Almost Strangers: A Novel - Softcover

Winer, Delsa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743212320 ISBN 13: 9780743212328

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

How two women seek and embrace freedom is at the heart of Delsa Winer's stunning first novel
"At fort, Ursula Korfield Gant believes she is independent of the usual pleasure people seek and connections they covet. She lives alone, although there are men who've had, for a while, resident status."
Thus begins Delsa Winer's engrossing novel, at once terrifying and full of hope. When her mother dies, the shattered Ursula retreats for distant shores, abandoning Daniel, her lover, and the safe boundaries of her life. Meanwhile, Daniel's wife, Cissy, is tormented by a different loss -- she knows of her husband's betrayal -- and she, too, leaves. Both women end up in the same plane crash, and each ventures into the world unknowable and unable to return to the past. The mystery of their fates is the force that drives this emotional journey through the many faces of female identity in all its beauty, chaos, and compassion.
At once ironic and moving, Almost Strangers is a love story, a suspense story, and a novel about starting over.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Delsa Winer has written short stories for The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Boston Globe Magazine, Working Mother, Tikkun, and other publications. The recipient of numerous literary distinctions, including the Capricorn Novel Award and a fellowship from the Massachussetts Council on the Arts, she lives in Lincoln, Massachussetts.

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Chapter 1

At forty, Ursula Kornfield Gant belives she is independent of the usual pleasures people seek and connections they covet. She lives alone, although there are men who've had, for a while, resident status. She doesn't own a television, rarely sees a movie. At the news kiosk in Harvard Square she hovers, ghostlike, over the racks. She realizes that some people, Daniel, in particular, consider her pretentious. He doesn't say this; he says she's perfect, but he loves her in spite of it, and in fact her only flaw is that she doesn't know one person in People. Books are Ursula's passion.

Immersed one night in The Times Literary Supplement, Ursula reaches for the ringing phone. "Ursula," a woman's voice says. "This is Delray, the third-floor nurse at Woodside."

Her old yellow Labrador beside her in bed flicks open his eyelids. She wonders if he instinctively feels it, her sense that something that matters to her more than anything else in her whole life is about to change. "Go back to sleep, Brontë," she tells the dog. "You can't go."

The empty highway speeds by almost unseen, her mind having returned to the night her father was "sent in" -- that fatal euphemism. The call came on her answering machine, complete and unretractable, moments after Daniel had hurried away. As she was about to leave for the hospital that time, Ursula had lifted the receiver with the idea of paging her departed lover at the airport, before he could slip back to his wife on Central Park South. But at the busy signal she hung up, relieved.

It suits her image, she guesses, to face a crisis alone.

As a child, Ursula had been compliant and secretive in the way of only children in the city, born to older parents. When she was quite small, she started going with her mother to the vault on the fifteenth of the month. The guard knew Mrs. Kornfield; she signed the card, and then he put his key and hers into the steel door and drew out the gray metal box. He set it on the scratched glass. Ursula was allowed into the booth, although never identified. She would climb on the chair and lift out the thick black books. The books had rigid covers that could not be bent but could be taken apart, but never were, by prying up the metal posts that held the pages. The top and bottom boards of the ledgers were lined with patterned paper, fancy scrolls like a grille. The green-tinted pages had thin red lines. Ursula watched her mother enter the names in her level, unbroken script, names she learned to read: John Deere Credit Company and Gulf + Western and Martin Marietta. Each company had its page and the one facing. Ruth wrote the date and the amount in the column marked Dividend. And there was a column for Date Bought. You never sold bonds, Ruth said.

"People get what they deserve" is another thing Ruth said. Ruth was fair and conscientious. She was proud, proud of paying cash, being American, being decent. When Ursula grew older, decency was very important. Decency was not kissing on the first date and not going all the way until you were married. If you did, Ruth said, you would be ruined. Ruined, she emphasized, not rotten in the way of a spoiled piece of fruit. But ruined like a sweater that moths had eaten holes in. Ruth gave Ursula a wrapped book the first time she got the "curse." Though she read the book diligently, to this day Ursula admits she isn't sure how chickens get babies. But in the end that hadn't mattered, had it? Only a month after college graduation, Ursula herself was dispatched to marriage like a gull to the wind. And when her marriage to Jay Gant ended, eighteen months later, Ursula's image of herself as needing nobody was confirmed.

