Built in a Day - Softcover

Rinehart, Steven

Softcover

ISBN 10: 038549856X ISBN 13: 9780385498562

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004

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Acclaimed author of the story collection Kick in the Head Steven Rinehart’s debut novel is filled to the brim with his characteristic wry humor, unflinching truth, and raw emotional power.

Built in a Day is the story of an over-educated underachiever whose oath to clean up his act is put to the ultimate test when the world around him crumbles into a state of disrepair. Left in charge of his late wife’s son and a sultry 15-year-old pregnant orphan named Jule, 32-year-old Andrew Bergman has to find the will and strength to rise to the absurd challenge of becoming a stepfather and -grandfather in the course of a few short months. Darkly hysterical and deeply stirring, Built in a Day is an affecting examination of love, responsibility, and the resilience it takes to pick up the pieces.

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�ber die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steven Rinehart is the recipient of an NEA grant and a Michener Fellowship. His collection of short stories, Kick in the Head, was published by Doubleday in 2000, and his work has appeared in a variety of magazines, including Harper’s and GQ. He lives in New York City.

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Acclaimed author of the story collection Kick in the Head Steven Rinehart's debut novel is filled to the brim with his characteristic wry humor, unflinching truth, and raw emotional power.
Built in a Day is the story of an over-educated underachiever whose oath to clean up his act is put to the ultimate test when the world around him crumbles into a state of disrepair. Left in charge of his late wife's son and a sultry 15-year-old pregnant orphan named Jule, 32-year-old Andrew Bergman has to find the will and strength to rise to the absurd challenge of becoming a stepfather and -grandfather in the course of a few short months. Darkly hysterical and deeply stirring, Built in a Day is an affecting examination of love, responsibility, and the resilience it takes to pick up the pieces.

Aus dem Klappentext

In acclaimed story writer Steven Rinehart s darkly funny debut novel, an overeducated underachiever tries to become a responsible father to his twin teenage stepsons and a house full of wounded misfits.

At thirty-two, Andrew is a recovering alcoholic, a poetry workshop dropout, and a failed Starbucks barista. He has an on-again, off-again relationship with Isabel, the single mother of teenage twin sons so protective that when Andrew begins to treat Isabel badly, they offer him $4,000 to end the relationship. But Andrew, lonely, at loose ends, and still unemployed after a brief, unsuccessful stint as a sign painter, manages to work his way back into Isabel s good graces and gain the tentative acceptance of her sons and the beautiful young orphan, Julie, who lives with them. Isabel and Andrew get married and, for the first time in a long time, things fall into place for Andrew. Isabel gets him a cushy, if slightly shady, job at Teen Scene, a local outreach center, and the teens in his own household come to appreciate his presence. When the unthinkable happens, Andrew finds himself the unlikely force trying to hold the survivors together.

Rinehart brings his strong, simple style and wry humor to the tale of a young man who is thrust, unready, into a position of fearful responsibility. As Andrew struggles to cope with his unusual family and to make sense of his increasingly bizarre job, Rinehart proves himself to be a novelist of extraordinary power and insight, a writer reminiscent of such modern masters as Richard Ford and Raymond Carver.

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1
Isabel and I got married in her backyard, on a cold fall day under a tent that had once had banners sewn on it advertising cheap tequila and now just showed the outlines of the letters "Santa Rosa."

All the guests were from her side; a couple of her physical therapy patients were there, along with her boys, Russ and Alex, Russ's beautiful girlfriend Jule, big old Rosie, and a few others I couldn't really place. We had one very expensive bottle of champagne that we managed to hit every glass with, even mine, although I didn't drink it, I just toasted Russ's bang-up job as best man and carried it around the tent afterward. At that point I had been sober for a year and was still being extra cautious.

"Assembled guests," Russ had said, his teenage voice artificially grave. All of us stood with our glasses and listened. Russ was only fourteen but he had that effect on people.

"It falls upon me to say a few words about the couple before you. First, it's been a long road, a very long road. Many of us thought it was too long . . ." A few of us smiled; others nodded. I looked at Isabel next to me but she was staring at her son.

". . . but they persevered." He stumbled on that a bit and this clearly irritated him. Isabel's hand tightened on mine.

"They hung in there and now they stand before us, husband and wife. Please join me in saluting them."

A cheer rose up from the happy little bunch. One of Izzie's physical therapy patients even said Huzzah. The other, a guy named Carl, made a big show of tilting his plastic champagne glass vertically above his mouth and shaking the last drops off the lip.

"I should have been a scientist or a chemist," Carl said to me later, both of us hovering near the edge of the tent. Izzie was dancing with the younger twin, Alex, next to Russ and Jule. Rosie was loaded and had dragged some stranger out onto the parquet.

