Before Everything - Hardcover

Redel, Victoria

 
9780735222571: Before Everything
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0735222576 ISBN 13: 9780735222571
Verlag: Viking, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

A group of lifetime friends gather together to confront life, love, and now mortality

“Everything you want a novel about life, death, and friendship to be—smart, moving, sweeping, poetic, stinging, just beautiful. I loved these women (and their men) and this elegy to their long-reaching bonds.”
—Dani Shapiro, author of Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

Before Everything is a celebration of friendship and love between a group of women who have known each another since they were girls. They’ve faced everything together, from youthful sprees and scrapes to mid-life turning points. Now, as Anna, the group’s trailblazer and brightest spark, enters hospice, they gather to do what they’ve always done—talk and laugh and help each other make choices and plans, this time in Anna’s rural Massachusetts home. Helen, Anna’s best friend and a celebrated painter, is about to remarry. The others face their own challenges—Caroline with her sister’s mental health crisis; Molly with a teenage daughter’s rebellion; Ming with her law practice—dilemmas with kids and work and love.

Before Everything is as funny as it is bittersweet, as the friends revel in the hilarious mistakes they’ve seen one another through, the secrets kept, and adventures shared. But now all sense of time has shifted, and the pattern of their lives together takes on new meaning. The novel offers a brilliant, emotionally charged portrait, deftly conveying the sweep of time over everyday lives, and showing how even in difficult endings, gifts can unfold. Above all it is an ode to friendship, and to how one person shapes the journeys of those around her.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Victoria Redel is the critically acclaimed author of four previous works of fiction and three collections of poetry. Her debut novel, Loverboy, was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times and won the Sister Mariella Gable Prize from Graywolf Press and the Forward Silver Literary Fiction Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and has contributed to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, O, the Oprah Magazine, Granta, One Story, and the Harvard Review. She received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

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1

Simply Said

On a late March day when you could taste spring's muddy tang, Anna was given results from the new scans. Anna, who had done it well—actually managed a couple get-well miracles—simply said, "No more."

Starfish

Anna didn't remember having come out to the living room, but here she was on the couch, and they are here—Helen, Ming, Caroline, Molly—her oldest friends. When had they arrived? Who'd told them? She'd let Helen's daily calls go to voice mail. But no, of course, she'd picked up thinking it was one of her kids. Instead it was Ming. She'd told Ming the whole shebang—from new recurrence to hospice. Didn't give any room for questions. "You'll tell the others for me."

"Don't." She'd shuddered when Ming said, "I'm coming. Of course, all of us are coming."

Now they were here, her gang since childhood, and it felt good to have them gathered in her vaulted living room. Caroline, telling a story about her older sister, Elise, who always has all the trouble. Caroline, describing another of Elise's episodes, but in her usual way, funny, a bit resigned but not sarcastic, never ironic with Caroline, instead always reserved hilarity.

How had they done all this getting here? Anna knew they'd driven—Great Barrington, Manhattan, Arlington, Larchmont—but all that moving seemed impossible. Leaving the house felt impossible. And then the skein of highways, tolls, turnoffs for gas, fishing out wallets from pocketbooks gaped open on the passenger seat. More than even the effort, it seemed the world with its unstoppable movement was an undoable tangle or an extinct language she'd once understood.

"Speak louder," Ming called. Ming was in the kitchen making soup. "I don't want to miss anything."

Anna followed the story. Or mostly she did. She laughed along. Helen laughing her big, optimistic whoop. Molly's eyes tearing up the way they do and her silent, gulpy laugh. And there was Caroline's hilarious way of gesticulating with flexible eyebrows as much as with hands that swooped and sliced the air.

They have done so much laughing, these five, they'd managed to laugh their way through even the unlaughable.

Funny, how even now it was the girl, not the woman, Anna saw, hearing Ming's three-trilled laugh in the kitchen—seeing Ming's compact teenage body, not the rounder, squat shape of middle age. And she still pictured Ming's hair as a gleaming, waist-length, dark curtain, not the professional salt-and-pepper layers trimmed every six weeks.

"Is this too much, Anna?" Helen asked, massaging her feet and legs.