So however it had happened, she thinks now, after all she turned out loose and bold. She slept around -- which is the way her mother referred to it; and realizing that Ruth would die of shame if she knew, Ursula felt a little pang of triumph, being loose and bold, yet stricken to the heart.

"I'm here about my mother, Ruth Kornfield."

Ruth has been stably weak and demented for two years. Before that, when Ursula's daddy was alive, Ruth had roared toward senility on Prozac, directing her financial advisor to "roll over bonds" she claimed had matured. But when Charlie died without fuss, as he'd lived, all the frenzy seemed to drain out of Ruth; and like a general without a war to fight, she retired from public life. Her recall of words failed first, although a startlingly apt phrase would pop out when least expected. Now, in her eighty-first year, Ruth's white, vigorous hair flies up from her high brow, her quick brown eyes are slightly quizzical, and her cheek, when pressed against Ursula's, comes away creased like antique satin. Enthroned in her wheelchair at Woodside Nursing Home, Ruth wears the beatific and vacant expression of a plaster saint. Seeing Ursula, she'll clasp her hands under her chin in a childlike gesture of delight. For their roles have been reversed, and Ursula, whose dependence on her mother's praise forever sealed her lips against any appeal for it, oddly found a source of strength in Ruth's relentless decline. She's taken over the financial records and knows enough to roll over bonds when they mature, both of them living well enough on unearned income.

Ursula is told to take a seat. She opens the George Eliot biography that arrived that morning but can't concentrate. Nearby, a fat black woman is horsing around with an equally fat and pleasant black man, trading insults and poking. Ursula is reminded that Ruth is -- Ruth used to be, before she moved to Woodside -- critical of fat people and black people, as if being so were an indulgence. Indulgence of any kind is unacceptable to Ruth. But in the nursing home, when they bathed and diapered her, Ruth clung to their fat arms and covered their black faces with kisses. Once again, Ursula gives Eliot a chance. But she can't concentrate. In an open phone booth a scrawny youth with stringy hair and red-rimmed eyeglasses is reporting tearfully that he has brought his lover into the ER. A gurney slaps through the automatically parting doors with the orderly running alongside pumping an inert chest. The doors open again, and a panting woman carries in a large unconscious child, saying he's "gone mental." The next two hours are filled with the nightly hospital drama familiar, Ursula supposes, to TV viewers, but utterly new and absorbing to Ursula Gant, whose only reference point is Fred Wiseman's documentary Hospital. Close to midnight the receptionist suddenly shouts, "Ursula! Through the swinging doors. Room twenty-three."

Ruth is connected to a heart monitor; her face is flushed, she's missing her hearing aid and her teeth. Two student nurses chat across Ruth's body about the May wedding one of them plans; they ask Ursula to step outside.

In the hub of the emergency ward, extras mill around a countertop Christmas tree like actors in a green room. They pay no attention to her. At last, a leading-man type, with a stethoscope draped around his neck, separates himself from the bustle.

"What's the matter with my mother?" Ursula asks tensely.

"Her white count's high. I'll probably admit her." He looks uncertain, as if he's ad-libbing; Ursula can tell he lacks experience. The whole production seems to be suffering from the incoherence of an out-of-town tryout.

Broad-spectrum antibiotics do not touch the infection, which lives its own riotous life inside Ruth, spiking her temperature to dangerous numbers. Nurses rotate as unpredictably as apples and oranges in a one-armed bandit. Ruth is packed in ice like a shipped fish. Needles slipping out of her collapsed arm veins are reinstated in her neck, and oxygen flows unseen through tubes in her nose; nourishment enters from a pouch on a pole, and tainted urine drips into a bottle...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0743212320
• ISBN 13: 9780743212328
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 244
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande