard going. Fanny was the prig in your first-grade class who never, ever misbehaved and who told the teacher when anyone else did. How to keep the movie audience from loathing her? While Austen, by some accounts, had been quite a flirt, full of life and charm. More like Mansfield’s villainous Mary Crawford.
So Austen had given Mary all her own wit and sparkle, and none of it to Fanny. Prudie had always wondered why, then, not only Fanny but also Austen seemed to dislike Mary so much.
Saying all this took time. Prudie and Jocelyn stopped at the Café Roma to have a cup of coffee together and examine their responses more minutely. Dean, Prudie’s husband, left them there and went home to reappraise the movie in solitude while catching the second half of the 49er–Viking game.
On her first reading, Mansfield Park had been Prudie’s least favorite of the six novels. Her opinion had improved over the years. So much so that when Sylvia picked it for May, Prudie volunteered to host the discussion, even though no one is busier than a high school teacher in May.
She expected a lively exchange and had so much to say herself, she’d been filling index cards for several days in order to remember it all. Prudie was a great believer in organization, a natural Girl Scout. She had lists of things to be cleaned, things to be cooked, things to be said. She was serious about her hosting. With power—responsibility.
But the day began, ominously, with something unexpected. She appeared to have picked up a virus in her e-mail. There was a note from her mother: “Missing my darling. Thinking of coming for a visit.” But then there were two more notes that had her mother’s return address plus attachments, when her mother hadn’t mastered attachments yet. The e-mails themselves read, “Here is a powful tool. I hope you will like,” and “Here is something you maybe enjoy.” The identical “powful tool” message came again in another e-mail. This one seemed to be from Susan in the attendance office.
Prudie had planned to send out a reminder that, because of the heat, the book club would meet at eight instead of seven-thirty that night, but she didn’t wish to risk spreading the infection. She shut down without even answering her mother’s note.
The predicted temperature for the day was a hundred six. This, too, was bad news. Prudie had planned to serve a compote, but no one was going to touch anything hot. She’d better stop by the store after work and get some fruit for a sherbet. Maybe root beer floats. Easy, but fun!
Dean lurched out of bed just in time to kiss her good-bye. He was wearing nothing but a T-shirt, which was a good look for him, and how many men could you say that about? Dean had been staying up at night to watch soccer. He was in training for the World Cup, for those games that would soon be shown live from whatever time zone Japan and Korea occupied. “I’ll be late today,” he told her. He worked in an insurance office.
“I’ve got book club.”
“Which book?”
“Mansfield Park.”
“I guess I’ll skip that one,” Dean said. “Maybe rent the movie.”
“You’ve already been to the movie,” Prudie answered. She was a tiny bit distressed. They’d been to it together. How could he not remember? Only then did she see that he was teasing her. It was a measure of how distracted she was, because she was usually quick to catch a joke. Anyone could tell you that.
“How long ago it is, aunt, since we used to repeat the chronological order of the kings of England, with the dates of their accession, and most of the principal events of their reigns!” “ . . . and of the Roman emperors as low as Severus; besides a great deal of the Heathen Mythology, and all the Metals, Semi-Metals, Planets, and distinguished philosophers.” (MANSFIELD PARK)
Prudie gave her third-period students a chapter of Le Petit Prince to translate—“La seconde planète était habitée par un vaniteux”—and took a seat in the back of the classroom to finalize her notes for book club. (The secret to teaching was to place yourself where you could see them but they couldn’t see you. And nothing was more deadly than the reverse. Chalkboards were for chumps.)
It was already way too hot. The air was still, with an odor faintly locker-room. Prudie’s neck was streaked with sweat. Her dress was fastened onto her back, but her fingers slid on the pen. The so-called temporary buildings (they would last no longer than Shakespeare’s plays) in which she taught had no air-conditioning. It was hard to keep the students’ attention in May. It was always hard to keep the students’ attention. The temperature made it impossible. Prudie looked about the room and saw several of them wilted over their desks, limp as old lettuce leaves.
She saw little sign of work in progress. Instead the students slept or whispered among themselves or stared out the windows. In the parking lot, hot air billowed queasily over the hoods of cars. Lisa Streit had her hair in her face and her work in her lap. There was something especially brittle about her today, the aura of the recent dumpee. She’d been dating a senior and, Prudie had no doubt, pressured daily to give it up to him. Prudie hoped she’d been dumped because she hadn’t done so rather than dumped because she had. Lisa was a sweet girl who wanted to be liked by everyone. With luck she would survive until college, when being likable became a plausible path to that. Trey Norton said something low and nasty, and everyone who could hear him laughed. If Prudie rose to go see, she believed, she’d find Elijah Wallace and Katy Singh playing hangman. Elijah was probably gay, but neither he nor Katy knew it yet. It was too much to hope the secret word would be French.
In fact, why bother? Why bother to send teenagers to school at all? Their minds were so clogged with hormones they couldn’t possibly learn a complex system like calculus or chemistry, much less the wild tangle of a foreign language. Why put everyone to the aggravation of making them try? Prudie thought that she could just do the rest of it—watch them for signs of suicide or weapons or pregnancy or drug addiction or sexual abuse—but asking her to teach them French at the same time was really too much.
There were days when just the sight of fresh, bright acne or badly applied mascara or the raw, infected skin around a brand-new piercing touched Prudie deeply. Most of the students were far more beautiful than they would ever realize. (There were also days when adolescents seemed like an infestation in her otherwise comfortable life. Often these were the same days.)
