Hello Goodbye - Couverture rigide

Chenoweth, Emily

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1602855390 ISBN 13 : 9781602855397

Editeur : Center Point, 2009

Synopsis

Book by Emily Chenoweth

A propos du livre

Extrait

February 1990  

By the time Helen comes in from her run, the first sparks of dawn, pale orange and chilly, are reaching through the bare trees in the backyard. On the other side of the fence, across a gully cut by a thin creek, the neighboring hospital puffs steam into the morning. From its vents and chimneys and pipes, clouds rise, catching light in their curling forms, turning pink and then fading to white. She slides a filter into the coffeemaker, pours in the last of the dark grounds, and leans against the counter. She’s been dizzy since her last mile, and sometimes when she turns her head quickly, her vision takes a moment to catch up: the breakfast table seems to wobble in the corner, and a silver blob resolves itself belatedly into the refrigerator. Call eye doctor, she scribbles on the grocery list, then adds Folgers below milk and carrots.

 When her daughter came home for winter break, Helen brewed endless pots of coffee; four months of college had turned Abby into a proper addict. She’d become a vegetarian, too, and a quasi- environmentalist, and an earnest proponent of domestic equity. She’d lectured Helen about the necessity of composting and talked at length about “the second shift,” which had something to do with how Helen, like most American women, had to work outside the home as well as make the dinners and do the laundry. 

When Helen went to college, there was Mass every day in the chapel and a dress code; one studied European history, geography, and psychology. Two decades later, her daughter is going to classes with names like “Literature of Conscience” and “Gender, Power, and Identity,” in jeans with sagging knees and sloppy, fraying cuffs. She reads books about poverty and oppression, which she discusses in classrooms with the children of the privileged. Abby considers Helen oppressed, though she will admit that, on the scale of cosmic injustices, her mother doesn’t have all that much to complain about. 

Helen yearns for her daughter when she’s gone, and she knows that Abby misses her, too. If Helen could, she’d go back to college with Abby–not to learn about poststructuralism or semiology, whatever those are, but just to watch her daughter’s life unfolding. She’d live in a different dorm, of course, or even off campus. But she’d be nearby, for support, and maybe sometimes they could meet for tofu burgers at the student- run café. She knows this is ludicrous, but there is no schooling the heart. 

She presses the start button on the coffeemaker, and it begins to make its comforting, burbling noises. The cat stitches itself around her ankles as she stands watching the first drops of coffee fall. Helen nudges her with her toe, but the cat comes back, purring, insistent. “Oh, Pig,” Helen says. “Get a life.” 

She rubs her temples–Honestly, she thinks, maybe I should go lie down again–and then her thoughts turn to Regina McNamara, one of her favorite and most incorrigible kids, busted yesterday for underage drinking in the city park right next to the police station. Helen has been a counselor at the county juvenile court for almost a decade. She knows all the bad kids and all the formerly bad kids, and every time she pumps her gas or goes to the grocery store she runs into one of the reformed; helping them find jobs is one of her specialties.

The coffeemaker hisses and bubbles. She stares at it, willing it to work faster, and in the corner of her eye there is a strange flash, like that of a lightbulb that has popped and burned out. A second later, there is another flare, a jagged red spark. Her headache intensifies. She puts one hand on the counter and with the other touches her brow. She is alert, wary, and her pulse quickens. She blinks and blinks again, holding on to the old avocado Formica counter that she has meant, for years, to have replaced. The light grows brighter. 

There is so much to do–she has to find out Regina’s court date and get Bill Gordon’s transcript and see if she’ll be able to beg him in to Kenyon despite his two turns in juvie (his SAT scores are excellent), and she has to defrost the ground beef for dinner, and she hasn’t called Abby in a whole week– 

Wait, she thinks. Wait. 

But the light doesn’t wait. The light explodes from a star that suddenly rises up from the kitchen sink. It shines in all the colors she has ever seen and in colors that don’t exist on this earth–colors of nebulae or comets, colors of time and gravity. There is a glow that contains an afterglow; there is a light that eats itself and grows brighter. There is a candle burning in the center of a supernova. The light has arms, fingers, wings. The light is splendid, but there is no word for splendid anymore. A great wonder of anguish washes over her. Her hand slips from the counter and she falls down. The sun climbs the trunks of the trees, and the clouds from the hospital billow and pulse and pull themselves apart in the sky. On the counter in the chilly morning, the coffeemaker fills with weak coffee. There is a prism in the window, and soon it will fling rainbows about the room.

August 1990 
Monday
Cupped in its summer valley, ringed by humped blue mountains, the Presidential Hotel rose up like a marooned ocean liner–massive, ornate, and radiantly white. It was five stories tall and, according to the brochure Abby had read, nine hundred feet long, capped with a turreted roof of scarlet tile. It was so spectacular and sudden a vision that Abby, though dulled by hours of dim tree- lined highway, very nearly gasped from the backseat. 

