Just Like February: A Novel - Softcover

Batterman, Deborah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1943006482 ISBN 13: 9781943006489

Verlag: SparkPress, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

To Rachel, there’s no one in the world like her uncle Jake. Handsome and mysterious, he fills her with stories, sends postcards and gifts from exotic places. And he’s so much more fun to be with than her parents, who are always fighting. When she learns he’s gay, she keeps it under wraps. And when he gets sick, she doesn’t even tell her best friends. Until she realizes that secrecy does more harm than good.

Framed by the passions of the ’60s and the AIDS crisis of the ’80s, Just Like February begins with the wedding of Rachel’s parents when she’s five and ends with her sexual awakening as Jake is dying. As this poignant coming-of-age story unfolds, Rachel is forced to reckon with a home broken by the stormy love between her mother (a social worker) and her father (a Vietnam veteran) and a heart broken by the realities of homophobia and AIDS.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A native New Yorker, Deborah Batterman is the author of Shoes Hair Nails, a short story collection framed around everyday symbols in our world and their resonance in our lives. She is a Pushcart nominee and her award-winning fiction appears in the Women’s National Book Association’s 2017 centennial anthology. Her stories and essays have appeared in anthologies as well as various print and online journals, including Dr. T. J. Eckleburg Review, Akashic Book’s Terrible Twosdays, Every Mother Has a Story, Vol. 2, Open to Interpretation: Fading Light, and Mom Egg Review, Vol. 14. Learn more about her at deborahbatterman.com.

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Just Like February

A Novel

By Deborah Batterman

BookSparks

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Batterman
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-943006-48-9

Contents

a spoon and six dolls, 1, 
a family undivided, 37, 
postcards, 55, 
postscript, 127, 
skeletons in the closet, 131, 
womanhood, 163, 
endings, 191, 
beginnings, 217, 
epilogue, 245, 
about the author, 247, 

CHAPTER 1

a spoon and six dolls

The summer I was born, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, Ted Kennedy put Chappaquiddick on the map, and my parents, along with my uncle Jake and me, set out on a pilgrimage to Woodstock. Only Jake got there. Midway across the George Washington Bridge, our car began sputtering, losing steam by the second. We made it just to the tollbooth. My father, who'd had reservations from the start, saw this as a sign that maybe the trip just wasn't meant to be. My mother accused him of being smug.

Cars passed by, there were offers of help, but the engine had died. Jake, at my mother's insistence, hitched a ride with a blond girl in a red Corvette. "I want details," she said, kissing him goodbye. It took two hours before a tow truck finally came and carted my parents and me back to Brooklyn. I wailed, my mother was silent, my father and the driver talked. "I could kick myself for not hitching a ride, too," my mother always says when she tells the story of that infamous day. Her voice is like glass: cold, clear, transparent with subtext. If it wasn't for your father ... Eventually she softens; the news reports, she had to admit, gave her second thoughts about being in a sea of mud with a nursing infant. Besides, my father had recently purchased an elaborate new sound system. All weekend long they listened to the crystal-clear voices of their favorite WNEW-FM disc jockeys bring up-to-the-minute coverage right into our living room; it was almost like being there.

A need to rationalize any simple twist of fate colors my father's perspective. "The last time I saw Jimmy Briggs was on a chopper leaving Saigon, and here he turns up driving the tow truck that takes us back home — that's more than just coincidence, even for a cynic like me." All the way back to Brooklyn, they talked about the endless nights and rain-drenched days in Vietnam, the buddies who had died and those still alive. They talked about Woodstock, too, which they agreed was nothing more than one big antiwar demonstration masquerading as a party. Not that my father wouldn't have loved to hear Jimi Hendrix and the Butterfield Blues Band and Santana and the Jefferson Airplane live, on the same stage, within the space of a few days.

The starting point for Jake is a spoon he came across at a small shop in the town of Woodstock. Candy, the girl he drove up with, wanted to go antiquing before heading over to Yasgur's farm. So they browsed antique shops — she bought an old piano stool that barely fit in the trunk of her car — had lunch in a funky café, and stopped in a gift shop, where Jake found the small wooden spoon that he bought as a present for me.

