At Home in the World by Joyce Maynard

Author:Joyce Maynard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

Chapter Ten

MY PARENTS COME to visit. I’m not so young that I don’t recognize that at age fifty my mother might find Jerry Salinger an enormously appealing and attractive partner for herself. She is a woman who crackles with artistic, intellectual, creative, and sexual frustration. For twenty years she has lived a substantial part of her life through the accomplishments and experiences of her daughters, never more so than she does right now. She is oddly accepting of my apparent choice, at eighteen, to leave behind everything I ever said I cared about for life on the mountaintop with Jerry. She chooses her words carefully, and has chosen the word “enchanted” to describe her feeling about him.

Although our family lives just sixty miles south of Cornish, my parents almost never make a drive this long or far. Our annual trip to Ogunquit Beach, in Maine, involved a journey of some thirty miles each way, but produced so much anxiety about traffic, highways, and dangerous drivers on the roads that my father would get us up even earlier than usual so we could “beat the traffic.”

I want desperately for the three adults I love best in the world to like and respect one another. I want Jerry to see how funny and smart my parents are. I want my mother to like Jerry’s house, although I can’t imagine showing my parents the bedroom where I sleep with Jerry.

My father emerges from the car like an astronaut from a space capsule after an exceedingly trying orbit. He and my mother set out over two hours earlier, as I knew they would, to beat the traffic heading to Cornish. They arrive a few minutes before noon. My father is wearing corduroy pants and a Viyella shirt, with an ascot and a fedora hat. My mother wears a red suit and high heels, and a matching felt hat with a feather.

For the first time I see my parents through Jerry’s eyes. They look faintly pathetic—my father in his shabby oxfords, my mother overdressed in her too-tight suit. Jerry, in blue jeans and an L. L. Bean sweater, betrays no sign of condescension. He greets my parents with the grace and courtliness of the leader of a major world power. He kisses my mother and shakes my father’s hand.

“You must be very proud of Joyce,” he says warmly. “You could just sit back and rest on your laurels for the rest of your lives after producing a daughter like this one.”

“Joyce was always a brilliant girl,” my father says.

“Rona, too,” says my mother. “In fact, Rona talked at nine months. We thought Joyce was a little slow, by comparison.… I made a tape of Rona singing in French when she was just eighteen months old. I suppose Joyce has told you that a story of Rona’s was mentioned in Best American Short Stories of 1964.”

We show them into the house. My father studies a landscape hanging on Jerry’s living room wall that I know he will regard as second rate, or worse.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.