The Evolution of Jane Read Online Free

said, is Barlow. Jane Barlow Schwartz. My mother did try to use Barlow as my first name, but my father, in this matter at least, prevailed, and I reverted, at age two weeks, to Jane. Of the many ways in which it was unfortunate that my great-aunt Anna, herself a Barlow, chose just that moment to enter senility, the one that affected me exclusively was her conviction, until her death, that my name was Barlow Schwartz, which she repeatedly criticized as silly, undignified, and, worse, unladylike.
    "Well," my mother would say to a distressed Aunt Anna, "her name is Jane, but if you insist on calling her Barlow, we could always change it."
    "Barlow? Barlow, indeed!" Aunt Anna would say. "Why, you must call me Aunt Anna, of course!"
    Sometimes Aunt Anna would introduce herself by saying, "How do you do? I am the skeleton in the family closet." We're the sort of family that has skeletons rather than ghosts, and I'm grateful for that. Ghosts are personal and intrusive, memories that haunt the living. We have neither the imagination nor the patience for ghosts in my family.
    Skeletons, on the other hand, are the real thing. Skeletons hold everything together. Skeletons hold the past. They hold information. That's why Darwin collected skeletons. On one of his many inland excursions from the
Beagle,
Darwin visited a place in Patagonia called Port Desire. One of his traveling companions shot an emu, which is some kind of big flightless bird like an ostrich. It was smaller than the other emus he'd seen, so Darwin thought it was an immature member of that species, a young rhea. Only after the little ostrich was cooked and eaten did he realize it was probably a specimen of a smaller, less common species, which he had heard about but had never seen, though he had been searching for one for months. He scraped the bones from the plates, gathered up the remaining bits of feathers and skin and,
voilà!
Ostrich stew transformed into
Rhea darwinii,
a new species stuffed and on exhibit at the Zoological Society.
    Skeletons don't come and go like ghosts, even after they've been served for dinner. You can study them, measure them, read the past in them. They're as faithful as dogs. I have tried to examine my friendship with Martha, my former best friend, in this manner. If only I could scrape her off my plate and pick at the bones of our friendship and glue back the feathers.
    There's one old shard that I'm particularly attached to—an event that occurred when Martha went on a trip with her parents. She asked me to water the plants she was growing for a science project. I remember the plush emptiness of her house as something thrilling, secret. I walked up the stairs to Martha's room and stood on the threshold looking in with an almost guilty excitement. It was just Martha's room, a canopy bed, a prism hanging by the window, a poster of Madonna. I watered the plants. Then I left Martha a note saying I had been there. I drew a heart and signed it. I felt suddenly self-conscious about the heart. I put a question mark beside it. And I left.
    Martha asked me about it when she got home.
    "It looks sort of mean," she said. "A heart with a question mark."
    "It wasn't meant to be mean," I said.
    "Oh. Okay." And that was it. Martha crumpled the note, threw it away, and it was only later, when we stopped being friends, that I thought of the question mark and the heart again. Why did I draw a heart? Because I loved Martha? Why did I write a question mark? Because I was embarrassed about having such strong feelings for Martha? Why did Martha even mention such a stupid, unimportant note? Because it really said so much? Were Martha's feelings hurt? Why would her feelings be hurt by an offhand note? Did my explanation soothe her feelings? Did she, years later, think of that note? Did she think, "Jane is peculiar, both excessive and stingy in her affection. Who needs a friend like that?" Is there anything more petty, more exalted, than a friendship between two