"My best class in high school was Advanced Chemistry," he said. "Do you remember oxidation-reduction reactions? I could do those in my sleep."

I'd been bored by advanced-placement chem and had kept myself occupied by cheating on my yields while designing elaborate water pipes. At that point in my life my questionable morals had gotten me passed over for valedictorian and kicked out of the Honor Society and I'd be damned if I was going to weigh out crystals and read thermometers like it meant something. Even now, at thirty-two, it seemed ridiculous.

"Doesn't high school seem like an old, really long movie you once saw?" I said. "Like The French Connection or Barry Lyndon?"

"Did The French Connection have Telly Savalas?" he asked. "Do you remember him, Telly Savalas?"

"Yes, I do. I don't think he was in it but I remember him. Wet lips, right? Sort of bags under his eyes?"

He nodded. "And bald as a cue ball," he said, as I knew he would.

"I don't think so," I said. "Not the way I remember him, anyway."

Carl looked as if he hadn't heard me right. "I'm sure he was bald," he said. "That's what I remember most."

"I bet we're just mixing up two different actors. I'm usually wrong about stuff like this, so let's just go with bald."

But he couldn't leave it alone. He just waded right back in. "You know, he had that Popsicle all the time." He began to look distressed and searched the tent for someone to back him up, but there was no one handy.

"Definitely the guy," I said, "but it was a lollipop, I think, not a Popsicle. Lollipop with the little white stick always wagging back and forth. And an Afro. A big natural with a comb in the side."

He seemed to squeak a little. "I think that was someone on Baretta," he said.

"You're right," I said. "I bet it was. And he always said, 'Who loves ya, baby?' "

Now he was wringing his hands. His ailment had been a kind of psychosomatic paralysis and he'd gotten attached to Isabel at some point in the eight weeks she pumped his legs up and down and made him walk between the parallel bars.

"That's him, but he's bald, I swear," he said. "It's a trademark." Just then Isabel showed up and took my arm.

"What's up?" she said. Her grip on the sharp bone of my elbow was something she must have learned as part of her training.

"Carl and I were reminiscing about high school," I said. "He remembers it a lot better than I do."

"Was Telly Savalas bald?" he asked Isabel, slightly out of breath. "He was, wasn't he?"

"I think so," she said.

"And white, right?"

"Definitely," she said. "Excuse us, Carl, we've got to do a few things." She steered us away and toward the card table holding what was left of the cheap cake.

"Honey," I said. "He was asking for it. You weren't there, he was really being awful."

"Like last time?"

At the engagement party I'd convinced him that vanilla was an element, on the periodic table and everything.

"I'm worried about Russ," I said.

"Baloney," she said. "Don't change the subject."

"Okay, I'm not worried about him but I'm afraid he's growing up too fast." This was true. A lot of things about Russ worried me, and the fact that he might catch up and pass me was somehow not a ridiculous thought. That toast was typical. That kid had his shit together way too much for fourteen.

Isabel took the champagne glass out of my hand and sniffed it.

"Still there," I said. "Still smells just as awful."

"I know we don't say things like this but I'm crazier than ever about you," she said. "It's our wedding so I thought I'd take a chance and get mushy."

"Oh, Izzie," I said. "You can say whatever you want anytime you want. I will too."

"You will?"

"I'll try." I meant it, even though I'd proposed to her in tears, blubbering, practically speechless. Afterward I'd laid my head in her lap and hiccuped, feeling as if I'd been plucked from the surf by a helicopter and deposited in a soggy pile on the beach.

Under the tent Isabel was looking at me the same way she had that day.

"So try now," she said. "Say something."

"Okay," I said. "I'm absolutely nothing without you. I'm less than nothing. My whole life begins today."

"Hmm," she said. "Not really romantic for a wedding." But she had colored a bit, so I was not far off. "Keep going."

I could tell I was scrunching up my face, like a child squeezing out the answer to his mother's possibly entrapping question about his whereabouts or the smoky odor lingering around his clothes.

"When you're not around I think for a second that my life hasn't changed, and that I can go back to the way I was. Then I realize that Holy Shit you aren't around and I panic a little and think, Why isn't she around? Where is she? So I go find you or find something that reminds me of you." I licked my lips, they had gone dry.

All of it was true--what I usually did if I couldn't get to her was look for Alex, twenty minutes the baby of the family, but sometimes it seemed like twenty years. The boys were fraternal twins--Russ stocky and handsome, Alex thin and boyish. I'd find Alex and we'd play Nintendo or backgammon or throw a football around until I got it out of my system.

She didn't say anything for a...