Verwandte Artikel zu What To Keep

What To Keep - Softcover

Cline, Rachel

 
9780812971798: What To Keep
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812971795 ISBN 13: 9780812971798
Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

A three-part novel follows Denny Roman's observations about family and parenting at the ages of twelve, twenty-six, and thirty-six, crossroads during which she struggles with her divorced parents' neglect, packs childhood possessions at a critical moment in her career, and discovers a runaway on her doorstep. A first novel. Reader's Guide included. Reprint. 16,000 first printing.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

RACHEL CLINE spent almost a decade in Los Angeles, writing screenplays and teaching at USC. She now lives in Brooklyn.


From the Hardcover edition.

Aus dem Klappentext

Denny Roman at twelve: a midwestern girl with a clueless family, a bit part in the school play, a crush on the drama teacher, and concerns about frontal development. Her mother and father, divorced neuroscientists, are raising her with benign neglect. The family is virtually run by an agoraphobe named Maureen, who has a taxi fleet and a superorganized and compassionate method of managing other people s lives, especially Denny s.

Denny Roman at twenty-six: jets home from Hollywood for the weekend and lands in the marital minefield of her mother and stepfather s imminent relocation to New York. She has to pack up her childhood possessions in forty-eight hours before returning to L.A. for a big audition with Robert Altman. She s supposed to be deciding what to keep, but she s worried about what to wear. In a deranged moment, she kisses her stepfather. On the lips.

Denny Roman at thirty-six: A playwright on the eve of her first Off-Broadway production and once again living within sparring distance of her mother, she comes home from rehearsal one afternoon and finds a thirteen-year- old boy on her doorstep: Luke, the son of Maureen and a Mauritanian refugee cabdriver. Bewildered by his mother s recent death, Luke is looking for a place where he might fit. Will Denny keep him in New York? Will she get any help from Sean an actor whose good looks may be all there is to him? Will she be reconciled with her mother at long last?

What to Keep looks into the lives of Denny Roman, her mother, her father, her stepfather, and her surrogate mother all practicing variations on the theme parent but none of them quite done being children themselves. Bubbling with sly humor and psychological insight, their story holds out a refreshingly flexible and realistic model of what a good family whether created by nature or chance or both can consist of.


From the Hardcover edition.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

Lily wakes up with a cupcake hovering before her eyes. Denny holds it there, has held it there for a while in fact, waiting for her mother to (1) wake up, (2) make a wish, and (3) blow out the candle. Not so hard, you would think, but it is for Lily. She stares blankly at the tiny flame, and Denny, who at twelve and a half is nearly too old for this sort of thing, is forced to intervene. "Mom," she says, dropping the word into a second, disappointed syllable as Lily's eyes blink, again. "Mom, make a wish. Happy birthday."

Ordinarily, Lily would be the one waking Denny up, so Denny is surprised to find her mother as hard to retrieve from sleep as she is. But that's just how it is. Since her parents' split two years ago, Denny has been in charge of their domestic reality-the here and now of social perception: what other kids' parents are worrying about, what's worth watching on TV (Little House), whether or not there is lipstick on Lily's teeth, and when it's safe to turn left on Broad Street. In return, Lily makes money, buys groceries (by proxy, but more on that later), drives the car, and tells Denny when to turn off the TV.

Lily and Denny Roman live in Bexley, an amiable suburb of Columbus. Unlike the way most suburbs relate to their cities, Columbus has grown around Bexley in concentric rings of shopping centers, parks, hospitals, universities, institutes, and bedroom communities. Every ten years or so, the latest ring seems to degrade into slum. Bexley itself is only a mile or so from the old, original downtown (and state capitol), but it somehow retains its beauty and its property values. Its houses are large, its schools are excellent, and its trees are immense, forming a canopy over the broad streets. Some of the streets are so wide they have their own grassy median. It's a very old suburb but it has a faint theme: the street names have a Brittanic sound, and many of the houses are distinctly manorial. The Romans' house at 2424 Sherwood Road-just two blocks from Main Street-lacks cupolas and sleeping porches and isn't as large as many in the neighborhood, but it isn't small, either. It is built of gray clapboard with white trim, black shutters, and one little dormer window, on the third floor, looking out at the vast Ohio buckeye tree in the front yard. It is a fine house, built in 1907, and has never needed major repairs.

As Lily rubs her eyes and fumbles for her glasses, Denny nibbles at the pink-frosted cupcake. It's a Hostess Sno Ball, a coconut-flecked demi-globe of pink marshmallow that surrounds a wad of chocolate cake. Inside the cake is a tiny inner bolus of something called "creme." In short, it's a food that would give pause to almost anyone over the age of sixteen.

"Perhaps a Sno Ball is not the perfect breakfast food?" asks Lily.

Denny shrugs but halts her attempt to tear off a flag of marshmallow flesh. She stares at the cupcake, replacing it on the plate with its twin as Lily blunders into the bathroom, now awake to the day.

"They're like tits," says Denny, though Lily can't hear her with the shower running. It's not a remark likely to reach Lily's sense of humor, anyway. Denny picks up the two cupcakes and holds them, breastwise, up to her own largely featureless chest. She steps to the mirror as Lily sticks her head out of the bathroom to ask something that she instantly forgets at the sight of Denny's pantomime.

"Look, I developed!" says her daughter, slyly.

"I see that," Lily replies with a nod. The doorbell rings.

Denny raises her eyebrows.

"I have no idea," says Lily.

Denny goes to the bedroom window and looks down. "It's Dad." She's still holding her cupcakes at the ready.

"Go offer him a Sno Ball," says Lily. "And, for God's sake, don't tell him where it's been." This cracks Denny up. Lily returns to the bathroom, not sure she was making a joke. She looks at herself in the steaming mirror and remembers that she has a nine a.m. haircut appointment at Lazarus, downtown. For most of her life, Lily has studiously ignored her appearance-she was pretty enough in her teenage years to take it for granted that she didn't have to fuss. However, since turning forty she finds herself taking a more careful look: She is far too pale, and verging on bony; her wispy blond hair is neither long nor short, and the layered cut that-if properly blown dry-was supposed to look like a less trashy version of Farrah Fawcett's has never been, and will never be, properly blown dry. Moreover, her eyeglasses have worn a pair of purple indentations into the sides of her nose and a formerly inoffensive beauty mark on her cheek has become, decisively and seemingly overnight, a mole.

Denny opens the front door for her father, who looms in the doorway. Charles is tall and slender and mostly bald, prematurely so. His eyes are light brown and crinkly but so far above Denny most of the time that she feels like she never sees them. He wears wire-rimmed glasses but not the John Lennon kind. His are rectangular. Usually he wears turtlenecks under his tweeds, but today he is wearing a shirt and tie. Denny knows he was once physically close to her, she even vaguely remembers it. Now he looks down at her and forgets to smile.

"Mom's in the shower," says Denny. "Want a Sno Ball?"

"Isn't she going to Chicago today?" asks her father.

What Denny doesn't know, and Lily doesn't remember, is that Lily is supposed to go to Chicago today, on her birthday, because it's also the annual meeting of the AAN (American Academy of Neurology) and Maureen paid Lily's $500 deposit long ago. The whole point of having someone else manage this type of thing for you is so that you don't forget, even if it is your forty-first birthday and you are feeling strangely petulant and vulnerable. Unfortunately, sometimes even Maureen's systems break down.

Maureen is Lily's gateway to the world. In some respects, Maureen is Denny's erstwhile Dad-the second opinion that makes being a single mother bearable for Lily. Maureen is a small business that began four years ago as an answering service and grew with the times. Mostly, she works for doctors (her father was an endocrinologist). Now she not only fields calls but acts as a travel agent, bookkeeper, personal shopper, UPS drop and pickup site, contract post office, appointment secretary, and dispatcher of taxis, ambulances, and messengers. Maureen does not do pet care. Maureen and Lily sometimes speak several times a day, as do Maureen and Denny, as do Maureen and Charles (another client). No one really grasps the full extent of Maureen's involvement in this stubby little former family, except Maureen and, maybe, Denny.

"No one else in my class has a Maureen. Why not?" Denny asked, when she was eight.

"Well, there is no one else like Maureen, Denny. Just like there's no one else like you. Put your shoes on."

"You're not answering my question. Does it have something to do with religion?"

"No. What do you mean?"

"I don't know. Sometimes that's why people's families are different."

"Well, we're not that different. Come on, let me tie that. Lots of the other people in the neighborhood use Maureen."

Denny retrieved her sneakered foot from her mother's busy hands, wanting to tie her own damn shoe, though that is not what she said. She simply performed the task, somewhat laboriously, while formulating her response to her mother's statement, which was:

"We don't 'use' Maureen. We 'have' Maureen. That's what you always say. I think it's different."

Lily didn't know what to say to that observation, and anyway, it was time for school.

And it is...

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Verlag
Ballantine Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812971795
ISBN 13 
9780812971798
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
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Verantwortliche Person
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