Trey Norton, on the other hand, was beautiful and knew it—wounded eyes, slouched clothes, heavy, swinging walk. Beauté du diable. “New dress?” he’d asked Prudie while taking his seat today. He’d looked her over, and his open assessment was both unsettling and infuriating. Prudie certainly knew how to dress professionally. If she was exposing more skin than usual, that was because it was going to be a hundred-fucking-six degrees. Was she supposed to wear a suit? “Hot,” he’d said.
He was angling for a better grade than he deserved, and Prudie was just barely too old to be taken in. She wished she were old enough to be impervious. In her late twenties, suddenly, unnervingly, she found herself wishing to sleep with nearly every man she saw.
The explanation could be only chemical, because Prudie was not that sort of woman. Here at school every breath she took was a soup of adolescent pheromones. Three years of concentrated daily exposure—how could this not have an effect?
She’d tried to defuse such thoughts by turning them medicinally, as needed, to Austen. Laces and bonnets. Country lanes and country dances. Shaded estates with pleasant prospects. But the strategy had backfired. Now, often as not, when she thought of whist, sex came also to mind. From time to time she imagined bringing all this up in the teachers’ lounge. “Do you ever find yourself . . .” she would begin. (As if!)
She’d actually been sexually steadier her first time through high school, a fact that could only dismay her now. There was nothing about those years to remember with satisfaction. She had grown early and by sixth grade was far too tall. “They’ll catch up,” her mother had told her (without being asked, that’s how obvious the problem was). And she was perfectly right. When Prudie graduated, most of the boys had topped her by a couple of inches at least.
What her mother didn’t know, or didn’t say, was how little this would matter by the time it happened. In the feudal fiefdom of school, rank was determined early. You could change your hair and clothes. You could, having learned your lesson, not write a paper on Julius Caesar entirely in iambic pentameter, or you could not tell anyone if you did. You could switch to contact lenses, compensate for your braininess by not doing your homework. Every boy in the school could grow twelve inches. The sun could go fucking nova. And you’d still be the same grotesque you’d always been.
Meanwhile, at restaurants, the beach, the movies, men who should have been looking at her mother began to look at Prudie instead. They brushed past her in the grocery store, deliberately grazing her breasts. They sat too close on the bus, let their legs fall against her at the movies. Old men in their thirties whistled when she walked by. Prudie was mortified, and this appeared to be the point; the more mortified she became, the more pleased the men seemed to be. The first time a boy asked to kiss her (in college) she’d thought he was making fun of her.
So Prudie was not pretty and she was not popular. There was no reason she couldn’t have been nice. Instead, to bolster her social position at school, she’d sometimes joined in when the true outcasts were given their daily dose of torment. She’d seen this as a diversionary tactic at the time, shameful but necessary. Now it was unbearable to remember. Could she have really been so cruel? Someone else perhaps had tripped Megan Stahl on the asphalt and kicked her books away. Megan Stahl, Prudie could now see, had probably been slightly retarded as well as grindingly poor.
As a teacher Prudie watched out for such children, did her best for them. (But what could a teacher do? No doubt she made things worse as often as she made them better.) This atonement must have been the real reason she’d chosen the career, although at the time it had seemed to be about loving France and having no inclination for actual scholarship. Probably every high school teacher arrived with scores to settle, scales to tip.
Precious little in Mansfield Park supported the possibility of fundamental reform. “Character is set early.” Prudie wrote this on a notecard, followed it with examples: Henry Crawford, the rake, improves temporarily, but can’t sustain it. Aunt Norris and cousin Maria are, throughout the book, as steadfast in their meanness and their sin as Fanny and cousin Edmund are in their propriety. Only cousin Tom, after a brush with death and at the very, very end of the book, manages to amend.
It was enough to give Prudie hope. Perhaps she was not as horrible as she feared. Perhaps she was not beyond forgiveness, even from Jane.
But at the very moment she thought this, her fingers, slipping up and down her pen, put her in mind of something decidedly, unforgivably un-Austenish. She looked up and found that Trey Norton had swung about, was watching her. This was no surprise. Trey was as sensitive to any lewd thought as a dowser to water. He smiled at her, and it was such a smile as no boy should give his high school teacher. (Or no high school teacher should attribute such things to the mere act of baring one’s teeth. My bad, Jane. Pardonnez-moi.)
“Do you need something, Trey?” Prudie asked. She dropped the pen, wiped her hands on her skirt.
“You know what I need,” he answered. Paused a deliberate moment. Held his work up.
She rose to go see, but the bell rang. “Allez-vous en!” Prudie said playfully, and Trey was the first on his feet, the first out the door. The other students gathered their papers, their binders, their books. Went off to sleep in someone else’s class.
“This chapel was fitted up as you see it, in James the Second’s time.” (MANSFIELD PARK)
Prudie had a free period, and she walked through the quad to the library, where there was air-conditioning as well as two computer stations with Internet access. She wiped the sweat from her face and neck with her hand, wiped her hand on her hem, and looked at her e-mail. Kapow to the offers to consolidate her debts, enlarge her penis, enchant her with X-rated barnyard action, provide craft tips, recipes, jokes, missing persons, cheap pharmaceuticals. Kapow to anything with a suspicious attachment; there were six more of these. Deleting all this took only a minute, but it was a minute she begrudged, because who’d asked for any of it? Who had the time? And tomorrow every bit of it would be back. She had la mer à boire.
