Cassandra at the Wedding (offload 15)

'Cassandra at the Wedding' by Dorothy Baker is described as a 'classic' inside the cover. It is almost a coming of age story, though Cassandra is in her twenties and travelling home to attend her adored twin sister's wedding. It is a lovely period piece of 60s affluent middle class America, told in first person by Cassandra as she tries to make sense of her feelings of abandonment and that her unconventionality made her feel a little like an outsider in her own family. 

The girls have always done everything together but Judith's moving away has left Cassandra adrift, unable to settle and finish her thesis, her sense of self and direction collapsed. She makes multiple oblique references to suicide, that kind of hang there, almost petulantly as the days pass. I guess, as with coming of age stories, the protagonist is utterly self-absorbed, but because of the twin thing, her sister is also part of her self-absorption. She is indecisive, drifting. The plans she and Judith had made have been abandoned, and it's almost as if the apparently abrupt decision by her sister to marry has bought her lack of direction sharply into focus. They are obviously a close knit little group, their mother having dies only a few years previously, leaving the girls with their introverted father and elderly grandmother. When she arrives home with some trepidation but it received warmly and enthusiastically, and she doesn't know how to articulate what had become seething anger. 

Here she tries to rebuff her sister's care having gotten a little sunburned on her journey:

"I inhaled again, drank again, and told her that there were a lot of things I didn't know, and one of them was why women have to be the way they seem to have to be, always wanting to make somebody eat something or talk to somebody on the telephone or smear something on their sunburn. And in the winter put on a coat.

'There's probably a school for wives,' I said, 'but you don't need to go.'

I felt better, and I looked at her obliquely to see if she felt worse, but there was no way to tell. She looked very calm and thoughtful, and after a while she gave an answer. Quite good.

'Go ahead. Blister and break.'

'Good idea, I'll do it.'

'And don't eat. Drink.'

There again, I thought, say it twice and underline it. The emblem of good women is always this anxiety about drinking - other people's drinking. And I know ew why. Because alcohol releases truth and truth is something good women never care to hear. It frightens them. They only want to hear clichés about how lovely it is to be home again, and what an exciting occasion this is, not only a glad reunion but a wedding thrown in, and may I please take a peek inside the hope chest, Pandora's box? That's what they want - my sister no less than the most uxorious of them." (p.59)

So the next day Judith drives off to collect her young man, Cassandra petulantly misnaming him in the story because she resists thinking of him as a real person, and Cassandra is left to her own devices with a disconcerting selection of medications. 

"I picked up the clutch bag, and possibly from association, clutched it - held it tight against me, as if it were a doll, and rocked it a little. I don't think I sang to it or anything quite so far out as that, but I do know I had a sense of having found a lost pet or teddy bear, one I couldn't really do without. I thought how nice it was to have an inanimate friend, one that can't get in a car and go roaring off to Bakersfield and places like that. This kind may hide under the bed and give you a bad time for a while, but it doesn't really run out on you. It stays where it is and waits until you find it, or Conchita finds it, and then it's back with you, just as it was. Just as it was, but I felt I should do a little checking anyhow, so I unsnapped it, then unzipped it, and then unzipped an inner pocket and dumped three bottles out on the bedspread. The bottles were full: there was God's own plenty, all with numbers across the top, and dosage and usage overtly described: 'One every six hours as needed for sleep,' and 'One capsule no oftener than every four hours as needed.' I understood the reticence of the last one, I thought. It would be difficult for a great many pharmacists to write: 'as needed for zest', or 'as needed for zeal', or 'as needed to encourage the minimum of tolerance for the brute stupidities of this world'. It would also go against the grain to write simply 'Pep pills'. Apothecaries have their own sensitivities and some of them cannot go beyond a gentle 'as needed.'" (p.150-151)

After that the story unfolded a little predictably, but I enjoyed it because the voice was very authentic and honest. I don't think you find first person very often and I think it's hard to do because it focusses so hard on the one character and you only get the other people more obliquely, but I like the way it feels slightly more inside the story, rather than looking in on it.

Also this last week I have been listening to  'Swimming in the Monsoon Sea' by Shyam Selvadurai about a young Sri Lankan boy Amrith and a turbulent summer spent rehearsing Othello and discovering unexpected feelings as he gets to know his Canadian cousin. A lovely atmospheric book with warm lovely characters, and some mean judgy people, and the fraught clashing of the modern world with the more traditional Sri Lankan social attitudes. Amrith is beholden to his Uncle Lucky and Auntie Bundle because his parent's relationship was disapproved of (though they are the lovely warm people fortunately), and this has a huge impact on his life and the way he feels about himself. But when I thought more about it I realised that of course in western culture people are also judged for their social background, and ostracised, often for choices that their parents made, it's just that when you have more economic and social freedom it will perhaps have less of an impact on your life chances. 

Stay safe. Be kind. Get those overdue books back to the library.

Reviews in Reverse (14 days to Offload) - Okay is Underrated

 

'The Emperor of Gladness' by Ocean Vuong is already late back to the library and a queue of people are waiting impatiently to read it, so I am starting with the most recently read from the book pile. It was read mostly back and forth on the train to Devon, but not much while I was there because Claire and I were too busy pottering about and pretending to be retired (well I was pretending, she is semi-retired).

I love this kind of story; people going through some kind of crisis find each other, and go through their crisis together. It's not all neat and happy ending, just human beings muddling along and making what they can of life. Hai is at the end of his tether. He is grieving. He has lied to his mum, and not just about the little things. Grazina has spotted him on the bridge, and is pretending (it turns out) to be trying to hang out laundry. The elderly frail Lithuanian is having trouble keeping her carers and after she has offered some words of solace and advice she invites him to stay. She thinks his name is Hello, so she calls him Labas, which means hello in Lithuanian. So for a while they muddle along together, her with a meagre pension and him working at HomeMarket with his cousin Sony, and Hai creating an alternate reality where he is rescuing her from the Nazis when Grazina's dementia episodes leave her huddled and terrified. 

"He stood watching Grazina sleep under the photo of herself half a century ago, her face, the only part of her that wasn't covered, grey and compressed and smeared with strawberry jam. What did he know about her illness, after all, other than that four of the thirteen pills she took each day were supposed to 'subdue' it, like some sort of criminal in her head? How could he have known that her brain was actually collapsing slowly inside her skull, how this made little holes, which then made new neural connections and scrambled old ones? It must be like water, he thought, as the morning rose up around them. It must be like the lake she talked about. Diving under the surface until everything was muted and gauzed but still there. He listened to her wheezy breaths, and imagined a tiny fire scratching inside her. A little torch that forgot it was not supposed to burn underwater. Because to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering. The idea made him sick. And without knowledge of his own legs moving beneath him, he crossed the hall to his bedroom, fished the contact lens case from his jacket pocket, and , having been sober for forty-seven days, tossed the Perc and codeines back in one gulp, then returned to where Grazina lay slumped in the jeep." (p.110)

As much as he saves her, she also saves him. She is just a person with no expectations, and so he never fears disappointing her. Here he finally tells her about Noah:

"He told her of their friendship, of the days driving aimlessly in a truck through a town far, far away from Europe, from Germany, called East Gladness. How they'd walk for hours through the pines, the back lots of that rusted strip of earth, singing in adolescent voices that crackled like wartime radios. About the pools of clear water that rose over the cattails and sweetgrass in the junkyards after a storm, how once they swam in a shallow tub made from the rainwater collected in a dent in the roof of an old school bus. And the water was so clear, so sweet, your skin looked truer that it did on the surface, warped and magnified by the tiny current they made from their scavenged laughter. He told of Noah's barn, where they knew the wrong inside them was the only thing that made sense of where they grew up, where the gods, after flipping the tables from losing their bets, left them alone to make a fugitive life. That a boy beside a boy could form an island of 'okayness.' 'With him,' he said, 'it wasn't that I was happy - but that I was okay. And okay is even better than happy because I thought it had a better chance of lasting.' He turned and was startled to find her staring right at him. 'Okay is underrated...' " (p.315)

The cast of characters at HomeMarket also have their own issues but equally they provide caring for each other: the manager BJ who is a part-time wrestler, Hai's cousin Sony who is obsessed with the Civil War, Wayne, Maureen and even the unnamed washing up girl. Here, surreally, they borrow a van to go to the site of Sony's father's untimely death on a roadside in Vermont:

"Hai could tell, from the faint throb in Sony's neck, that the boy was trying hard to hold it in. BJ's shadow slid across the dried leaves and covered Sony like a cape. She cupped the boy's head with her hand, as if to hold him in place, before reaching down to hug him. He turned into her embrace as Maureen took the headrest into her arms bouncing it like a living baby. Hai came forward, his mouth partly open, and threw his arms around the huddled group, his face buried in BJ's enormous back as the branches clicked above them in a spring gale. These people, bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen that was never truly a kitchen, paid just above minimum wage, their presence known to each other mostly through muscle memory, the shape of their bodies ingrained into the psyche from hours of periphery manoeuvring through the narrow counters and back rooms of a fast-food joint designed by a corporate architect, so that they would come to know the sound of each other's coughs and exhales better that those of their kin and loved ones. They, who owe each other nothing but time, the hours collectively shouldered into a shift so that they might finish on time, now brought to their knees in a forest to gather around a half-burnt headrest of a Nissan Maxima on a Tuesday in mid-April, their bodies finally touching, a mass of labor cobbled together by a boy's hallowed loss - on the clock." (p.366)

After a visit to Lucas, Grazina's son, who turns out to be real and not imagined as Hai had wondered, their ramshackle existence is threatened by his plan to move his mother and sell her house. They try to stave off the inevitable, inevitably.

Stay safe. Be kind. Read some really good writing.