The Evolution of Jane Read Free Page A

demonized, and forgotten Martha, off and on, for quite a few years. Standing in that airport, awkward and uncertain and impatient, I found it hard to believe that now, after so long, Martha could casually greet me, turn easily to the others, nonchalantly turn back again. I don't know what I thought would have been more appropriate. A massive stroke, perhaps.
    "We're like your little ducklings," I said. The sound of my voice depressed me. It was forced, lighthearted, one of those voices that have about them a faint echo of desperation.
    "Quack," said the oddly dressed woman, and she shook my hand warmly, another member of the flock.
    This is where I ought to tell you why Martha and I stopped being friends. The problem is, I don't know. There just came a time when she stopped calling, stopped returning my calls, stopped dead. I never knew what it was I'd done. I just knew that I'd lost my best friend. Or perhaps misplaced her, for here she was again, right in front of me.
    We climbed into a launch. The wind blew in our faces. The sea was everywhere. It filled every sense. I tried to think of something to say. Ahead, I could see the
Huxley,
a ninety-foot yacht built especially for ferrying tourists around the Galapagos.
    "Our boat is the same size as the
Beagle,
" I said.
    Martha nodded.
    "The
Beagle
carried seventy-four passengers for five years. Can you imagine all those people, all those years on such a small boat?"
    "Well," Martha said. "Actually, I forgot to tell you. The trip has been extended! The other sixty people are already on board!"
    Our latitude was zero degrees. Martha and I sat in a launch motoring toward a ninety-foot boat at zero degrees. Was that like starting out from zero? Perhaps we could begin all over again, squabbling happily, pretending the last few years had never occurred, ignoring the years of friendship before that. We could meet as if for the first time and proceed from there, from zero degrees latitude. But I saw immediately that Martha was far too familiar to meet for the first time.
    The sun was so bright it bleached the sky a pale, pale blue. I put on my sunglasses and watched Martha from behind them. She loved the group already, that was clear. I was sure that she liked all her groups, indulging them, her ducklings waddling all in a row behind her. Martha was not maternal, don't get me wrong. When she played with dolls as a little girl, they were never her babies—they were her devoted followers. I was sure that the tourists in every one of her groups were as devoted as her dolls. I always had been, and old habits die hard: Martha pushed her sunglasses up on her head, and I felt an awkward urge to do the same.
    We climbed a ladder from the
panga,
as Martha called the launch, to our boat. We were handed up by members of the crew. All of them then assembled in the main cabin, a lounge with a bar. There were ten crew members wearing dress-white uniforms, and as they shook hands and greeted us in smiling, animated Spanish, I thought that, unfriendly as the islands might be, the
Huxley,
at least, was going to be an amiable place. The cook, fat and bow-legged, wore a stiff, sparkling white chef jacket and a tall sparkling white chef hat that towered officially and absurdly above his white shorts and sneakers.
    We had been ferried to the boat in two
pangas,
and I had gone with the courtly old gentleman and the two older women, the one tall and mighty, the other soft, ripe, and risqué, whose names I instantly forgot, as well as the young couple, who both had the softest traces of Canadian accents, and the person of late middle age in deeply eccentric clothing who had quacked. In the other
panga,
there was the middle-aged couple and the guy who had advised me about seating in the plane along with his family. Although I was rather skeptical about men just at that point, I did note that he seemed to be single and was good-looking, though short. And I idly speculated what it would be like to have him as