Category: Book Passages

Christmas Shopping

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Laura Mathis faces the first Christmas after her teenage daughter was killed by a drunk driver. From The One-Percenter, a dark tale of revenge, forthcoming.

Laura avoided the Black Friday crowds by waiting a week. Stores still had deals, and she shopped wisely, picking between Target, Wal-Mart and even K-Mart for the lowest prices. She bought presents and spent the afternoon wrapping them. Only four, two for her, two for Paul.

Next up was the tree. It wasn’t the tree they’d used since Jessi was born. This one she nabbed on sale from K-Mart. An Imitation Tree, according to the box, lights already strung around the branches. She set it up in minutes and tossed the box by the backdoor. Paul was at group therapy. She forgave him for the plates. Maybe he had a point. But life moved on, that’s what Paul had to understand. He’d come around. If Christmas didn’t help, something else would.

Laura sat on the floor crosslegged like she did Christmas mornings when Jessi was small, telling her which presents to open and whether they came from Mommy and Daddy or Santa. Laura admired the tree. None of the ornaments from the old one: a card Jessi made in preschool, pictures of Jessi from ages 3 to 7, a picture she’d of herself in a rocketship, heading to the moon to visit the moon man. No train either. Every Christmas, Thomas the Engine circled the tree singing Christmas carols and Jessi liked to chase it.

Laura got up and grabbed the box and headed to the backyard. The shed lurked in the corner and the grass crunched under her shoes. Paul hated mowing but once a week each summer he pushed their little mower around the backyard, stomping through the backdoor sweaty and irritated.

She unlocked the shed and threw the doors open. Sixteen years’ worth of stuff. She set the Imitation Tree’s box at the edge and grabbed the doors. A thin rectangle of light slanted across boxes and piles of old stuff. Laura’s eyes followed it. When Jessi learned to talk she also learned to want. Three-year-old Jessi Mathis had trouble doing what she was told, no trouble telling them she wanted an Elmo doll or anything with Mickey Mouse on it.

A neighbor’s dog barked. A truck rumbled down the street.

Laura stepped inside the shed. Memories rose in the dark, each a siren’s call to nowhere. Jessi’s old stroller. Little pairs of shoes. Her heart ached as she held each pair and for each pair she remembered when and where she’d bought them. Here was the Sesame Street pair they found in the discount bin at Wal-Mart. Here was the pair Jessi always wore to the playground. This pair? She liked the green shells. Green was her favorite color. And the red pair? Those were the shoes she first velcroed on her own. She insisted

let me do it

and Laura’s days as Super-Mom began their fast decline. Laura told herself the story of each pair and once she let go of the last pair she was breathing heavy. She steadied herself on the lawnmower.

It’s done. There’s nothing else you can do. What are you going to do? What do you think Jessi’s thinking right now? Mom, you’re better than this. Tell yourself that and get up. No one’s going to help you.

Laura’s breathing settled. “Mom. You’re better than this.”

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The Boy with Blue Eyes – Opening

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The boy squats in the dust and the roadgrime tracked in on their shoes. He has his mother’s raven hair, eyes as blue as a fabled sea. They call the boy a mixed blood and he watches father, aging reminder of a faraway land he will never see, the room dark day or night. Eight years old. Already the boy understands much. He sees and he listens.

Father drinks. He speaks the common dialect poorly and when he isn’t drinking he takes the boy out and shows him the city. Cramped backstreet restaurants and shops, father’s memories strewn across a chaos of hammers and horns. Holding the boy’s hand at the city’s many lakes, distant cranes and buildings across the silver waters, skeletal sketches of New China halfbloom in the construction dust.

The haze floods the sky and swallows the sun. Read more “The Boy with Blue Eyes – Opening”

Book Passage of the Week – from Hold the Dark, by William Giraldi

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I’m digging the prose in Hold the Dark, about an ailing old man who helps a grieving mother track down the wolf that killed her son in a remote Alaskan village.

He’d seen his daughter only once in the last three years, when she came home the morning after her mother’s stroke. Three crawling years. Life was not short, as people insisted on saying. He’d quit cigarettes and whiskey just before she was born. He wanted to be in health for her and knew then that ten years clipped from his life by drink and smoke were ten years too many. Now he knew those were the worthless years anyway, the silver decade of life, a once-wide vista shrunk to a keyhole. Not all silver shines. As of this morning he had plans to return to cigarettes and whiskey both. He regretted not buying them at the airport.

Book Passage of the Week – from Manhattan Transfer, by John Dos Passos

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So much good in Manhattan Transfer, I’ll just stick with what stood out to me the most:

A nickel before midnight buys tomorrow . . . holdup headlines, a cup of coffee in the automat, a ride to Woodlawn, Fort Lee, Flatbush . . . A nickel in the slot buys chewing gum. Somebody Loves Me, Baby Divine, You’re in Kentucky Juss Shu’ As You’re Born . . . bruised notes of foxtrots go limping out of doors, blues, waltzes (We’d Danced the Whole Night Through) trail gyrating tinsel memories . . . On Sixth Avenue on Fourteenth there are still flyspecked stereopticons where for a nickel you can peep at yellowed yesterdays. Beside the peppering shooting gallery you stoop into the flicker A Hot Time, The Bachelor’s Surprise, The Stolen Garter . . . wastebasket of tornup daydreams . . . A nickel before midnight buys yesterday.

Take a break from this week’s fashionable outrage or regiurgitated opinions on gun control, and check out this portrait of early twentieth century New York City. Highly recommended, and I’d bet a toenail that Cormac McCarthy read Manhattan Transfer at some point in his life prior to writing Suttree.

 

Book Passage of the Week: from Lancelot, by Walker Percy

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I spent much of the book believing that Percival is a figment of Lancelot’s imagination. The brilliance of Lancelot‘s format is that by addressing the reader directly, we become Percival, the priest who hears his confession and his deranged ideas about ushering in a new order.

Good book. Highly recommended.

On to the quotes:

Next follows catastrophe of some sort. I can feel it in my bones. Perhaps it has already happened. Has it? Have you noticed anything unusual on the “outside”? I’ve noticed that the doctors and guards and attendants here who are supposed to be healthy — we’re the sick ones — seem depressed, anxious, gloomy, as if something awful had already happened.

Talk? Talk about what? Some years ago I discovered that I had nothing to say to anybody nor anybody to me, that is, anything worth listening to. There is nothing left to say. So I stopped talking. Until you showed up. … It’s strange, I have to tell you in order to know what I already know. I talk, you don’t. Perhaps you know even better than I that too much has been said already. Perhaps I talk to you because of your silence. Your silence is the only conversation I can listen to.

That was one of the pleasures of the sixties: it was so easy to do a little which seemed a lot. We basked in our own sense of virtue and in what we took to be their gratitude. Maybe that was why it didn’t last very long. Who can stand gratitude?

I’ve discovered that even in this madhouse if you tell someone something, face to face, with perfect seriousness, without emotion, gazing directly at him, he will believe you. One need only speak with authority.