The Evolution of Jane Read Online Free Page A

girls? How did mine go wrong?
    Martha took up almost as much of my energy when we stopped being friends as she did before we stopped being friends. I want you to understand that there were long stretches of my life during which I did not think about Martha Barlow. There were many such stretches, days and weeks and months. I fought with my parents, fell in love with boys, studied for exams, and went to Europe. I graduated from college, got an apartment, got a job, got married, got divorced. My life was full of joy and annoyances, just like the next person's. I didn't sift through Martha's trash in the middle of the night. I was not insane. I was just haunted.
    I was haunted by her absence. Did I say, just a moment ago, that my family did not have ghosts? That we had skeletons instead? Skeletons in our closets? Well, I was haunted by Martha, and if that makes her a ghost, so be it. I stand corrected.

    Martha first appeared in Barlow when she was eight and I was seven and a half. She and her parents were going to spend the summer in the house to the west of ours. There was another house to the east. Ever since I can remember, and before that, too, those neighboring houses were a source of mortification for my mother. All three houses were identical, three white houses balanced on the cliffs above the sea. They had been built by my great-great-grandfather for his three children, triplets named Frederick (my great-grandfather), Franklin (Martha's great-grandfather), and Francis (he never married, seeming to prefer sailors to women). The three brothers were ships' captains who prospered and caused their New England village to prosper to such an extent that the town fathers rechristened it "Barlow" after its own favorite sons.
    By the time my parents got married and moved into the house with my grandmother, the Captain Francis Barlow house to the west had become a clubhouse bordered by a golf course and tennis courts. A gray wooden staircase scaled the cliff from beach to house, and club members in bathing suits traipsed up and down from June till September. We were far enough away not to be disturbed by noise, and gradually my mother came to accept the Barlow Country Club, almost as if she herself had established it, like a Rockefeller letting the commoners walk his Pocantico pastures. But the Captain Franklin Barlow house was a different story.
    Just half a mile down the road, beyond the meadow and the stand of trees that bordered our property and signaled the beginning of theirs, stood a house that mirrored ours in every way, and yet no one would have had the slightest difficulty distinguishing between them. For the shutters, which sagged and gapped and faded into their dotage at our house, hung straight and bright on theirs. At our house we believed in crabgrass the way others believe in the stars—crabgrass was less than a religion, but it held meaning. And that meaning was: Look how green and lush a weed can be, look at the pretty yellow dandelions. And all without watering! The lawn spread out from their house in manicured opulence. This house was Martha's. Visiting Martha, I would walk through the field and beneath the trees until I reached that carpet of grass. Then I would ascend the stairs to the large porch, continue across the polished floor, through the open door, where I would stand for a moment, alone and awed by the wallpapers, by the splendor and order and spotless peace, and I would sigh happily, and I would say, "Chaos."
    Until the summer I met Martha, the house had looked almost as disreputable as ours. Her parents, who lived in New York City, had rented it out for years and years. I loved the two men who were the last in a long line of tenants. Pan and Sven. They were ballet dancers. They drove a red sports car and were waiting for a check from Sven's father, a famous novelist who lived in Mexico. Pan colored in his bald pate with some kind of brown pencil, and he made this shiny pretend hair come to a point