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Whatever Makes You Happy: A Novel - Softcover

Grunwald, Lisa

 
9780812973211: Whatever Makes You Happy: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812973216 ISBN 13: 9780812973211
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

What does it take to be happy? How happy is happy enough? And what does “happy” mean, anyway? So asks Sally Farber–wife, mother, daughter, friend, working woman, and lover–in this wise and funny novel about a woman’s search for happiness in some of the right, and a few of the wrong, places.

Summer in the city looms long for Sally Farber when she sends her two daughters off to camp for the first time. Suddenly freed of her usual patterns in a city that becomes a grown-up’s playground,, she embarks on a journey unlike any she’s ever had–filled with guilty pleasures and guilty pains.

Caught between the past (cleaning out her childhood apartment as her demanding mother offers edicts from South Carolina) and the future (facing her first semi-empty nest), Sally finds herself unexpectedly involved with a powerful, unpredictable man.

And as she researches a book whose very topic is happiness, she must weigh the relative merits of prescriptions for its attainment offered by Aristotle and the Dalai Lama, Freud and Charles Schulz, scented candles and Zoloft, her mother and her best friend. The answer comes, in the end, from a surprising discovery, in this rich and original novel about how we can find, and ultimately embrace, both happiness and love.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lisa Grunwald is the author of seven novels, including Time After Time, The Irresistible Henry House, and The Theory of Everything. Along with her husband, former Reuters editor-in-chief Stephen Adler, she edited the anthologies The Marriage Book, Women’s Letters, and Letters of the Century. Grunwald is an occasional essayist and runs a side hustle called ProcrastinationArts, where she sells the other things she makes with pencils and paper. She lives in New York City.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

What does it take to be happy? How happy is happy enough? And what does "happy" mean, anyway? So asks Sally Farber-wife, mother, daughter, friend, working woman, and lover-in this wise and funny novel about a woman's search for happiness in some of the right, and a few of the wrong, places.
Summer in the city looms long for Sally Farber when she sends her two daughters off to camp for the first time. Suddenly freed of her usual patterns in a city that becomes a grown-up's playground, , she embarks on a journey unlike any she's ever had-filled with guilty pleasures and guilty pains.
Caught between the past (cleaning out her childhood apartment as her demanding mother offers edicts from South Carolina) and the future (facing her first semi-empty nest), Sally finds herself unexpectedly involved with a powerful, unpredictable man.
And as she researches a book whose very topic is happiness, she must weigh the relative merits of prescriptions for its attainment offered by Aristotle and the Dalai Lama, Freud and Charles Schulz, scented candles and Zoloft, her mother and her best friend. The answer comes, in the end, from a surprising discovery, in this rich and original novel about how we can find, and ultimately embrace, both happiness and love.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.

—Old children’s song When I was ten years old, my friends and I would sneak out at night and meet in our building’s service courtyard to play spy games and exchange secrets. The courtyard was forbidden: it was dangerous; it was ominous. Purple shadows draped its brick walls like pieces of cast-off clothing. It was where the building sorted its trash and where God only knew what dangers lurked. It scared me into a hollow, cold silence, but I went anyway because I was in love with Michael Farber. He lived two floors below me, and I would have eagerly followed him into the heartless depths of a raging fire.

One night, near the dumpster, Michael found a blue plastic gem, a dime-sized circle with facets, like the kind that came in the gum-ball machines at the front of Woolworth’s and Lamston’s.

“A sapphire!” whispered Julian Becker, who lived three floors above me and was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

“No, it’s fake. It’s only plastic,” I told him.

“What?”

“You’re such a dweeb,” Michael said, with a certainty that Julian made no effort to contradict.

Julian was the extra boy, and Michael was the one I adored, the one who made me willing to brave my fears and the purple shadows.

“What are you going to do with it?” Michael asked me, putting it in my hand.

“Me?” I asked, flustered.

“You,” he said.

“You’re giving it to me?” I said.

“You could make it into a necklace.”

Tenderly, appraisingly, he touched the chain I wore on my neck.

Then came the bang of a heavy door and the shuffle of heavy footsteps.

“Enemy spy!” Julian whispered, exultant, and pushed Michael into the corner behind the dumpster that served as our usual shield.

Standing alone, I shivered and froze.

“Come on, Sally!” Michael hissed from his hiding place.

“Quick, Sally!” Julian whispered.

But I was too terrified to move.

“Hide, Sally!” Michael shouted, and then, with a courage that would continue to move me for years and years to come, he emerged from his own safe hiding place and pulled me into the darkness behind an empty, discarded stove box.