She looked down the length of her body to Helen's thick fingers on her calf. Not a muscle left on her athletic legs. She'd always teased that Helen had the hands of a dockworker, not a painter. Georgia O'Keeffe's elegantly tapered fingers, those were a painter's hands. Still, Helen's hands felt good. It felt good to be touched. She wouldn't have guessed that she'd want to be touched but she did, and when Helen slowed, she stretched the other leg into Helen's lap, nudging it under Helen's hands. I'm going to take care of you, Helen mouthed. Helen, who needed always to make things better. Helen, who'd promised more than forty years ago to be Anna's best friend and had never faltered. She stretched to touch Helen's hand.

Molly tensed forward, rested her elbows on her knees. This was how Molly listened. Muscularly. Her whole body attentive. And, just as Anna knew she would, Molly cocked her head and lifted her dimpled chin toward Caroline's voice.

Anna hadn't been out here in the living room for days. There was almost too much to look at. Every wall covered with art she'd bought or been given. There, on the table, in a blue glass bowl, hundreds of tiny starfish collected at Point Reyes. There, mounted on the wall, the scrap-metal sculpture she'd bought in Provincetown. Clustered on a shelf, mason jars of cardinal feathers. Hours she'd spent selecting and arranging. All the tableaux of pretty—how had she ever done all that? All that going and doing. All that caring for beauty.

Anna closed her eyes. Listened. So entirely familiar the dips and lilts of her friends' voices. Even Caroline's pauses to find a more exact word were familiar. She couldn't explain it, the ease she felt. She wouldn't have imagined this. Part of the easiness was that she no longer had to try.

The Old Friends

End of sixth grade, they made it their official name. It was a joke one afternoon, but they liked the way it sounded. Permanent. The Old Friends. A declaration that anyone who came into their lives, maybe next year in seventh grade or later in high school, anyone else might be new and exciting, even counted as a friend for life, but not part of The Old Friends. Not like they're running to stencil T-shirts or roll out an official announcement and cheer. But they love the way it sounds. Like a rock band. Or a mystery series. This way, the five girls agree, it's just a fact. And ours forever.

Secret

Days earlier the eldest boy was alone in the room with her.

"Momma." He held her hand.

She nodded her head to show she was awake.

"Mom, I have a secret to tell you."

She smiled. He was her first child. Now a grown man. Oh, those years she'd spent unnecessarily worrying about Julian. Shy boy, the one to play at the corner of the school yard where the pavement yielded to weedy scrub, a boy poking sticks into dirt, serious and happy and unworried about kids whizzing past him. "Got you!" they screamed, tagging a shoulder, not his. At pickup she'd ached watching him happy alone. She'd wanted him to be in the center of the playing field calling teams, the one named captain.

Now here he was, a gentle man, still quiet, with a boy's stuttery laugh, still happiest in the woods foraging for black morels and ramps.

"Mom," Julian said again, "I have a secret."

She nodded.

"Can you open your eyes?"

She'd do anything for him. Her eyes were so heavy, nickel-lidded, heavier even than the given doses, heavy with some thickness she could feel weighted in her bones, in her blood.

She opened her eyes.

Beautiful. It was his father's face he wore, that halo of curly dark hair. The light was behind him. She saw the lace of the curtains and, through the curtains, the trees of the yard. Her lace, her window with her crystal hanging on filament and the yard where her three children had played. So slightly hers, any of it, anymore.

"Yes, baby."

He said, "We're having a baby."

There was a rush. Happiness left for the having. Even in these last days, she'd felt happiness, momentary, sometimes sharp almost like pain. Here, though, was the apex.

"We don't want anyone to know. Not yet. But we want you to know."

The baby of her first baby. She had loved the shape of him unborn inside of her so much that when she came to full term, she hoped for a long birth, wanting, she said, for each moment to be exceptional, hers to savor, and then the joke for years with friends was that after eighteen hours into her labor, curled into some jagged harbor of agony, she had begged for drugs. But at the end there was this child, perfect lips, hands, feet, and she was forever...

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Verlag
Viking
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0735222576
ISBN 13 
9780735222571
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
VIKING
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