Standard Deviation (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

Heiny, Katherine

 
9780804173162: Standard Deviation (Vintage Contemporaries)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0804173168 ISBN 13: 9780804173162
Verlag: Knopf Publishing Group, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

An uproarious novel from the celebrated author of Single, Carefree, Mellow about the challenges of a good marriage, the delight and heartache of raising children, and the irresistible temptation to wonder about the path not taken.

"Heart-piercing and, crucially, very funny." —The New York Times

When Graham Cavanaugh divorced his first wife it was to marry his girlfriend, Audra, a woman as irrepressible as she is spontaneous and fun. But, Graham learns, life with Audra can also be exhausting, constantly interrupted by chatty phone calls, picky-eater houseguests, and invitations to weddings of people he’s never met. Audra firmly believes that through the sheer force of her personality she can overcome the most socially challenging interactions, shepherding her son through awkward playdates and origami club, and even deciding to establish a friendship with Graham’s first wife, Elspeth.

Graham isn't sure he understands why Audra longs to be friends with the woman he divorced. After all, former spouses are hard to categorize—are they enemies, old flames, or just people you know really, really well? And as Graham and Audra share dinners, holidays, and late glasses of wine with his first wife he starts to wonder: How can anyone love two such different women? Did I make the right choice? Is there a right choice?

A hilarious and rueful debut novel of love, marriage, infidelity, and origami, Standard Deviation never deviates from the superb.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

KATHERINE HEINY is the author of Single, Carefree Mellow, a collection of short stories. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and many other places. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and children.

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Chapter | One

It had begun to seem to Graham, in this, the twelfth year of his second marriage, that he and his wife lived in parallel universes. And worse, it seemed his universe was lonely and arid, and hers was densely populated with armies of friends and acquaintances and other people he did not know.

Here they were grocery shopping in Fairway on a Saturday morning, a normal married thing to do together—­although, ­Graham could not help noticing, they were not doing it together. His wife, Audra, spent almost the whole time talking to people she knew—­it was like accompanying a visiting dignity of some sort, or maybe a presidential hopeful—­while he did the normal shopping.

First, in the produce section, they saw some woman with a baby in a stroller and Audra said, “Oh, hi! How are you? Are you going to that thing on Tuesday?” and the woman said, “I don’t know, because there’s that other meeting,” and Audra said, “I thought that got canceled,” and the woman said, “No, it’s still on,” and Audra said, “I wish they wouldn’t double-­book this stuff,” and the woman said, “I know,” and Audra said, “Well, if we don’t go, will everyone say bad things about us?” and the woman said, “Probably,” and it wasn’t that Graham wasn’t paying attention, it wasn’t that he missed the specifics—­it was that there were no specifics, that was the way they actually talked.

He took his time thumping melons and picking over grapefruit and was actually rewarded for being forced to linger by remembering to buy green grapes, which weren’t on the list.

“Who was that?” he asked when Audra rejoined him.

“Who?” Audra said. She was peering into the shopping cart.

“That woman you just said hello to.”

“Oh, she has a girl in Matthew’s class,” Audra said, selecting an apple. “And a five-­year-­old and a toddler and that baby, if you can believe it. But no more, because when the baby was only a week old, she had her husband get a vasectomy. Just made the arrangements and woke him that morning and said, ‘Guess what? You’ve got a doctor’s appointment.’ And he went!”

She took a bite of the apple. Audra was forty-­one—­a slender woman with a not-­quite-­perfectly oval face. In fact, Graham sometimes thought, all of Audra was not-­quite. Her eyes were not quite brown but had stalled at hazel, her lips were not quite full enough to be lush, her eyebrows were not quite high enough to be called arched, her chin-­length hair was not quite auburn, and its messy waves were not quite ringlets. She’d worn her hair this length for as long as Graham had known her. Apparently, if she cut it shorter, it curled up around her face and made her head look overly round, and if she grew it longer, the ends got too heavy and she had to have lots of layers put in. (This was marriage: you started out thinking you’d married the most interesting person in all the world and twelve years later, your head was full of useless hair facts. Of course, there was other stuff in there—­some milestones, having a baby, buying a house—­but that was basically the essence of it.) Audra was not quite beautiful but her liveliness kept her far away from plain.