“Who’s that?” we heard a loud, harsh voice say.

The footsteps grew closer.

I clutched Michael’s arm.

“Who’s that at this time of night?” the voice said.

Michael put a finger to his lips.

Then the box was simply lifted away from us, as if a giant were moving a mountain. As we crouched, we stared up at a large black woman whose name was Posey Rivers and who was famous in the building for the flame-shaped scar on the back of her hand. Posey was the housekeeper for a family that didn’t have any kids, but we’d seen her plenty of times, and she seemed to know all about us, too.

Under the purple shadows of this particular night, she gathered Michael and me into a hug against her huge, warm chest, which smelled, splendidly, of French fries.

“It’s cold,” she said. “You all must be chilly.”

Neither of us said anything.

“November and not a coat on you all,” Posey scolded. “Your mothers are going to catch a fit.”

Michael and I looked at each other. Pressed against Posey’s enormous breasts, we were finding it hard not to giggle.

“I’ll bet your mama,” Posey told me, “thinks you’re downstairs at his place. And I’ll be his mama thinks he’s upstairs at your place.”

Again, we didn’t answer.

“Well, but Posey knew you were here,” she said. She turned to shout over her shoulder. “And you can show your sorry face now, too, Julian Becker.”

Timidly, Julian stepped out of hiding and grinned down at his feet.

“Oh, come on, I’m not going to bite you, Mr. Molasses,” Posey said.

Julian stepped toward us, and there was something about the shy, dim look on his face that made Posey start to laugh. Posey’s laugh was a hyuk-hyuk-hyuk affair, a tropical outburst every bit as big and broad as she was herself. And it wrapped around Michael and Julian and me with the sureness and strength of her arms, until all four of us were laughing together in the purple courtyard light.

In Posey’s fragrant embrace, I felt the promise of Michael beside me, a promise both calming and thrilling; and I held and would cherish the blue plastic gem, a token that, three decades later, I would still keep in a pouch in my purse. I was safe—vibrantly, exquisitely safe—and for years to come, whenever I thought about happiness, this was the moment that would come, first and least self-consciously, to my mind.

2

I’ve got the bowl, the bone, the big yard. I know I should be happy.

—One dog to another in a Mike Twohy cartoon Lying in bed with my husband one night, I am shocked to discover that I can’t remember the size or shape of any other man’s penis.

This alarms me, but in a quiet way, as one might be alarmed to discover that the ceiling plaster is starting to crack.

“The ceiling plaster is starting to crack,” I say to Michael, because I suspect it is somewhat better than saying, “I can’t remember the size or shape of any other man’s penis.”

It is a Wednesday night near the end of May, the traditional month when Manhattan springtime mingles with end-of-the-school- year shock. Between us, the bedspread stretches, broad and neat, like an unmapped country. Around us, the world is in order as well. Our daughters are now nine and ten years old, and shed somewhat fewer possessions in their travels around the apartment. The books on our shelves are alphabetized. No uncapped pens clutter up the desk. The stacks of clothes in our dresser drawers rise in tidy, specific piles.

“It looks like the Mojave Desert up there,” I say, staring up at the ceiling.

“What?”

“It looks like the Mojave Desert.”

To the left, over on his side of the bed, Michael cradles his favorite cereal bowl and clicks his teeth against the spoon with each precise yet slurpy bite. He looks up at the ceiling.

“Don’t you think we should have it replastered?” I ask.

His eyes return to the TV screen, where the daily fortunes of New York’s sports teams are unfolding in brisk succession.

“It’s really starting to bug me,” I say.

He turns to me now with a marital smile, a smile filled with wisdom and depraved acceptance, a smile that says: You know that’s not what it is.

In fact, he is right, and I smile back, but I don’t know what it is.

I suppose it might be the way he eats cereal.

Or the fact that, for the fourth night this week, the girls didn’t fall asleep until ten, thus narrowing to Ginsu-knife thinness the slivers of time I can actually spend with him.

Or the fact that I didn’t manage to get enough work done today on the book I am currently researching, a book that is called, not incidentally, The History of Happiness and is due, not incidentally, in three months.

Or it might be the Acme cartoon topography of tomorrow’s to-do list, which includes glue-gunning a costume for Emily’s school play, giving my editor an update on my book, starting in on the packing list for the girls’ camp trunks, and whipping up a bowl of hummus for Katie’s Ancient Egypt Day. I do not know...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812973216
ISBN 13 
9780812973211
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

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