As time went by, Jane became aware that her daughter could enrage her so much that she said and did things she would later regret bitterly. As it happened, these things were often said or done just when Julie was about to be left with her babysitter, or when Jane was going away for several days, which meant that she remained in a state of anguished self-reproach until she could once more hug her daughter tight and have the chance to make it up to her. On her way home from literary events and book readings, she would jump into taxis, zigzag across the airport to avoid business travelers and overweight tourists from the Midwest, drive all the way home in the left-hand lane on the highway, taking the corner of Spooner Street and Regent Street on screaming tires—only to be told by Greg that Julie had just fallen asleep.
Julie was eleven when Jane realized that one of her rather slim novels was receiving unexpectedly enthusiastic attention. Greg called it a great breakthrough, but that was of course an exaggeration. The Age of Plenitude was in every way as demanding as her earlier books and as focused on language. Even so, it sold more copies than all her previous titles put together. Her editor said that was because it was so fucking excellent. Jane thought, although she kept it strictly to herself, that the cover had done the trick: it showed a woman on a beach just before the trend that placed woman-on-a-beach images in a special category of successful cover designs. She celebrated Greg’s fortieth birthday, luckily more than a year before her own, by buying him an eighteen-foot fishing boat, a trailer, and all available accessories for sport fishing. She joined him on trips a couple of times because she wanted to experience his happiness at being on board next to a cooler stocked with bottles of beer and an echo sounder display of flickering pixels, which might or might not be fish. Greg’s most faithful companion on fishing trips was none other than Tom Belotti, Jane’s admirer when they were at school. Tom had also moved to Madison and eventually become an especially good friend to both of them. He had married a Russian nurse with nearly transparent teeth, who could look about seventeen one moment and fifty-five the next. You were asked to believe a backstory about Vladlena (what joy, just to say her name…) that involved a wild party at the Russian embassy and a love that conquered every barrier of language and culture placed in its way. This story was about as credible as young Tom’s tale about the white shark that lived in the filter system of the public swimming pool in Brookfield and was let out for exercise a couple of times a year. Tom had spotted Vladlena for the first time in an online catalog of Russian women wanting to marry. But they seemed happy together.
The unexpected success of Jane’s latest book spurred her on. She wanted to work harder, write more and faster, speed up her publication rate, say yes to invitations, and generally carry on doing whatever was needed to make a name for herself because there seemed to be a genuine interest in what she was writing—she no longer felt that to be a writer meant holing up in some dark cubbyhole and making stuff up. On the days she didn’t teach at the university or attend some event out of town, she typed away on a new novel. She could hear when Julie came through the door after school, but more and more often just called out a greeting from her upstairs study; the front door seemed to open in the middle of the most important sentence so far. During the frenetic hours before Greg came home, her conscience was always on its way to Julie. She had been an only child herself and knew just what the tense quietness downstairs meant.
One Thursday at the beginning of May, Jane felt she needed to meet Julie after school and spend a few hours with her before she had to go to the weekly hour of piano playing with Mrs. Gurzky (this was a Greg project). Jane’s longing had an urgency she hadn’t felt since Julie was very young. She must save what she had written and hurry out. Later, this appeared to be a portent, a sign so unmistakable that, in her capacity as creative writing instructor, she would have called it foreshadowing.
Probably, her longing had sprung from three recent events. For one thing, a few days earlier, Julie had preferred to be driven to a friend’s house rather than going with her mother to buy a new swimsuit, a choice Jane saw as confirmation of her daughter’s growing independence. Secondly, Jane was off to the Newberry Seminar in Chicago the following day, and had to spend several days without seeing Julie. Thirdly, she had drunk so much coffee throughout the morning that her brain seemed to lay exposed and trembling, like a dish of jelly on a picnic table.
In the handout on “Safe Delivery and Collection,” parents were told to park behind the tall fence around the yard on the western side of the school. However, Julie would come out through the main entrance on the opposite side of the building. Jane squeezed the car up against the curb on Chadbourne Avenue, along with other parents who either felt like irresponsible slobs or actually were. While she waited in the car for the clock to show 2:37 pm, the eccentric end point of the school day at Randall Elementary, she was upset with herself for not collecting Julie more often. It was always Greg who played with her and Jane who helped with dull homework; Greg who joined in ball games and Jane who cooked complicated Mediterranean food with a glass of Chablis in her hand. She couldn’t understand why she hadn’t taken pleasure in things like sitting on the floor with Julie and fussing with the nylon hair, bristling with static electricity, of a small, plastic pony.
When Julie and her friends came out of school, Jane was brimming with coffee-induced expectation. She had rolled down the car window but managed to hold back from shouting. This was how Julie looked when she didn’t know her mother was watching her: whispering and whooping, dancing about in tight jeans, knock-kneed when she giggled. Jane recalled this moment of childhood: the taste of eraser in her mouth, multicolored nylon bags dangling from thin shoulders, the way one had to swing one’s hair out of the way of the straps, the yelling and squeaking of sneakers on a stone floor becoming a mass of sound that built behind her, higher and higher until she was ejected through the door and the sound turned into rustling in the treetops.
They drove along Lake Monona. Julie was in the back. No one seems to know exactly when a child is old enough to sit in front. The grass was green along the water’s edge but the bleakness of winter lingered in the lake and the sky above. Julie was deep into one of her long tales about an episode from her school day, something Amy had said to Joe just at the moment Joe was tipping forward and back on his chair so that the teacher was just… and he just, and then she just… Jane watched in the mirror as the eagerness to tell bubbled in the corners of Julie’s mouth, nodded and agreed when it seemed appropriate, but was aware that, in her head, she was inside the scene she had been working on before leaving her study.
“Mom?”
Jane often reflected on how she would like to have about three hours to surface after being immersed in her fictions, something like the pressure equalization that divers need.
“Mom?”
“Yes?”
“Where are we going?”
“I thought it might be a good idea to go look for that swimsuit.”
“OK. But Dad and I have already been looking online.”
She switched on the blinker with excessive force as she changed lanes.
“So, what’s the upshot? Do you need a swimsuit or don’t you?”
Julie didn’t answer for a while, then: “I don’t.”
“Terrific!”