One aisle over, in the breakfast cereals department, Audra suddenly stopped the cart. A young man behind them glared but Audra paid no attention.

“Oh! Hey!” Audra said. “Look! Hello! Hi! Whoa! How are you?” You would have thought she was greeting a whole soccer team instead of one lady in a T-shirt and jeans with her hair pulled back into a bun.

“Hello, Audra,” the lady said.

“So sorry I missed yoga this morning, Beverly!” Audra said. She cleared her throat. “Or, um, I mean, Maninder Prem. Sorry, again, I forgot that you go by your spiritual name now, right? Even in the supermarket?”

“You can call me Beverly,” the lady said neutrally. “But please remember that I have a no-­refund policy for late cancellations and no-­shows.”

“Of course,” Audra said. “It’s just that this morning we had a slight—­well, I don’t know if you would call it a family emergency, more of a family situation—­regarding my mother-­in-­law and an ancient jar of capers in her fridge and a trip to the hospital—­”

Audra’s tendency to lie could still shock Graham. His mother lived in Ohio, and as far as he knew, she was perfectly healthy, although she did have a habit of leaving things in the refrigerator for a terrifyingly long time.

“I’m sorry to hear that—­” Beverly said. There seemed to be more to say but she wasn’t saying it.

“Yes—­” Audra said. There seemed to be more for her to say, too, but she wasn’t saying it, either. Finally, she made a fluttery little gesture and said, “Beverly, this is my husband, Graham. Graham, this is my yoga teacher, Beverly.”

Graham smiled politely and shook hands with Beverly, who looked him up and down, her eyelids flickering. He was fifteen years older than Audra and he could tell that Beverly was thinking, Oh, it’s one of those marriages. Graham wanted to tell her that it wasn’t one of those marriages, that his relationship with Audra was so special and unique even he didn’t know what it was, but he’d given up on trying to communicate that long ago. He was tall and in good shape, with the hair at his temples just starting to go gray, but he suddenly felt tempted to stand up straighter. (Was it just Graham or was Beverly awfully judgmental, especially for a yoga teacher?)

“So anyway,” Audra said, “see you next week, Beverly.”

They moved on, and as soon as they went around the corner and out of sight, Audra said, “I completely forgot about yoga this morning!” as though that hadn’t been as obvious as a bumper sticker.

“I think Beverly could tell that,” Graham said.

Audra sighed. “Maybe so. I don’t know why I ever thought yoga class early on a Saturday morning was such a good idea. I guess I must have been feeling particularly empowered when I signed up.”

They saw their appliance repairman, Brady Shannon, in the ice cream aisle, and Graham knew that Audra would have an extralong talk with Brady because she believed that if you were very, very nice to repairmen, they responded very, very quickly the next time you needed something repaired. The fact that this theory had proved very, very untrue had not shaken her belief in the practice.

“Brady Shannon!” Audra exclaimed.

“Well, hello, Ms. Daltry, Mr. Cavanaugh,” Brady said. He was a slight, balding man wearing a gray sweat suit and those black padded kneepads that skateboarders wear. Every time Graham had seen him, Brady was wearing those kneepads, presumably because he was always having to get down and crawl around people’s refrigerators and washing machines.

“I was thinking of you just this morning,” Audra said. “In fact, I think of you every morning when I get in the shower!” Brady had recently fixed their shower head. “I think, This feels heavenly and I owe it all to Brady Shannon!”

Brady smirked at Audra and rocked a little on the balls of his feet.

Not for the first time, Graham wondered if there was some sort of processing...

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Verlag
Knopf Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804173168
ISBN 13 
9780804173162
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
319
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
49078
Deutschland

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