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.