Produkt

KlappentextSummer Dawidowitz has spent the past year caring for her grandmother, Josie xe2x80x94 a lifelong Communist, a dedicated teacher, and the founder of an organization that tutors schoolchildren. When Josie dies, everything that seemed solid in Summerxe2x80x99s life comes into question. What sort of relationship will she have with the mother who abandoned her? Will she meet with the brother Josie exiled from the family? Does she really want to go back to the non-monogamous household she was part of before she moved in to take care of Josie? Finally, does she still believe a small, committed group of citizens can change the world, and if so - how?

Ellen Hawley has worked as an editor and copy editor, a talk-show host, a cab driver, a waitress, a janitor, an assembler, a file clerk, and for four panic-filled hours, a receptionist. She has also taught creative writing. She was born and raised in New York, lived in Minnesota for many long, cold winters, and now lives in Cornwall, U.K.

Details

Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781800751491

ProduktartE-Book

EinbandartE-Book

FormatEPUB

Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen

FormatE101

Verlag

Swift Press

Erscheinungsjahr2023

Erscheinungsdatum15.06.2023

Seiten208 Seiten

SpracheEnglisch

Dateigrösse2341 Kbytes

Artikel-Nr.11957239

Rubriken

Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe

3

By the time we broke up, the night of Josie´s death had opened into a steel-gray morning, and I took a moment to stand alone on the sidewalk, pulling cold air into my lungs, letting its sharp edges clear the family from my body, reassembling the adult I could only manage to be in their absence.

Caro and Steve lived a block and a half from Summit Avenue, as close as they could afford to the turn-of-the-century grace the robber barons had left behind and the upper middle class now nested in. It was a well-behaved neighborhood, with an underlying tension about how close it sat to - they´d whisper it so as not to risk offending anyone - the Black neighborhood along the freeway.

Not that they were prejudiced, mind you.

Their block had a bland kind of beauty, and for a second or two I was grateful for its quiet.

Then I drove home, and I´d closed Josie´s garage door and was headed for the back gate when Irene crossed the alley toward me, dressed for work, looking both tough and office-ready, a cigarette in one hand, a purse big enough to hold a kitchen chair over the opposite shoulder.

Any news on your gramma?

Gone, Irene. Early this morning.

Instead of saying she was sorry, she said, She was a real lady, you know?

I laughed. Because it was true. Because none of us get to escape our history. Because Josie never stopped carrying herself like she knew where the goodies were kept. She´d have trained that out of herself if she´d known a way, but she´d absorbed it too young.

Irene gave me a one-armed hug, holding the cigarette to one side, protecting my shoulder blades from the smoke. It was awkward. She´d sat with Josie when things got to the point where I didn´t feel right leaving her alone, but we´d never been on hugging terms.

She smelled of stale tobacco and winter air.

Stop by if you want company, she said. Have a beer. A cup of coffee. Whatever.

I said I would. They were the things people say - stop by; I will - one side not knowing if the invitation´s welcome, the other not knowing if it´s real, both of us wondering if we didn´t like each other best with an alley in between.

I gotta run. I´ll miss my bus.

She was half a garage length away before I called my thanks after her. She waved an arm to say she´d heard, but she didn´t turn.

Josie´s house was quieter than the 3 a.m. hospital corridors had been. If Irene hadn´t just left for work, I´d have run back out and asked her in. I wanted someone there to breathe the air with me. The words of a song, or as many of them as I could get hold of, echoed in my head: Old someone´s dead and gone, left me here to sing this song. Until that moment, I would have thought that was a single state, dead and gone, but it wasn´t. In the hospital, Josie had been dead. Here, though, in the house I´d shared with her, she was gone, an absence so big it swallowed the possibility of sound. It was a different thing altogether. I traced a path from the kitchen to the dining room to the living room, opening curtains, bringing in the winter light.

In each room, her absence echoed off the walls.

Old Josie´s dead and gone, left me here to sing this song.

I tried to clear the words out of my head. It was like sweeping smoke until I substituted Beloved Comrade . Jack was right about it being overblown, and he was also right that it was beautiful. I sang most of the first line before my voice broke and I wept. For Josie. For her long-lost comrades - that poisoned, antiquated, beloved word. It wasn´t a word she´d used, and even in my thoughts I never had. One or two of her - let´s say it - comrades actually had talked about each other as comrades, although I never heard them say Hello, comrade , or anything that embarrassing. It was more like Some of the comrades were there , and even that didn´t happen often. I doubt I´d heard it used half a dozen times. Just enough to remind me that even if it doesn´t fit comfortably on an American tongue, it had once been a living part of the language. They´d meant it. Or some of them had.

As far as I know, the Communist Party had already folded in on itself by the time I heard anyone put breath behind the word. The Soviet Union had collapsed, leaving these old warriors behind to remind each other of who they´d been and what they´d hoped for. To trade news of the small battle fires they still tended. To tell each other about their aches, their illnesses, their grandkids, their disappointments. Josie had loved them, and they drove her crazy with their complaining.

I was weeping partly for Josie and partly for all the purity that might have made the world a better place and hadn´t.

When I ran out of tears, I picked up the shoes she´d left by her chair, knobbed where her bunions had fought the leather for space, and I carried them to her closet and lined them up neatly, as if she might need them again. Then I turned the covers down on one side of her bed and curled myself into it.

Josie´s sheets were older than I was, but they were good cotton - percale, she told me once - and they´d grown softer with age until now they were as smooth as skin. She´d committed her life to the working class, but she´d kept a weakness for small luxuries. Like Irene said, she was a lady.

When I was little, she used to sing me a song about a lord´s wife who runs off with the Gypsies and says she won´t miss her husband´s goose-feather bed. She´ll sleep in a cold, open field. I used to think of it as Josie´s story, only she ended up with the best of both worlds: Sol and the cold, open world, plus two sets of damn fine sheets.

Only I didn´t know back then how good Josie´s sheets were. Which was just as well, because I was a little purist and would´ve looked down my nose at them, and at her for having them. I didn´t find out about them until I moved back in to help with those small, essential jobs like vacuuming crumbs off them.

The day she went into the hospital, I put clean sheets on the bed to welcome her home, folding them down the way she taught me to, so the piping showed above the blankets. The way the lord´s sheets are turned down: bravely-o. Even though I half knew she wasn´t coming back.

Or - admit it - I hoped she wasn´t. She´d been wanting to die ever since the strokes robbed her of the person she´d been. If humans had an off button, she´d have pushed hers. It was an act of love to want her death, and wishing for it had left me fouled.

I didn´t exactly sleep in her bed, but I lay there, my mind hazed, wanting her back as helplessly as I´d ever wanted Zanne to come back for me, and I let time pass until the phone rang and Caro asked for a couple of people´s numbers. Then Jack wanted a few, and when I hung up I made my own calls: Josie, early this morning, we wanted you to know, we´ll call about the memorial as soon as we get it figured out, although it won´t be right away. And yes, we´ll miss her. We´ll all miss her.

I spread my grief across the city until it was wide and thin and damn near bearable.

When I couldn´t think of anything else to do with myself, I called Shar and told her how much I missed her. I didn´t tell her Josie was dead. I had a half-formed sense that telling her on the phone would cheapen it and a less-than-half-formed sense that once I told her, my grief wouldn´t be my own anymore, so I held it close. This belonged to no one but me, even while she was the one person I wanted comfort from.

She asked if I could come over, meaning could someone stay with Josie, and I said I could, not telling her we were past that and had been for days.

I felt the Household´s gravity pulling at me.

The Household, capital H, meant Shar, Tee and Zac. Before Josie reached the point where she couldn´t live alone, it had meant the three of them plus me, although I was never in the inner orbit. I was a moon circling Shar. But even after a year of making my bed at Josie´s and keeping most of my stuff there, I still thought of it as the Household, as if it was the only one I knew of.

I unlocked their front door and walked into the full scream of the vacuum. Shar caught sight of me and fumbled for the power button, yelling over the noise for me to wait, reminding me of someone struggling with a dog that outweighed her. She hit the button and the scream curved downward into silence.

Hey, she said.

She was still holding the vacuum and couldn´t seem to free herself from it.

Josie died, I said. Last night. I stood at the edge of the rug, hands inside my jacket pockets, each one clutching a glove.

She leaned the vacuum wand against the wall and we watched it slide, neither of us making a move to catch it, flinching in unison when it clattered on the floor, as if the sound had surprised us. As if Josie´s death had. She moved toward me and I shook my head, saying no to something: No, don´t be kind to me. Don´t cry, don´t touch, don´t speak, although what had I come there for if not all of that?

It´s what she´d been wanting. Since the first stroke.

It felt right to say this, as if I owed Josie bluntness.

All the same, she said.

She told me to take off my jacket, and it seemed natural that she had to tell me this.

Here. Sit.

I let her park me on the couch and she sat next to me.

I´ll miss her, she said.

I thought the...

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Autor

Hawley, Ellen

Ellen Hawley has worked as an editor and copy editor, a talk-show host, a cab driver, a waitress, a janitor, an assembler, a file clerk, and for four panic-filled hours, a receptionist. She has also taught creative writing. She was born and raised in New York, lived in Minnesota for many long, cold winters, and now lives in Cornwall, U.K.

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