“Voilà,” her father said, winking at her in the rearview mirror. “The best hotel in New Hampshire.” 

Elliott had been calling it that for months–not, Abby thought, because he knew it to be true but because it drove her crazy, and this amused him. He turned in at the ornate iron gates, and they rumbled up a narrow road beneath vine- wrapped lampposts whose globes flickered with gaslight, past a pond edged by daylilies and tall, whispering grasses to the left, and then a smooth green plane of golf course to the right. The driveway curved alongside manicured lawns and flower beds and big granite boulders positioned as deliberately and artfully as sculptures. 

“It looks like that ship–” Abby’s mother said. 

“What ship?” the other two asked. 

“You know,” she said, “that one . . .” Helen watched out the window as they approached, the hotel looming larger and larger. A flag at the roof ’s highest point seemed to pierce the low- lying clouds. 

“Actually, we don’t know,” Abby said. 

Through the bars of the headrest, Abby could see the thin, corded column of her mother’s neck and the trailing ends of the bandanna that she wore instead of a wig. In March, doctors had found an astrocytoma in her frontal lobe, which had stretched, tentacle- like, into the temporal. That explained the headaches, the blurred vision, the elusiveness of familiar words; that was what caused the seizures, which had been the first undeniable indications that something was wrong. 

She’d had high- dose chemotherapy and a course or two of radiation, all while Abby was away at school, and now, during a brief pause in the treatment–time off for good behavior, Elliott joked–they were taking a vacation. Abby, who wanted her mother to rest up for the next therapeutic onslaught, had been against the idea, but she’d discovered that her opinion counted less than it used to. 

Elliott brought the Volkswagen to a rest by the front steps, and the valets lingering beside them uncurled from their slouches and readied themselves to be of service. Helen sat with her purse on her knees, waiting until Elliott came around and reached over her to unbuckle her seat belt. Abby waited, too, enjoying a new and unexpected hopefulness. In a grand place like this, it seemed possible that everything might get a little bit better. She could imagine her father relaxing, her mother feeling stronger, and herself becoming kinder and more attentive. Maybe for a week, she thought, they could all be happy, transformed by the hotel’s elegance and order into superior versions of themselves. 
 “Are you planning on getting out?” Elliott asked Abby. He hadn’t shaved that morning, so there was an uncharacteristic shadow of stubble along his jawline. 

She plucked peanut shells from her lap, dumped them into the ashtray, and then gathered up her backpack and her copy of The Mill on the Floss, a book she’d been assigned last term and hadn’t even opened because she’d taken an incomplete for the course. She might have waited still longer–inside the car, inside that moment of lovely anticipation– but her door swung open and a hand presented itself to her, palm up and fingers outstretched. Beyond the hand she could see a maroon coat from waist to neck, with a double row of brass buttons gleaming like coins. She hesitated, and the hand gave a flick of its fingers. Uncertainly, she plac...

Revue de presse

“This bright, well-crafted novel, set at a family gathering to celebrate a mother whose death is imminent, steers competently away from the maudlin and makes what could be a heavy-handed exploration of mortality instead an entertaining, sometimes delicate story.” (Lydia Millet)

“Chenoweth avoids sentimentality, handling emotions with grace and consummate skill.” (New York Journal of Books)

“Tender....Chenoweth’s affectionate style works marvelously, capturing the decadence of youth.” (New York Times on Hello Goodbye)

“Chenoweth writes with a restraint that allows minor gestures to become elegantly weighted with meaning.” (New Yorker on Hello Goodbye)

“Poignant.” (Boston Globe on Hello Goodbye)

“Elegantly crafted.” (Vanity Fair on Hello Goodbye)

“A tender ode to empathy.... Every page of this book serves as an affirmation of the terrible, wrenching beauty of life.” (Elle Magazine on Hello Goodbye)

“Moving and assured.... Chenoweth’s smart, unsentimental and poignant takes on living and dying ring true, and her exploration of coming-of-age and coming to terms with mortality is divine.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Hello Goodbye)

“An understated debut novel of great beauty and power.” (Kirkus Reviews on Hello Goodbye)

“[Chenoweth] writes gracefully and eloquently of loss and love, portraying both generations at their most self-absorbed and most vulnerable.” (Library Journal on Hello Goodbye)

“A beautiful novel ...Chenoweth’s eye for telling detail is as sure as her language is playful.” (Alice Sebold, author of The Almost Moon and The Lovely Bones, on Hello Goodbye)

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Center Point
• Date d'édition: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1602855390
• ISBN 13: 9781602855397
• Reliure: Relié
• Langue: anglais
• Nombre de pages: 397