Cameron Watson settled into the terminal next to her. Cameron was a slope-backed, beak-nosed kid who looked about eleven but was really seventeen. He’d been in Prudie’s class two years before and was also a neighbor from three houses over. His mother and Prudie were members of the same investment group. Once this investment group had seen some heady returns. Once fiber-optics companies and large-cap tech stocks had hung like grapes from a vine. Now everything was a shambles of despair and recrimination. These days Prudie saw little of Cameron’s mother.
Cameron had told Prudie that he had a friend in France. They e-mailed, so he wanted to learn the language, but he’d shown no aptitude, although his excellent homework made Prudie suspect the French friend did it for him. Clearly bright as a bee, Cameron had that peculiar mix of competence and cluelessness that marks the suburban computer geek. Prudie went to him with all her computer problems and did her best, in return, to genuinely like him.
“I’m afraid to send anything from home just now,” she told him, “because I’ve been getting e-mails that seem to’ve come from people in my address book but didn’t. There are attachments, but I haven’t downloaded them. Or read them.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’ve been infected.” He wasn’t looking at her, leaning into his own screen. Mouse clicking. “Self-replicating. Tricky. The work of a thirteen-year-old kid in Hong Kong. I could come clean it up for you faster than I could tell you how.”
“That would be so great,” Prudie said.
“If you had DSL I could do it from home. Don’t you hate being so—geographical? You should get DSL.”
“You live three houses from me,” Prudie said. “And I spent so much money last time out.” (Cameron had advised her on every purchase. He knew her setup better than she did.) “Just two years ago. Dean won’t see the need. Do you think I could get a substantial upgrade without buying a whole new computer?”
“Don’t go there,” Cameron said, apparently not to Prudie but to the screen. Although it might have been to Prudie. Cameron liked Dean a ton and would hear no criticism about him.
Three more students walked in, ostensibly on a research assignment. They punched up the catalogue, wrote things in their notebooks, conferred with the librarian. One of these students was Trey Norton. There was a second boy, whom Prudie didn’t know. One girl, Sallie Wong. Sallie had long polished hair and tiny glasses. Good ear for languages, lovely accent. She was wearing a blue tank top with straps that crossed in the back, and her shoulders gleamed with sweat and that lotion with glitter all the girls were using. No bra.
When they went into the stacks, they went in three different directions. Trey and Sallie met up immediately somewhere in poetry. Through the glass window of the computer station, Prudie had a clear view down four of the aisles. She watched Trey take Sallie’s hair in his hands. He whispered something. They ducked into the next aisle just before the other boy, a heavy young man with an earnest, baffled expression, appeared. He was obviously looking for them. They were obviously ditching him. He tried the next aisle. They doubled back.
Cameron had been talking this whole time, talking with passion, although still scrolling down his own screen. Multitasking. “You need bandwidth,” he was saying. “Your upgrade now, it’s not about processors and storage anymore. You need to situate yourself on the Web. That desktop paradigm—that’s over. That’s beached. Stop thinking that way. I can get you some killer freeware.”
Trey and Sallie had surfaced in the magazines. She was laughing. He slid his hand under one strap of her top, opened his fingers over her shoulder. They heard the other boy coming, Sallie laughing harder, and Trey pulled her down another aisle and out of Prudie’s sight.
“Like a free long-distance line,” Cameron was saying. “Streaming live real-time video, IRC. You’ll be able to fold your computer like a handkerchief. You’ll be living inside it. You’ll be global.” Somehow they’d morphed into The Matrix. Prudie hadn’t been paying attention and might not have known when it happened even if she had been. The air-conditioning was starting to chill her. Nothing a brisk walk to her classroom wouldn’t cure.
Trey and Sallie reappeared in the magazines. He backed her into National Geographic and they kissed.
“Your computer’s not a noun anymore,” Cameron said. “Your computer’s a f-fricking verb.”
The heavy young man came into the computer station. If he had turned around he’d have seen Sallie Wong’s lips closing over Trey Norton’s tongue. He didn’t turn around. “You’re not supposed to be in here,” he told Cameron accusingly. “We’re all supposed to be working together.”
“I’ll be there in a minute.” Cameron sounded neither apologetic nor concerned. “Find the others.”
“I can’t.” The boy took a seat. “I’m not going to do anything by myself.”
Sallie was holding on to the back of Trey’s neck, arching slightly. The air-conditioning was no longer a problem for Prudie. She forced herself to stop watching, swung back to Cameron.
“I’m not going to do the whole assignment by myself and then put all your names on it,” the boy said, “if that’s what you think.”
Cameron continued to type. He could spot a hoax in seconds, but he had no sense of humor. He thought the graphics for Doom were totally awesome—his fingers twitched spasmodically when he talked about them—but he’d fainted dead away when Blood on the Highway was shown in driver’s ed. Although this was a fatal step for his high school rep, it consoled Prudie when she heard about it. This was not a boy who would open fire in the hallway anytime soon. This was a boy who still knew the difference between what was real and what wasn’t.
For an instant, like an ambush, a picture came into Prudie’s mind. In this picture she was backed into National Geographic, kissing Cameron Watson. She deleted the image instantly (good God!), kept an expressionless face, concentrated on whatever the hell Cameron was saying. Which was—
“What if they changed the paradigm and no one came?” Cameron did something strange with his hands, thumbs touching at the tips, fingers curled above.
“What’s that?” Prudie asked him.
“A smiley face. Emoticon. So you’ll know I’m joking.”