Shaped like a flower petal and inscribed with the words Make Love, Not War, the spoon ended up being more ornament than utensil. My mother kept it on the windowsill in the kitchen, next to the stained-glass sun that illuminated the window like a bright, smiling orange. Supposedly, it was the source of my first word. Squirming in my high chair, I'd point to the spoon. "Boon," I'd say, refusing to eat until my mother gave me the smooth-as-pearl spoon to hold while she fed me. When it came time for me to start feeding myself, the spoon mysteriously disappeared. My mother accused my father of "accidentally" throwing it away. My grandmother, who had recently bought me a silver spoon from Tiffany, said it was just as well. "Wood splinters," she reminded my mother. The admonishment irked my mother almost as much as did the disappearance of her one and only memento from Woodstock. "And silver tarnishes," she said.

The summer I turned five, I stopped — quite suddenly, it seemed — playing with my dolls. To my mother, a social worker, it was no big deal, just some latent anxiety over my parents' impending marriage. My grandmother, who was less prone to psychoanalyzing my behavior, immediately went out and bought me a new doll. The way she saw it, I was bored with dolls that looked like babies, so she got me a "more mature" one, with a silky black bob for hair and a red satin dress. Instead of putting her in the large basket where I kept my other dolls, I placed her on a green wicker chair in my room. The chair had a flat floral pillow, and, enthroned in it, she took on the aura of a princess.

I told my grandmother I loved the doll, just so she'd stop saying, "I hope you don't think you're too old for dolls already." Giving up dolls, she believed, meant I was growing up too quickly. Like my mother, though, she had totally misjudged the situation. Six tiny dolls, not the kind you could cradle in your arms and squeeze and pretend to feed, had captured my imagination.

"Every night when you go to sleep," said Jake, when he gave me the small painted box that contained the dolls, "you tell these dolls your troubles and they take them away." He had recently returned from a trip to Guatemala, filled with stories about dusty pyramids jutting through lush jungle foliage, and a king known as Great-Jaguar-Paw, and a ten-year-old girl named Carmelita who lived in a village called Chichicastenango. I laughed, tried repeating the tongue twister — Chichi ... Chichicha ... Chichicas — and laughed some more. It was Carmelita who, after a dream one night in which she saw herself flying on the back of a bird, had made the cloth purse that Jake gave me along with the dolls. I'd never seen anything like it. Running along the edge was a braid of black cotton that framed the remarkable bird woven into cross-stitches of red, blue, green, and purple. I traced the bird with my finger. Its beak was too large for its body, and its feathers, spread across the purse, reminded me of a king's robe. In short, there was nothing about this image that should have conjured flight. But, like all things that become the sum of their parts, the bird soared.

The name of this rare bird, Jake told me, was quetzal, and once, when he was sitting in the square with Carmelita, he saw one perched in a tree. He was about to take a picture, with Carmelita in the foreground, when, out of nowhere, it seemed, like a small boulder, her grandmother came barreling in front of him. She didn't say a word to Jake, just put her hand over the camera lens, and when he asked her why she did it, she pursed her lips, looked him squarely in the eyes, and said, with all the wisdom and superstition of a culture he later came to understand, "If you take a picture, you take away the soul." She then handed Jake a box of trouble dolls. For a child he loved.

I immediately turned my attention to the dolls, which lay in a jumble on the coffee table. At first glance, there was nothing striking about the six stick figures of paper and wire. Three of them wore woven skirts (one red and blue, one purple, and one blue and white), and three wore pants. Their shirts, each a different color, were made of threads coiled across them like shawls, and they all seemed to have the same face of painted dots and lopsided smiles. In a way, I liked their tininess, though I really did not know what to make of them. I tried standing them up; they fell down. I shook them as if they were dice, then...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: SparkPress
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1943006482
• ISBN 13: 9781943006489
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande