Peter Beagle - Tamsin

To the memory of Simon Beagle,

my father.

I can still hear you singing, Pop,

quietly, to yourself

shaving.

When I was really young, if there was one thing I wanted in the world, it was to be invisible. I used to sit in class and daydream about it, the way the other kids were daydreaming about being a movie star, being a big basketball player. The good part was, if I was invisible, Mister Cat—my cat—Mister Cat would always be able to see me, because invisible doesn’t mean anything to a cat. As I know better than anyone, but that comes later.

I used to let Sally see me, too—Sally’s my mother—in the daydream. Not all the time, not when I was mad at her, but mostly, because she’d have worried. But I really liked it best when it was just me and Mister Cat drifting along, just going wherever we felt like going, and nobody able to tell if my butt was too fat or if my skin had turned to molten lava that morning. And if I got my period in P.E., which I always used to, or if I said something dumb in class, nobody’d even notice. I used to sit there and imagine how great it would be, not ever to be noticed.

It’s different now. I’m different. I’m not that furious little girl daydreaming in class anymore. I don’t live on West Eighty-third Street, just off Columbus, in New York City—I live at Stourhead Farm in Dorset, England, with my mother and my stepfather, and I’m going to be nineteen in a couple of months. That’s how old my friend Tamsin was when she died, three hundred and thirteen years ago.

And I’m writing this book, or whatever it turns out to be, about what happened to all of us—Tamsin Willoughby and Sally and me, and Evan and the boys, too, and the cats.

It happened six years ago, when Sally and I first got here, but it seems a lot longer, because in a way it happened to someone else. I don’t really speak that person’s language anymore, and when I think about her, she embarrasses me sometimes, but I don’t want to forget her, I don’t ever want to pretend she never existed. So before I start forgetting, I have to get down exactly who she was, and exactly how she felt about everything. She was me a lot longer than I’ve been me so far.

We have the same name, Jennifer Gluckstein, but she hated that, too, and I don’t mind it so much. Not the Gluckstein—what she hated was the damn stupid, boring Jennifer. My father named me. He used to say that when he was a boy, nobody was called Jennifer except in a few books, and Jennifer Jones. He’d say, “But I always thought it was a really beautiful name, and it actually means Guenevere, like in King Arthur, and why should you care if everybody in the world today is named Jennifer, when they aren’t named Courtney or Ashleigh or Brittany?” His name is Nathan Gluckstein, but his stage name is Norris Groves, and everyone calls him that except Sally and me and his mother, my Grandma Paula. He’s an opera singer, a baritone. Not great, I always knew that, but pretty good—semifamous if you know baritones, which most people don’t. He’s always off working somewhere, and he’s on a couple of albums, and he gives recitals, too. He’s sung at Carnegie a couple of times. With other people, but still.

Meena says—Meena’s my best friend here in England—Meena says that if I’m really going to write a book, then I have to start at the beginning, go straight through to the end, and not ramble all over everywhere, the way I usually do. But where does anything begin? How far back do you have to go? For all I know, maybe everything starts with me rescuing Mister Cat, when I was eight and he was just a kitten, from a bunch of boys who were going to throw him off the roof of our building to see if he’d land on his feet. Maybe it really starts with Sally and Norris getting married, or meeting each other, or getting born . Or maybe I ought to go back three hundred years ago, back to Tamsin and Edric Davies… and him .

Well, it’s my book, so let’s say it all starts on the April afternoon when I came home from Gaynor Junior High and found Sally in the kitchen, which was strange right away, because it was a Tuesday. Sally’s a vocal coach and piano teacher—back in NewYork she worked with people who wanted to sing opera. A couple of her voice students were in the chorus at the Met, and I think there was one doing small parts with City Opera. She’s never had anyone famous, so she always had to teach piano, too, which she didn’t like nearly as much. The singers mostly lived downtown, and she went to their homes on different days, but all the piano people came to our place, and they always came on Thursday, the whole gang, one after another; she scheduled it like that on purpose, to get it over with. But Tuesdays Sally never got home until six at the earliest, so it was a little weird seeing her sitting at the kitchen table with her shoes off and one foot up on the step stool. She was eating a carrot, and she looked about eleven years old.

We don’t look anything alike, by the way. She’s tall, and she’s got this absolutely devastating combination of dark hair and blue eyes, and I don’t know if she’s actually beautiful , but she’s graceful , which I will never be in my life, that’s just something I know. In the last couple of years my skin’s gotten some better—because of the English climate, Sally says—and Meena’s taught me stuff to do with my hair, and I’m actually developing something that’s practically a shape. So there’s hope for me yet, but that’s not like being graceful. It doesn’t bother me. I can live with it.

“They fired you,” I said. “All of them, all at once. A detriment to their careers. We’re going to be selling T-shirts in Columbus Circle.”

Sally gave me that sideways look she never gave anyone else. She said, “Jenny. Have you been—you know—smoking that stuff?” She never would call boom or any drugs by their right names, it was always that stuff , and it used to drive me mad. I said, “No, I haven’t,” which happened to be true that afternoon. I said, “I was making a joke , for God’s sake. I don’t have to be booted to make jokes. Give me a break, all right?”

On any other day, we’d probably have gotten into a whole big fight over it, a dumb thing like that, and wound up with both of us hiding out in our rooms, too pissed and upset to eat dinner. We used to have a joke about the Gluckstein Diet—stay on it for two months and lose twenty pounds and your family. But this time Sally just put her head on one side and smiled at me, and then suddenly her eyes got huge and filled up, and she said, “Jenny, Jenny, Evan’s asked me to marry him.”

Well, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t been practicing for it. I can still close my eyes and see myself, lying in bed every night that whole year, holding Mister Cat and visualizing how she’d be when she told me, and how she’d expect me to be. Sometimes I’d see myself being so sweet and so happy for her, I’d never have gotten through it without puking; other times I thought I’d probably cry a little, and hug her, and ask if I could still call Norris “Daddy,” which I haven’t called him since I was three. And on the bad nights I’d plan to say something like, well, that’s cool, only it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other, because I’m off to Los Angeles to be a homeless person. Or a movie director, or a really famous call girl. I varied that one a lot.

But when it actually happened, I just looked at her and said, “Oh.” I didn’t even say it, exactly, it just came out—it wasn’t a word, it wasn’t anything, but it was what came out, after all that imagining. “Oh.” The story of my life.