He wouldn’t look at her, but if he had, she wouldn’t have been able to look back. How lucky his generation was, making all these friends they’d never actually meet. In cyberspace, no one gets pantsed.
“If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. . . . The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient—at others, so bewildered and so weak—and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond controul!” (MANSFIELD PARK)
Prudie liked the beginning of Mansfield Park most especially. This was the part about Fanny Price’s mother and aunts, the three beautiful sisters, and how they all married. It bore some resemblance to the story of the Three Little Pigs. One sister had married a wealthy man. One had married a respectable man with a modest income. One, Fanny’s mother, had married a man of straw. Her poverty became so pronounced that Fanny Price was sent all alone to live with the wealthy aunt and uncle. Everything changed then into “Cinderella” and the real story began. Someone else had talked about fairy tales last time. Was it Grigg? Prudie had read a million fairy tales as a child. And reread them. Her favorite was “The Twelve Swans.”
One thing she’d noticed early—parents and adventures did not mix. She herself had no father, only a picture in the hallway of a young man in uniform. He’d died, she’d been told, on some secret mission in Cambodia when she was nine months old. Prudie had no reason to believe this and, in spite of its obvious appeals, didn’t. Her mother was the problem; no matter what Prudie did, she showed no inclination to give Prudie away.
Prudie’s mother was sweet, affectionate, tolerant, and cheerful. She was also strangely tired. All the time. She claimed to work in an office, and it was this work, she said, that so wore her out that even lying on the couch watching television was sometimes too taxing. She spent the weekends napping.
It made Prudie suspicious. It was true that her mother left the house after breakfast and didn’t come back until dinnertime, it was true that Prudie had gone to visit her at her office building (though never unannounced) and there she would always be, but she was never actually working when Prudie did visit. Usually she was talking on the telephone. Her mother should try a day at day care! “I’m too tired” cut no mustard there.
On Prudie’s fourth birthday her mother was unable to rouse herself to the demands of a party at which many of the guests would presumably be four years old. For several days she told Prudie that the birthday was coming up—the day after tomorrow, or maybe the day after after—until she finally gave Prudie a present (not wrapped) of a Sesame Street record and apologized for its being late. Prudie’s birthday, she now admitted, lay somewhere vaguely behind them.
Prudie threw the record and herself onto the floor. She had all the advantages of justice on her side, as well as four-year-old tenacity. Her mother had only twenty-three-year-old cunning. The whole thing should have been happily resolved in less than an hour.
So it was with considerable confidence that Prudie lay on the rug, drumming her toes, thudding her fists, and she could hardly hear what her mother was saying over her own wailing. But the bits she caught when she paused for breath were so outrageous as to silence her completely. Yes, Prudie’s birthday was over, her mother was now contending. But, of course, there’d been a party. Prudie’s mother described this party. Balloons, cupcakes with pink frosting and sprinkles, a piñata shaped like a strawberry. Prudie had worn her unicorn shirt and blown out all the candles. She was such a good hostess, such a wonderful, uncommon child, that she’d opened all the presents and then insisted the guests take them back, even though one had been the stuffed squirrel that sucked its thumb, which she’d seen in the toy section at Discoveries and been whining after ever since. None of the other parents could believe how unselfish she was. Prudie’s mother had never been so proud.
Prudie looked up through a screen of wet and knotted hair. “Who were the guests?” she asked.
“No one you know,” Prudie’s mother said, not missing a beat.
And her mother refused to back down. On the contrary, over the next few days, she embellished. Scarcely a meal went by (a favorite dinner was bagels with butter, which left only a single knife to be washed afterward) without a vivid description of a treasure hunt, pirate hats as party favors, pizza just the way four-year-olds like it, with nothing on it but cheese and not a lot of that. She even produced an opened package of napkins from the back of the cupboard, with ladybugs on them. “Left over,” her mother said.
The other children had not behaved as well as Prudie had. Someone had been pushed down the slide and needed a Band-Aid. Someone had been called a chicken noodle and cried over it. And her mother provided all of this detail with a conspiratorial twinkle. “Don’t you remember?” she would ask periodically, inviting Prudie to join her inside the rich, rewarding world of the imagination.
Prudie held out less than a week. She was drinking orange juice from a little plastic orange that her mother had said they would rinse out and she could keep after. The prospect had her charmed almost to the point of sedation. “I remember a clown,” Prudie offered carefully. “At my birthday.” She was, in fact, beginning to recall the party, or bits of it. She could close her eyes and see: wrapping paper stamped with stars; the cheese sliding in a sheet off her pizza slice; a fat girl with sparkly glasses she’d once seen at the park winning the ring toss. She’d already told Roberta at day care about the piñata. But the clown was a gambit, one last attempt to resist. Prudie hated nothing so much as clowns.
Once again her mother eluded the trap. She gave Prudie a hug, her chin pressing into the top of Prudie’s head and then retracting, like a pen point. “I would never bring a clown into this house,” she said.
The stratagem had been such a success it was reemployed on Halloween, and then whenever it suited her mother’s purposes. “I got milk at the store this morning,” she might say. “You already drank it.” Or, “We’ve seen that movie. You didn’t like it.” Always with a smile, as if it were a game they were playing together. (When they did play games, Prudie’s mother let her roll the dice and move her token for her. She always let Prudie win.)
Sometimes it seemed to Prudie that she’d had a childhood filled with wonderful parties, trips to Marine World, dinners at Chuck E. Cheese, where grownup-sized rodents played guitar and sang Elvis songs to her. Surely some of these things must have happened. But she was often not certain which. She began to keep a diary, became a maker of lists, but it proved surprisingly hard to write things down accurately.
It was especially hard to be honest about her own behavior, and she began to feel, long before she could put it into words, that there was something manufactured about her, not just in the diaries, but in the real world. (Whatever the hell that was.) The years receded behind her like a map with no landmarks, a handful of air, another of water. Of all the things she had to make up, the hardest was herself.
One evening when she was eight or nine, during a commercial break in the middle of The Greatest American Hero (Prudie’s mother was a sucker for the sad, guilt-ridden lives of superheroes. In The Greatest American Hero, a high school teacher was given a magical red suit and superpowers, which he then used to battle spies and criminals; as if the classroom isn’t the place superpowers are really needed), her mother recalled a Christmas when they’d gone to meet Santa at Macy’s. “We had breakfast there,” she said. “You ate chocolate chip pancakes. Santa came and sat at the table with us and you asked him for Matchbox cars.”
Prudie paused with her dinner (spoonfuls of peanut butter taken with milk) softening in her mouth. Something unfamiliar bloomed inside her chest, expanding until it took up all the empty space around her heart. This something was a conviction. She had never, in her whole life, wanted Matchbox cars. She swallowed, and the peanut butter rolled down her throat in a life-threatening clump. “That wasn’t me,” she said.
“The menus were shaped like snowflakes.”
Prudie gave her mother what she imagined was a look of steel. “I’m a poor orphan. No one takes me to see Santa.”
“Santa had just eaten a Christmas cookie. He had red and green sugar sprinkled all through his beard. I’m your mother,” Prudie’s mother said. She blinked once, twice, three times. She took the low road. “What would I do without my little crumble-cake?”
But an eight- or nine-year-old has no heart, except maybe where baby animals are concerned. Prudie was unmoved. “My mother is dead.”
“What of?”
“Cholera.” Prudie had The Secret Garden very much in mind. If she’d been reading Irish Red it would have been rabies. (Not that anyone in Irish Red got rabies. They nearly died of starvation in a snowstorm on a mountain when they went out hunting martens. Rabies was not even mentioned. It was just that any dog book made one think of Old Yeller.)
Her mother was in no mood for small mercies. “I see,” she said slowly. Her face was melted sadly around the eyes and lips. “Cholera. That’s a nasty death. Vomiting. Diarrhea. Really, really painful. Like you’re turning inside out. Puking your guts up.”
Prudie had pictured something less rude. “I loved her very much,” she offered, but it was too late, her mother was already rising.
“I didn’t know you liked to pretend you were an orphan,” she said, and bull’s-eye! How many times had Prudie imagined her mother dead? How many ways? Riptides, car crashes, kidnapping by bandits, misadventures at the zoo. She began to cry with the shame of being such a horrible daughter.
Her mother went to her room and closed the door, even though the show had come on again—William Katt, who, her mother always said, was hot, hot, hot, and anyone who preferred Tom Selleck wasn’t using the eyes God gave them. If they had been playing a game, Prudie couldn’t have told if she’d just won or just lost. But if it was a game, that was the sort of game it would be, the kind where you wouldn’t know.
For her tenth birthday Prudie saved her allowance for four months in order to buy her own invitations, which she then addressed herself, and an ice cream cake, which she served on Ewok plates with matching napkins. She asked seven girls she knew from school, and on the day she gave out the invitations she had one lunchtime in which she was the center of attention. This turned out to be more alarming than enjoyable.
On the day of the party, because her mother had measured her for a dress she’d seen in the Sears catalogue, but then not gotten around to ordering it, she let Prudie wear her pearl-drop necklace from Hawaii. The chain was too long for Prudie, so they strung the pendant on a black cord that could be tied at any length she liked.
Prudie was given three books, all too young for her, a kite, children’s Trivial Pursuit, a bicycle bell, and a plastic goldfish in a plastic goldfish bowl, none of which she gave back. The presents and the party struck her as lame. The girls behaved very nicely. It was all a sad comedown from what she was used to.
It was a very proper wedding. The bride was elegantly dressed—the two bridesmaids were duly inferior . . . her mother stood with salts in her hand, expecting to be agitated—her aunt tried to cry— (MANSFIELD PARK)
Prudie had brought a magazine to read in the teachers’ lounge at lunch. She was prepared to socialize if there was interesting conversation, but two of the teachers had developed bunions and were commiserating over it. Prudie was too young to be told that shopping for shoes could ever become a nightmare. Nurses’ shoes were suggested. Orthotics. It was horrible. Prudie opened her magazine. She saw that Dean had already taken the quiz, a set of questions to determine which of the Sex and the City girls you were most like. She checked out his answers:
To make a good impression on a Saturday night, Dean would “(a) wear a flirty top and a pencil skirt.” If a hot guy stood next to him at a bar, Dean would “(d) tell him he has great biceps—and ask him to flex.”
Prudie and Dean had first met at a bar. She was in college, out with her friends Laurie and Kerstin, celebrating something or other. Finals or the week before finals or the week before that. “We just need some girl time,” Kerstin had told him warningly, but the words had no impact. Dean leaned past her without so much as a look and asked Prudie to dance.
Everyone else was dancing fast. Dean put his arms around her, pulled her in. His mouth was right beside her ear; his chin brushed her neck. Al Green’s “Don’t Look Back” was playing. “I’m going to marry you,” he told her. Laurie thought it was weird. Kerstin thought it was scary. It wasn’t their ear; it wasn’t their neck.
