Martha and all her friends as wintry apparitions. She took on the inevitability of a season. I still thought about the family feud now and then. I associated that with Martha, too, of course. But each year the feud receded further into that mysterious and obscure adult realm to which I was not admitted. It shimmered there and held for me a gorgeousness, like smoking cigars or drinking whiskey, that I preferred to admire from afar.
6
O N THE THIRD MORNING of the voyage of the
Thomas H. Huxley,
Gloria and I got out of bed before anyone else in the group, and we stood on deck shivering, waiting for the sun to rise. We had done this both days before. The wildlife was almost absurd, a child's drawing: sharks in the sea, gulls in the air. Sea lions leapt through the water. Green turtles floated past the bow. Boobies dropped to the water in heavy, perfect dives. Frigates coasted. Fish sparkled.
We watched the birds and the beasts in a kind of daze.
"I don't know where to look first," she said.
Visitors to the Galapagos always report on dolphins frolicking alongside their boat, and Gloria patiently scouted for them. We had not seen any yet, but we spent those early mornings very pleasantly nonetheless, leaning over the rail, talking. There was a great deal to talk about. In our two and a half days, we had already visited four islands and snorkeled on two dark, rocky shores. Gloria could somehow remember on which island each species had been encountered, and had also managed to read three books. I myself was in a feverish delirium of information.
As the sky began to brighten, Martha walked toward Gloria and me and gave a chummy little salute. I watched her, the way she kind of strutted, remembering when we were children, when we were friends.
How do you begin to describe a friendship? Well, let's see: there's mundane, habitual, urgent intimacy. And it's for no reason. I wanted to ask Martha right then why she had stopped being my friend. I wanted to ask her if she would be my friend again. Of course I could do neither. One had one's pride. Anyway, how could she explain the end of something that itself had no explanation?
"What is the evolutionary reason for friendship?" I said to her.
"Good morning to you, too, Jane," she said, laughing. "And evolution doesn't have reasons. It's opportunistic."
I'm sure she knew what I meant, though.
Martha looked up at the frigate birds that hovered above the boat, their deflated scarlet throat sacs just visible in the new sunlight. She smiled at the birds, magnificent black cutouts against the sky, their pointed wings enormous and absolutely still, their long tails forked and stiff in the breeze.
"They don't look like scavengers, do they?" she said.
She climbed the ladder to the top deck to retrieve the wet suit she had hung up there to dry.
I thought, You're very stupid, Martha. I am excellent company. See what a fine time I'm having with Gloria? And all around me on this boat are new friends. Well, perhaps not friends. Friendship might indeed be a deviant, a joke of nature, I thought, when compared with this, the perfect adaptation—camaraderie.
"Darwin had an anthropomorphic side," Gloria continued. She was now reading a biography of Darwin by an Englishwoman named Janet Browne. Her tone was therefore particularly personal and knowing. "Darwin blurred the distinction between man and animal in a charming, gentlemanly, sentimental way," she said. "That's obviously one of the things that helped him overcome the cultural prejudice against an idea like evolution. The English do like their pets."
I wonder if that identification with the animal world was one of the things that drew me to Darwin when I was a child. Perhaps because we are so close to the ground when we are young, because we are face to face with the family dog, we recognize our common humanity, so to speak. When I was five, I told Jennifer of Jennifer Circle, the odious daughter of the contractor who developed the
6
O N THE THIRD MORNING of the voyage of the
Thomas H. Huxley,
Gloria and I got out of bed before anyone else in the group, and we stood on deck shivering, waiting for the sun to rise. We had done this both days before. The wildlife was almost absurd, a child's drawing: sharks in the sea, gulls in the air. Sea lions leapt through the water. Green turtles floated past the bow. Boobies dropped to the water in heavy, perfect dives. Frigates coasted. Fish sparkled.
We watched the birds and the beasts in a kind of daze.
"I don't know where to look first," she said.
Visitors to the Galapagos always report on dolphins frolicking alongside their boat, and Gloria patiently scouted for them. We had not seen any yet, but we spent those early mornings very pleasantly nonetheless, leaning over the rail, talking. There was a great deal to talk about. In our two and a half days, we had already visited four islands and snorkeled on two dark, rocky shores. Gloria could somehow remember on which island each species had been encountered, and had also managed to read three books. I myself was in a feverish delirium of information.
As the sky began to brighten, Martha walked toward Gloria and me and gave a chummy little salute. I watched her, the way she kind of strutted, remembering when we were children, when we were friends.
How do you begin to describe a friendship? Well, let's see: there's mundane, habitual, urgent intimacy. And it's for no reason. I wanted to ask Martha right then why she had stopped being my friend. I wanted to ask her if she would be my friend again. Of course I could do neither. One had one's pride. Anyway, how could she explain the end of something that itself had no explanation?
"What is the evolutionary reason for friendship?" I said to her.
"Good morning to you, too, Jane," she said, laughing. "And evolution doesn't have reasons. It's opportunistic."
I'm sure she knew what I meant, though.
Martha looked up at the frigate birds that hovered above the boat, their deflated scarlet throat sacs just visible in the new sunlight. She smiled at the birds, magnificent black cutouts against the sky, their pointed wings enormous and absolutely still, their long tails forked and stiff in the breeze.
"They don't look like scavengers, do they?" she said.
She climbed the ladder to the top deck to retrieve the wet suit she had hung up there to dry.
I thought, You're very stupid, Martha. I am excellent company. See what a fine time I'm having with Gloria? And all around me on this boat are new friends. Well, perhaps not friends. Friendship might indeed be a deviant, a joke of nature, I thought, when compared with this, the perfect adaptation—camaraderie.
"Darwin had an anthropomorphic side," Gloria continued. She was now reading a biography of Darwin by an Englishwoman named Janet Browne. Her tone was therefore particularly personal and knowing. "Darwin blurred the distinction between man and animal in a charming, gentlemanly, sentimental way," she said. "That's obviously one of the things that helped him overcome the cultural prejudice against an idea like evolution. The English do like their pets."
I wonder if that identification with the animal world was one of the things that drew me to Darwin when I was a child. Perhaps because we are so close to the ground when we are young, because we are face to face with the family dog, we recognize our common humanity, so to speak. When I was five, I told Jennifer of Jennifer Circle, the odious daughter of the contractor who developed the
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