The Evolution of Jane Read Online Free Page B

in front, like a cartoon devil. Pan and Sven fascinated me, and I begged to take ballet lessons from them instead of from Madame de Fornier. Unfortunately, they were arrested before I started. They were con men. There was no check, no famous novelist father in Mexico or anywhere else, no roles in the Paris ballet. Just charm and a leased red sports car and a painted point of hair. How I missed them when the police came and took them off in handcuffs. Even then they both looked suave and insouciant, words I learned from them. Sven waved, lifting the policeman's hand with his as he did so. Pan winked and his chiffon scarf blew behind him in the breeze.
    "I will miss them, too," my mother said, kissing me on the head. "Though, really, they pruned that lilac to within an inch of its life."
    The house stood empty for a while, then I noticed some activity, cars driving into the driveway, people opening and closing the front door. My mother pretended nothing was happening. But something was happening. First, the workmen came. They replaced the old roof with shingles of golden wood. The house, like the others, was large and square, built in 1860. I watched the workmen that summer without wondering who might be moving in. Maybe I thought the workmen were moving in. Probably the next step just never occurred to me. The activity itself was enough. To see the mirror of my own house transformed—first gutted, then put back together like a new breed of Humpty Dumpty—was riveting. I sat at the edge of the trees on the trunk in a weeping willow that had taken a convenient horizontal twist and watched in open-mouthed abstraction.
    It wasn't that I was alone before Martha came. I had my two brothers who, though they were so much older than I was, tried to make contact every once in a while, like those people who beam radio messages into outer space, just in case. And there were my parents, of course. My great-aunt Anna did not yet live with us, but even so, there were enough of us so that it never occurred to me I was lonely. It was only when I saw Martha, a little girl, a person who resembled me in height and weight and the pitch of her voice, galloping like a horse across her lawn the way I galloped across mine—it was only then, months after the workmen had come and transformed the house, as the family drove up in a blue station wagon and a little girl my age jumped out and galloped, that I realized I needed a friend.
    Martha saw me that day as I sat and watched from the weeping willow tree. She smiled, slowed her imaginary horse to a walk, began to approach me, then suddenly was whisked off by the unruly steed.
    "Whoa!" she cried. "Whoaaaa!"
    I was tempted to run out and join her. I recognized her invitation. But I just sat and waited in my tree, dumb and agog, until she got bored racing all over her new lawn and ran over as if she had no horse at all, and said, "Look! I have braces!"
    She did indeed sport an impressive set of shiny braces, which made me instantly jealous. But as she was a newcomer, almost a guest, I asserted my native superiority and personal liberality by being gracious.
    "And a new house," I said.
    "No. It's really old."
    Martha and I then entered our first of many arguments, pedantic but passionate exchanges, and our friendship began.
    "New to you," I said.
    "But not to you."
    "I already have a house,
just like
this one, and my house is
re
ally, really
old." I was proud of our house, and pride has always confused my debating abilities.
    "See?" she said.
    "A
hundred
years old."

    I walked home through the meadow that day in a thoughtful frame of mind. It was August and the Queen Anne's lace was as high as my chin. The sticky milkweed was even higher. The bees were out. Their noise was close, but muffled by the tall weeds. Above, the sky was so blue I wished the jungle of stalks around me would part and let me see it fully, an endless bowl of sky. Or that I was taller and could stroll through the wildflowers and skunk