Dean had that specific confidence that comes from nothing else but being popular in high school. He had been a high school jock, made the college soccer team as a freshman, was a scoring left wing with a fan section. He was the sort of guy who, a few years before, wouldn’t have even seen Prudie standing in front of him. Now he picked her out in a crowded bar. She was flattered, though she assumed she was not the first woman he’d vowed to marry in this fashion. (She found out later that she was.)
Didn’t matter. His heavy-lidded eyes, his cheekbones, athlete legs, orthodontic teeth—none of it mattered. Forget the fact that he would look so good walking in next to her at her high school reunions. Some people would be so surprised.
No, the only thing that turned out to matter was that the first time he laid eyes on her he thought she was pretty. Love at first sight was as ridiculous as it was irresistible. In fact, Prudie wasn’t pretty. She just pretended to be.
She’d assumed from this beginning that Dean was a romantic sort of guy. Her mother saw him clearer. “There’s a young man with his feet on the ground,” she had said. Prudie’s mother didn’t much care for young men with their feet on the ground. (Though she turned out to really like Dean. They both watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer every Tuesday night and phoned each other afterward to discuss the week’s developments. Dean was a sucker for the sad, guilt-ridden lives of superheroes. Now he had her mom rooting desperately for the no-superpowers-at-all U.S. soccer team and talking about offside traps as if she knew what they were and when to use them.)
Prudie heard the criticism implied in her mother’s assessment and forced it in Dean’s favor. What was wrong with a solid sort of guy? Did you want a marriage full of surprises, or did you want a guy you could depend on? Someone who, when you looked at him, you knew what he’d be like in fifty years?
She asked Laurie, because Laurie had a theory about everything. “It seems to me,” Laurie had said, “that you can marry someone you’re lucky to get or you can marry someone who’s lucky to get you. I used to think the first was best. Now I don’t know. Wouldn’t it be better to spend your life with someone who thinks he’s lucky to be there?”
“Why can’t you both be lucky?” Prudie asked.
“You can wait for that, if you like.” (But Laurie was the one who hadn’t married yet.)
Of course Prudie had to plan the wedding herself. It was a modest affair in her mother’s backyard. She heard later that the food had been good, strawberries and oranges and cherries with chocolate and white chocolate dipping sauces. She was too busy to eat any of it. Too dazed. When she looked at the pictures—her pleated dress, the flowers, Dean’s politely drunken friends—she hardly remembered being there. It was a very nice wedding, people said afterward, and the minute they said it, Prudie realized she hadn’t wanted a very nice wedding. She’d wanted something memorable. They should have eloped and never told anyone.
But it was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding. Prudie had married Dean, who, for no reason that Prudie could see, thought he was lucky to get her.
She was still learning how lucky she was. Dean was so much more than solid. He was generous, friendly, easygoing, hard-working, good-looking. He shared the housework and he never complained and you never had to ask. For their wedding anniversary, he’d bought two tickets to Paris. This very summer Prudie and Dean were going to France.
And that was the problem. Prudie loved France; she’d made a life out of loving France. She’d never been, but she could imagine it perfectly. Of course, she didn’t want to actually go. What if the trip was a disappointment? What if, once there, she didn’t like it at all? Then what? It seemed to her that her husband, the love of her life, should have understood her well enough to know this.
Kerstin’s husband did impressions. He could do people, but he could do objects as well—lawn mowers, corkscrews, cake beaters. He could do the whole cast of Star Wars, especially an excellent Chewbacca. Dean was a thoughtful lover with no objections to oral sex, even when it was his mouth. Even so—if Prudie had an itch one night for Chewbacca, there wasn’t a thing Dean could do about it. He was always himself.
Prudie had thought that was what she wanted. Someone dependable. Someone with no pretense. Most of the time she was deeply in love with Dean.
But just occasionally she felt more lucky in her marriage than contented with it. She could imagine something better. She knew who to blame for this, and it wasn’t Dean. The girl on Sex and the City that Dean was most like was Miranda.
It would be the last—in all probability the last scene on that stage; but he was sure there could not be a finer. The house would close with the greatest éclat. (MANSFIELD PARK)
Prudie had a terrible headache. The air was so hot all the oxygen seemed to have been squeezed out of it. She took two aspirin and drank lukewarm water from the only fountain whose nozzle wasn’t blocked with a wad of gum. Careless of her makeup, she splashed some water on her face. By the time she arrived at her fifth-period class, her headache was survivable, though she still felt it in her temples like a distant drum.
Karin Bhave was waiting for her with a note: Ms. Fry, the drama teacher, asked if Karin could be excused for the period. The school production of Brigadoon was having its first dress rehearsal this afternoon and its second this evening, and the blocking for some of the scenes was still not working.
Karin had played Maria in The Sound of Music her sophomore year, Marian the librarian her junior. The day the cast list for Brigadoon had gone up, Prudie had come upon her sobbing alone in the bathroom, tears streaking the blusher on her cheeks, turning it to war paint. Prudie had assumed, naturally enough, that the lead had gone to someone else. She’d said something well intentioned, that one didn’t want to do the same thing over and over again, even when that something was something good. She’d said it in French, because everything sounded better in French. Prudie was a better person in French—wiser, sexier, more sophisticated. “Toujours perdrix,” she’d finished, exhilarated by the idiom. (When she’d thought back on it later, she realized there was little chance Karin had understood her. The straight path, the English version, would have served better. Her ego had gotten in the way of her purpose. Tout le monde est sage après le coup.)
