The same guys who’d been her friends in grade school were now hanging out in the halls and smoking dope or taking advantage of girls, and Jane might wave or say hello to Michael but that was all. Her childhood was definitely over, she thought, each time she saw how far apart they had grown.
Almost imperceptibly she grew to have what her mother called a weight problem and her father, baby fat. He offered her Dexamyl for pep, as he put it since both he and Uncle Larry took a capsule or two every day like vitamins. Jane put on and took off weight like gloves and began not to know what she looked like. She looked at Miss Anderson, her English teacher, who didn’t wear a bra, even though she must have been over thirty. To her bleached blond hair and knowing, long-legged swagger Jane turned with fascination; here, she thought, was someone different. Miss Anderson’s brother was the biology teacher and he had a plate in his head from the war. It was also rumored that brother and sister were too close. In the classroom the sun shining through the windows reminded Jane of a life that existed elsewhere. Miss Anderson stood at the front of the class, framed by the blackboard, her blond hair and black roots, her white skin, a kind of flag of independence. Her lipstick was a deep red, like her sweater, her mouth moving slowly as she spoke with a drawl that matched her walk. If only, Jane thought, Uncle Larry had met Miss Anderson instead of his new, skinny wife.
For Easter vacation, in her senior year, Larry took her to Florida with his new wife, an ex-dance instructor her mother thought was a tramp, and his daughter from his first marriage. Even in a bathing suit Larry’s wife had no hips at all and what stuck out most was the cigarette that hung from her broad mouth. Her lips were big, a feature so unlike the rest of her that Jane considered them almost a deformity. Larry was broad everywhere, and the couple had a Laurel and Hardy quality that made Jane laugh secretly. Her uncle had known Bugsy Siegel—“he’d kill ya if you called him that, though”—and Frank Costello, from a steam room he frequented in the forties and fifties. “Frank saw me at the tables of one of his joints down here and he said to me, ‘Larry, what are you doing here? You know these tables are fixed.’” Her uncle told her stories about gangsters and her grandparents that her father never would have. “Your grandmother sent your grandfather away. He was a nice man, too, but we hated him because she told us he was bad.” They were on a boat getting terrible sunburns. “Your father took care of me, protected me. He should see a doctor, too, but he won’t.” Later that day Larry asked her, “How’s your sex life?” No one had ever suggested that she might have one. She said she didn’t have one. He said he started late too. Larry was driving a rented convertible along the highway that fronted the ocean. The sun was still brilliant.
Jane’s sunburn was turning into a third-degree burn right on the spot between her breasts, as if the sun had drilled a hole in her. The sky was a cloudless blue. Larry was in profile against the horizon, and he was speaking to her about things no one else ever had. Jane startled at the mention of her sex life and his, the possibility that they were connected. She felt adult and tragic. That night they went into Miami Beach and Jane fell in love with a college friend of her cousin’s. But you only saw him for a minute, her cousin insisted. The next five days, until they went home, Jane ate as if there were no tomorrow. “Doll,” Larry laughed, “slow down. You don’t want to look like me, do you?” Jane flew home eight pounds heavier. It was a bad flight, the plane hit an air pocket and dropped a thousand feet. Her uncle stuck some nitroglycerin under her nose. She tried to ignore all the people who’d been drinking heavily before the plane dropped as they vomited around her. This is the way the Romans did it, Jane thought — on purpose. Of course the Romans weren’t in a plane flying back from Florida to the suburbs. They did go to the sea, and they ate apples for headaches. And as she thought all this they came closer and closer to earth.
She decided to lose weight, not for her prom, which she wouldn’t go to on principle, but for life after it, and found a diet doctor who supplied her with multicolored tablets in small plastic boxes. Jane lost weight and talked constantly or not at all. Asked to be the bridesmaid at her middle sister’s wedding, having spent three hours combing her hair, trying to get it right, she didn’t smile as she walked down the aisle. Jane’s inappropriately sober attitude indicated to her father that his youngest daughter was still unmanageable, and somehow improper. Jane’s always been wild, he said. She did lose twenty or so pounds and was as slim as a branch whose leaves had just fallen off.
Her newly married sister fixed her up with a guy who had just graduated from college. He asked her out again and then again. He liked to go into the city and see a play or talk about movies or the war in Vietnam. But when he placed his hand on her breast, Jane felt sick to her stomach. She said she had a headache, as if she had memorized a Victorian manual written for skittish brides. He took her home and kept calling. She dreaded his calls and began to hate him, even though there was nothing hateful about him. He took her to see The Balcony and she spent the whole of the second act in the bathroom, like a Roman. Finally she was mean to him and he never called again. She felt a moment of guilt, then a curious blankness, and then relief.
It was to be Jane’s last summer in the suburbs. On graduation night her name was called to accept a $100 award for a mixture of virtues, including good citizenship, given regardless of race or religion. It was the only award so designated and Jane walked forward wondering what, if anything, she had done to deserve it or if she appeared so bland, so colorless that this award had been designed for somebody just like her. Miss Anderson handed her the piece of paper and said, They won’t love you if you’re good, only if you’re rich, and winked.
Jane spent the summer driving around, playing tennis, going to the beach, and fighting with her parents about finding a job. She said there were none. Her mother would say do you mean that in all of Manhattan and Long Island there are no jobs? Her father didn’t push her to look for a job the way her mother did. Jane was still taking a lot of pills, to maintain, as the diet doctor recommended. She was the thinnest person in his waiting room. She soaked up the sun as if it were food. Her tennis partners were two sixteen-year-old boys and she played both of them at the same time. She had never gotten so dark and it seemed like an achievement. Jane saw no one from school, but visited Jimmy in the city once or twice. She gave him some of her pills and they drove around Manhattan. She drove him home and she kept driving when no one was on the streets except the police. She drove aimlessly, thinking that the police must be suspicious of her. Expecting to be stopped, she drove slowly. Jane began imagining that her father wanted to kill her and she couldn’t sleep.
The days passed. The nights passed. Time disappeared as she stared at her reflection in window and in mirrors. She lay in the sun for hours with nothing on her mind, nothing that she could account for later. Or occasionally an image came to mind. She wrote in her diary: She was walking downstairs and I was at the bottom of the stairs and her hair was long and full. She looked old to me because her breasts were so big and she had a small waist. Maybe that was by comparison. I guess I was about seven and she was sixteen, she was just a little younger than I am now. Jane stopped writing and walked into the bathroom, visualizing the scene, looking at the metal toothbrush holder which used to be her mirror when she couldn’t see over the sink.