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What About the Love Part?: Stories - Hardcover

Rosenfeld, Stephanie

 
9780345448231: What About the Love Part?: Stories
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0345448235 ISBN 13: 9780345448231
Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Infused with gleaming insight and exceptional grace, here is an affecting debut of ten loosely linked stories that speak volumes of truth about mothers and daughters, girlfriends, and the weird propensity of smart women to choose lousy boyfriends. What About the Love Part? charts the life of a woman named Abby through her challenges in dating, marriage, motherhood, divorce, friendship, and all the shadings in between. Stephanie Rosenfeld offers a delightful glimpse into a world that instantly looks familiar and invites us to feel at home.

In “Grasp Special Comb,” Abby, soon-to-be-divorced, is battling that elementary school scourge: head lice. While there are plenty of guides on how to deal with the vermin attacking her daughter, nothing warns about the effect it will have on her ability to deal with life’s other infestations. “Good for the Frog” and “To Sarah, Wherever You Are” are tributes to a childhood friend who helped Abby survive dating hell. From the boyfriend whose lovemaking spurs her to think “I could’ve gone to the gym” to the guy who tells her “I’m a hunter, and you’re the hunted,” Sarah’s support and insight into why Abby is drawn to such inappropriate men steers her back on track. In “Insects in Amber,” Abby wanders through a museum with her daughter, struck by all the ancient remains of animals in glass cases. Reminded of when she was a child and felt compelled to save everything, she wonders why she could never save relationships, save love this way.

Evocative, magnetic, and real, What About the Love Part? speaks to every woman’s search for a life rich in meaning, passion, and tenderness. Stephanie Rosenfeld captures it all with piercing clarity and a heartening wit.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephanie Rosenfeld has a B.A. from Wesleyan University and an M.F.A from the University of Massachusetts. Her writing has been published in The Missouri Review, which included Rosenfeld in its list of “Ten Fiction Writers to Watch,” Northwest Review, and The Massachusetts Review. She now lives in Salt Lake City with her partner and her twelve-year-old daughter. Her first novel, Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu will be published in Spring 2003.

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good for the frog

“i have to tell you,” Jasper said to me on the phone— Jasper’s the one I tell my boy troubles to. It’s a form of flirting, but I keep it carefully reined in, just to the point where he could see it if he were ever to look, but otherwise not. I won’t mention how long I’ve been doing this.

“He’s my dream guy,” I tell my sort-of boyfriend, Rob, when a glitch in Rob’s call-waiting reveals him to be talking to a woman named Emily, whom, he ends up telling me, he thinks he might like to have a life with, though he’s never actually gotten up the nerve to ask her on a date.

There’s been a string of Robs. I have to remember not to go out with anyone named that anymore, I found myself thinking. Actually, I dreamed that solution, but it seems as much worth trying as anything.

I try to think of what I’ll answer if Rob asks me why I said the thing about Jasper—I try to remember what I know about Jasper. He plays an inspired infield; he takes mysterious-looking photographs of houses; he looks right at you when you talk, with intense dark eyes, either brown or blue or green, I can’t remember.

He lives three thousand miles away, in San Francisco. Which is the way I like it, I always add to myself heartily, as if I’m telling a joke, working hard to entertain a lone party guest. Also, Jasper netted me a lot of points in the contest my best friend, Sarah, and I devised over the summer, when I was living at her house in Salt Lake City, to round out the long evenings of staying up late talking about her bad dates and listening to the messages left on her answering machine by men she didn’t want to talk to. We’d play them over and over, memorizing them, saying them in unison, screaming with laughter.

I worry that it’s immature to have this kind of a best friend at thirty-two.

“Are you sure you’re not a lesbian?” Rob asked me when I first met him. I was just back from Sarah’s, and it must have seemed strange to him that I talked about her so much.

“Listen,” I told him, “I wish. Believe me.” I stopped just before I told him not to take that personally, that it had nothing to do with the fact that he was phenomenally lousy in bed, and that what was usually going through my head when we’d make love was something like, Shit, I could’ve gone to the gym. What I’d really like—I didn’t tell him this, either—is to ask Sarah to be in my family.