As luck would have it, she’d misjudged the problem anyway. Karin had once again been given the female lead. Of course she had. No one else had her bell-like voice and her slender figure and her innocent face. Karin was crying because the male lead had gone to Danny Fargo and not, as she’d secretly hoped, to Jimmy Johns, who was, instead, playing the part of Charlie Dalrymple. So Karin was going to have to fall in love with Danny Fargo in front of the whole school. They would kiss with everyone watching, and in order to do so, they would have to practice kissing. This was what her future held—numerous kissings of Danny Fargo while Ms. Fry stood at her elbow, demanding more and more passion. “Look into his eyes first. Slower. Naked longing.” Karin had kissed under Ms. Fry’s direction plenty of times before.
Plus, there were no other imaginable circumstances under which a girl like Karin could hope to kiss a boy like Jimmy. Jimmy had surprised everyone by even trying out when the show would pose such an obvious conflict with the baseball season. Jimmy’s coach had told the team they couldn’t do any other sports. Not in his wildest dreams had it occurred to him to outlaw the musical.
Jimmy was his only reliable closer. Accommodations were made, though the choice of a musical over baseball had left Coach Blumberg at first stunned and then dispirited. “I don’t have so many seasons left in me,” he’d told a group of women in the teachers’ lounge.
The whole thing had cruelly raised Karin’s hopes. If Jimmy had gotten the part of Tommy, they would have spent a lot of time together. He might have actually looked at her. He might have noticed that she could, in makeup and with her hair done, look just like a star in a Bollywood musical. Danny Fargo might have the same revelation, but who wanted him to?
“Are you coming to see us?” Karin asked Prudie, and Prudie said she wouldn’t miss it. (Though how hot was the theater going to be? How would she herself respond to the spectacle of Jimmy Johns, with his closing-pitcher arms, singing “Come to Me, Bend to Me”?)
She gave her sixth-period class the same section of The Little Prince to translate, but as they were third-years, English to French instead of the other way around. “The second planet was inhabited by a conceited man.”
Prudie returned to her index cards. It had occurred to her over lunch that none of Jane’s other heroines was anywhere near as devout as Fanny. The book club had yet to even mention religion.
Austen’s other books were filled with clergymen’s livings—promised, offered, desired—but these posed more financial concerns than spiritual ones. No heroine but Fanny spoke so approvingly of worship or seemed to admire the clergy so much. Six books. So many scenes of village life, so many dances and dinners carefully depicted. Not a single sermon. And Jane’s father had been a clergyman himself. There was much here to discuss! Bernadette would surely have things to say about this. Prudie filled five new cards before the heat got to her.
Her headache was making a comeback. She pressed on her temples and looked at the clock. Sallie Wong had written a note, folded it like a crane, brushed it off the desk with her elbow. Teri Cheyney picked it up, unfolded it, read it. Oh my God, she mouthed. (And not Mon dieu.) Probably Trey’s name was in that note somewhere. Prudie considered confiscating it, but that would involve standing. She was so hot she thought she might actually faint if she stood. What might the students not do if she were unconscious? What romps and frolics? Little black spots swam through her vision like tadpoles. She put her head on the desk, closed her eyes.
It was, thank God, almost time to go home. She would do some light cleaning before the book club came. Quick vacuum. Casual dusting. Perhaps it would be cool enough by eight to meet out on the deck. That might be lovely if the Delta breeze came in. The noise level in the classroom was rising subtly. She should sit up before it got out of hand, open her eyes, clear her throat loudly. She was determined to do so, and then the bell rang.
And then, instead of going straight home, Prudie found herself outside the multipurpose room. The kids who did drama were an interesting group. Mostly into pot, which distinguished them from the ones who did student government (alcohol) or played sports (steroids) or did yearbook (glue). So many distinct sets and subsets. There was something quite mandarin about the complexity of it. Prudie sometimes wished she’d studied anthropology. There would have been papers to write. Of course, that was the bad news as well as the good. Writing papers would have been an effort. She wasn’t her mother’s daughter for nothing.
She could hear music, muffled through the multipurpose room door. Behind that door was the Scottish highlands. Mists and hills and heather. It sounded lovely and cool. While going home, desirable in every other way, involved getting into a car that had been in the parking lot with the windows up since eight that morning. She would have to wrap her hand in her skirt to open the door. The seat would be too hot to sit on, the steering wheel too hot to hold. She would spend several minutes actually, technically, baking as she drove.
None of this would improve with delay, but the prospect was so unappealing that Prudie chose door B. She was rewarded with a wash of air-conditioning over her face. Some kid who’d never taken French was playing the bagpipe. Onstage the players rehearsed the chase of Harry Beaton. Ms. Fry was having them run through the scene, first in slow motion, and then up to speed. From her seat, Prudie could see the stage, and also the actors waiting in the wings. Meanwhile, in the back, the bagpipe practiced for Harry’s funeral. Without exactly liking the instrument, Prudie admired the performance. Where would a kid from California have learned to blow and squeeze that way?
The boys jumped down off the stage, kilts flying. Jimmy Johns put his arm around the blond sophomore girl who was playing his fiancée. In Brigadoon, their love had broken Harry’s heart; at Valley High, the broken heart was Karin’s. She sat a few rows back and alone, a careful distance from Danny.
