High Strung: A Novel - Softcover

Dalton, Quinn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743470192 ISBN 13: 9780743470193

Verlag: Simon and Schuster, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Years after running away from America and the mysteries surrounding her mother's death, Merle Winslow winds up editing trash novels at X Publishing in West London and shacked up with a drug-addled diplomat's son. Shaky and defeated, she heads home to Florence, Ohio, with no money and no idea of what to do next.
Meanwhile, Merle discovers that her brother Olin, rich and successful from marketing Marilyn Monroe meat thermometers, is poised to embark on a dubious performance art career, and that her stodgy father might be falling in love after years of living alone. As Merle looks for clues about her mother's life she uncovers disturbing new truths about her own romantic failings. She suspects she's never really escaped her old life; she's simply dragged it along with her, "like an outfit that was ill-fitting and too revealing, but impossible to get rid of." But with the help of her tough-talking grandmother, free-spirited brother, and a pilot who nurses a failing plane, Merle finally begins to face her family's checkered past and her own uncertain future.
In vivid cinematic prose, High Strung balances humor on the rough edge of loss, regret, and wounded family love. Merle is an unforgettable creation in an exhilarating debut novel from a young writer to watch.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Quinn Dalton has had her short stories published in various literary magazines, including StoryQuarterly, ACR Magazine, and The Kenyon Review. An earlier draft Bulletproof Girl was a semi-finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award last year. When writing, she draws from her many travels throughout the US, Europe, Russia and the Baltic States and her many barely-rent-paying jobs she's held over the years, such as tutor, door to door saleswoman, pub worker, antique store and photo shop worker, and teacher. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and young daughter. She is also the author of a novel, High Strung, published by Atria Books.

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Chapter 1

My life is a story of flights.

I wasn't technically present for two of them, and they weren't even of the airborne variety, but I count them anyway.

Two were with my mother.

Two others were over the ocean.

All were short on planning and quite nerve-racking.

One made me think about death, and that was when I started to calm down.

The next to the last one: I was running, really, back to Ohio from a shitty London flat over a woodcutting shop where machines shrilled like the trussed characters in a typical X Publishing adult novel, of which I had copyedited hundreds. I was just in time for my birthday and another campus vigil. I was beat up, underfed, sexually exhausted, pornographically overwhelmed. I had been gone ten years. I had a perverted ex-boyfriend and a smoking habit to show for my time, and a friendship with Fiona, a feng shui consultant and breathing instructor who kept me centered and in cheap Silk Cut cigarettes. I was coming home to a grandmother I hadn't spoken to since I'd left, a father I didn't really know, and a brother who had fallen in love with a doll. The beginning of a new century (or the end of the old one?) was a hook trailing three perfect zeros -- and we were still round with loss; we all led double lives.

I hugged Fiona good-bye when it was still dark, the windows facing the Gatwick observation deck dark mirrors showing more than I needed. The sky folded open with light as the plane took off and I thought of the photograph, the one that had followed me through childhood until I finally took flight number five to get away from it: my mother and I outside the Morris P. Alston education building moments after the bomb blast, me two years old that day and screaming in my mother's thin arms, her hair tangled in my fist, the dark smudges of police uniforms in the background. She looks angry, or maybe just determined, and her free hand reaches into the air, as if trying to catch something outside the frame.

My father would never talk about the photograph, and my mother can't now, having died drunk in a car accident the night she allowed me to start wearing mascara. I was thirteen. I'm thirty-two now, the age she was when she died, and every time I take a drink I still think about it, how I could get in a car and drive into my next life.

Fiona had instructions to take whatever of mine she wanted before the landlord padlocked my cramped, loud flat. I had also asked her to tell Terence that I'd had to leave on short notice -- family issues, I asked her to explain -- and that I didn't expect to be back anytime soon. I told her to tell him I'd be in touch.

I pulled on my orange-and-brown-striped clown socks the attendant handed out, and thought of Terence and seven years -- one year for each name letter, each stripe on each foot. I couldn't have warned him that I was leaving. He was too persuasive, too good with the guilt trips; he would have talked me out of it. Even so, I worried for him as I watched an extra-long sunrise turn the Atlantic a sequiny brass, which reminded me of Terence's favorite mirrored hip-huggers, and which got me wondering where he would go, at which point I had to remind myself that his father was a diplomat, and he had several houses to choose from.He should have been worrying about where you would go all this time, Merle, I told myself, scalding my tongue on the black water Virgin Airways calls coffee. I realized I was pinching the inside of my arm, a habit when I was worried. This kind of compulsiveness started with games every kid played, like skipping sidewalk cracks or breath-holding near graveyards, but somehow I'd never grown out of them. In fact, I had honed and perfected them so that they made a scary kind of sense to me. They were how I tried to correct a life filled with bad decisions. Most of my rituals focused on trying to avoid mishaps while using various forms of transportation; for example, I had to cross my fingers during flight takeoffs and landings. To keep myself from falling onto the tracks while boarding the Underground in London, I had to mouth "Mind the gap" along with the fatherly, firm voice on the speakers.

I could blame this on my family's bad luck with transportation -- my mother's fatal car accident, my grandfather's heart-attack death on a tractor while harvesting the family corn crop when my father was eight. But really, it was because I had always been tense, even as a child, walking around with my shoulders crammed into my neck, second-guessing every smile --Are they laughing at me? I'd always wonder, no matter who it was. I had to admit that, at the age of thirty-two, after sampling a range of therapies -- art therapy, aromatherapy, breathing exercises, crystals, meditation, good old-fashioned eighty-five-quid-per-hour therapy -- the fact is, uptight was just who I was.

Terence would be fine, I told myself as I flipped through the in-flight magazine, in which a blind and deaf fifteen-year-old was interviewed after climbing Mount Everest and a supermodel insisted you could travel to the Bahamas with a swimsuit, wrap skirt, and scarf and come up with twenty different wardrobe combinations. Terence would slink like a cat through life, always composed, always true to himself alone. I would have to learn to shed my dog ways, my compulsive habits, my obsessive loyalties for people who didn't extend the same concern for me. You're going home to grow old alone, I told myself as the plane lowered into a cloud bank over New York.

Copyright © 2003 by Quinn Dalton

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon and Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0743470192
• ISBN 13: 9780743470193
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande