The Jane Austen Book Club Read online

  “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 pu
ppy, 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.” S
he 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.