Prudie found herself in sudden sympathy with Coach Blumberg. How wise was it, after all, to encourage these children to play at great love? To tell them that romance was worth dying for, that simple steadfastness was stronger than any other force in the world? What Coach Blumberg believed—that there was something important about nine boys outpitching, outhitting, and outrunning nine other boys—seemed, by contrast, a harmless fraud. Jane Austen wrote six great romances, and no one died for love in any of them. Prudie observed a moment’s silence in honor of Austen and her impeccable restraint. Then she was just quiet with no purpose to being so.
Trey Norton slid into the seat beside her. “Should you be here? Don’t you have class?” she asked him.
“It was a hundred fourteen in the Quonset. Some geek had an actual thermometer on him, we were let out. I’m picking up Jimmy.” Trey was smiling at Prudie in a disconcerting way that wasn’t his usual disconcerting way. “I saw you in the library. You were watching me.”
Prudie felt herself flush. “A public display of affection is public.”
“Okay, public. I wouldn’t call it affection, though.”
It was long past time to change the subject. “The boy playing the bagpipes is really good,” Prudie said.
If only she’d said it in French! Trey made a delighted noise. “Nessa Trussler. A girl. Or something.”
Prudie looked at Nessa again. There was, she could see now, a certain plump ambiguity. Maybe Trey wouldn’t tell anyone what she’d said. Maybe Nessa was perfectly comfortable with who she was. Maybe she was admired throughout the school for her musical ability. Maybe pigs could jig.
The best thing you could say for Nessa was that she had only three years here. Then she could go as far away as she liked. She could never come back if that was what she wanted. Prudie was the one staying. She had a sudden revelation that this was Brigadoon, where nothing would ever change. The only people who would age were the teachers. It was a terrifying thing to think.
She had a more practical idea. “I’m not wearing my contacts,” she offered. Lamely and late.
“Yes you are.” Trey was looking deep into her eyes; she could smell his breath. It was slightly fishy, but not in a bad way. Like a kitten’s. “I can see them. Little rings around your irises. Like little dinner plates.”
Prudie’s heartbeat was quick and shallow. Trey lifted his chin. “And a good thing. PD of A to starboard.”
Prudie turned around. There, right there, in the wings, with the stage empty but a fair number of kids still scattered about the auditorium, Mr. Chou, the music teacher (unmarried) slipped his hands over Ms. Fry (married)’s breasts, squeezed them as if he were testing cantaloupes. And clearly not for the first time; those hands knew those breasts. What was it about this school! Prudie’s headache upped its tempo. The bagpipe exhaled forlornly.
Prudie’s second reaction was to calm down. Maybe this was not so bad. It would distract Trey from her unfortunate faux pas about Nessa. Nessa was an innocent here; Prudie didn’t regret the exchange.
As for Ms. Fry and Mr. Chou, Prudie couldn’t even pretend to be surprised. Ms. Fry had large breasts. Take pheromones, add music, rehearsals day and night, people dying for love. What could you expect?
One of the things that troubled Prudie about Mansfield Park was the way things ended between Mary Crawford and Edmund. Edmund had wished to marry Miss Crawford. It looked to Prudie as if, whatever other excuses he might offer, he’d finally cast her aside because she wished to forgive her brother and his sister for an adulterous affair. Edmund accused Mary of taking sin lightly. But he himself preferred to lose his sister forever rather than forgive her.
Prudie had always wanted a brother. It would have been nice to have someone with whom to cross-check memories. Had they ever been to Muir Woods? Dillon Beach? Why were there no pictures? She’d imagined that she would love this brother very much. She’d imagined he would love her in return, would see her shortcomings—who would know you better than a brother did?—but with fondness and charity. In the end, Prudie disliked Edmund so much more than she disliked his scandalous, selfish, love-stricken sister.
Of course, attitudes changed over the centuries; you had to allow for this. But an unforgiving prick was an unforgiving prick. “Oo-la-la,” Trey said.
Prudie’s own feelings on adultery were taken from the French.
“The evergreen!—How beautiful, how welcome, how wonderful the evergreen!” (MANSFIELD PARK)
The climate in the Valley was classified as Mediterranean, which meant that everything died in the summer. The native grasses went brown and stiff. The creeks disappeared. The oaks turned gray.
Prudie got into her car. She rolled down the windows, started the AC. The seat burned the backs of her bare legs.
Some bird had shat on the windshield; the shit had cooked all day and would have to be scoured off. Prudie couldn’t face doing this in the full sun. Instead she drove home while peering around a large continent—Greece, maybe, or Greenland. Using the water and wipers would only make things worse. None of the driving was freeway, and she had mirrors, so it wasn’t really as reckless as it sounded.
Without any particular affection for her eldest cousin, her tenderness of heart made her feel that she could not spare him; and the purity of her principles added yet a keener solicitude, when she considered how little useful, how little self-denying his life had (apparently) been. (MANSFIELD PARK)
The curtains were drawn and the air conditioner was on, so Prudie walked into a house that was dark and tolerably cool. She took two more aspirin. Now that it came to it, she didn’t have the energy for further cleaning. Her lists were a comfort to her, an illusion of control in a turvy-topsy world, but she was no prisoner to them. Things came up, plans changed. Holly, the housekeeper, had been by last week. The place was clean enough by anyone’s standards but Jocelyn’s. Prudie would have to go out shopping again, there was no help for that, or serve a salad made from a romaine already browned at the edges.
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.