Sarah’s and my contest was to see which one of us could become interested in or involved with the most inappropriate man, and Jasper was worth a lot—more, unbelievably, than the celibate fundamentalist born-again Christian I’d tried to convince myself I could change for; more, even—we had to check and recheck this—than the man Sarah was currently seeing, who was fifteen years older than she was, a Republican, married, and living with his wife and four children, two states away. But three thousand miles was worth a lot of points; so was “Probably Has a Girlfriend,” and “Isn’t Interested in Me.” We haven’t tallied Rob yet. Sarah hasn’t met him, but when she heard me describe him, she said maybe we’d have to invent some new categories.

“I have to tell you,” Jasper said. “This might sound harsh, but I think you have kind of a bad attitude toward men.” I calculated that he had probably just gotten my letter, in which I’d described a Swing Dance class I’d gone to the night before, and then segued to Rob, and then to Sarah, whom Jasper had never met. “I know this will sound weird,” I’d said in the letter, “but this summer it was like Sarah became my alter ego, the idea I carried around, and could comfort myself with, by imagining the two of us combined against the evil forces.”

I had been, I’d seen at once, the cutest one at the dance class. Not by my own standards, I tried to explain to Jasper. But you know what I’m talking about: the youngest. The fittest. The least plain. The most trophy-like, perhaps?

The class was made up mostly of single men and women. The women, like the men, were in their late thirties and early forties, generally unhip but pleasant looking. No one was talking to them.

First, a very short bald man about seventeen years older than me came over to where I was leaning against the wall waiting for class to start, introduced himself, and told me I was an attractive woman. He gave me a rundown of every dance event happening in the region and asked a lot of questions I was afraid to answer, because of the way they seemed to be pointing toward an invitation. Finally, just as I was considering drawing myself up to my full height to see if that would make the man go away, he nodded and moved on, and into his place stepped a red-faced guy, a little closer to my age, with a fresh stain on his shirt, who stuck out his hand and told me his name, and asked me if I had registered as a leader or a follower, and if I was a follower, would I be his partner when the dancing started?

I told Jasper that I’d begun to feel a little bit like a fire hydrant at a dog convention; I told him about the guy who rubbed his hand down my back when I rotated to his position during the lesson and said, “Are you feeling comfortable with this?” in a voice that made me glance around to see if anyone else had heard; and about the one who kept looking anxiously at the guy before him in the rotation, and who finally said, “God, he must be really good. All the women are, like, panting by the time they get to me. Is he? Really good?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I’d written. “But I left there feeling like . . . I’m sorry, but feeling like there’s something really wrong with men.

“I mean,” I’d continued lamely. “I’m not saying there is. But is there?”

“This will sound even weirder,” I’d written, and I told him about one weekend in the summer, when Sarah was out of town—how I went on a date with a man who actually said, “I’m a hunter, and you’re the hunted—I saw what I wanted and I went out and got it”; and how the next day I met a man in a coffee shop who told me he knew in his heart he was an artist, because he had always wanted to make a sculpture by wrapping a woman in cheesecloth and spraying her with a lot of spray starch; and how, shortly after he left, another man came over to my table and said, “You’ve got nice long legs,” and asked if I’d like to go out with him, and when I told him he might find me pretty hostile, had said, “Hey!” and thrown his hands in the air, “It’s not like I want to marry you or anything.”

“This is the weird part, I guess,” I wrote to Jasper, but then I sat there staring—not writing, just remembering: When I got home, I was shaking. I’d walked from one room of Sarah’s apartment to the next, breathing hard, my throat tight. I didn’t know where the dry, panicky feeling was coming from, but after a minute I realized what it reminded me of: I was remembering being five years old, one evening when my mother left me alone in the house with my sleeping baby brother while she went to pick up my father at the train station.

The radio had been on, to a classical station, when all of a sudden the music went away and loud, terrifying static filled the room. I didn’t know what to do—I started running around in circles, my hands in the air. I remember looking down as I ran, at...

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Verlag
Ballantine Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345448235
ISBN 13 
9780345448231
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
211
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