Objects of Desire by Clare Sestanovich

Author:Clare Sestanovich [Sestanovich, Clare]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

The morning after her birthday, Debbie listens to all of her voicemails. Some of them are voices she hasn’t heard all year. The childhood friend, the college friend, the office friend. The friend from architecture school who pulled all-nighters with her, both of them weeping silently over their cardboard. The friend from a long-ago pregnancy class, whose twins were sucked out of her.

Debbie’s sisters—two of them, plus a sister-in-law—leave messages from the car, the yard, the kitchen. A microwave beeps insistently in the background. A baby gets on the phone. Birfday. Her sisters are all grandmothers now. They say it’s the best job they’ve ever had, which isn’t saying much: they haven’t worked since they got married. One of them lives around the corner from her daughter, who is raising three kids—triplets—all by herself, who spent all her savings on fertility treatments that promised just one. Sometimes, the daughter said, you get more than you bargained for.

Debbie’s own mother had never pretended to enjoy being a grandmother. She told Tim to call her by her first name. Let’s just be friends, Debbie heard her tell him once, when he was still a baby. She visited on holidays, wrote him postcards, promised to take him to Istanbul, her favorite place in the world—but she drew the line at babysitting. She’d done her share of parenting. Debbie’s father, she said, had been a kind of child, too.

This year is the year Debbie outgrows her mother—turns the age she never reached. Until now, it had been a small reassurance to know that the two of them had undergone the same effects of time. Her mother’s life didn’t look much like Debbie’s: she’d married, divorced, married again; she’d applied for her first job when she was forty years old. But she knew all the things Debbie wanted to learn. How to get from one year to the next, how to wait and weather, how—sometimes—to change. Her hair lost its color. She wore shoes that were good for her knees and clothes that were plainer and plainer over time. She believed in being ready—she had a condo without stairs, a detailed will—and she believed in being honest.

“Aging,” her mother said, “means realizing everyone can live without you.” A pause, and then she added, “Will live without you.”

She insisted that she was lucky to get sick before she was really dispensable. Debbie’s sisters told her she was still young, and she said—old enough. She did chemo and something experimental and then she said stop.

Would her mother have gotten rid of her uterus? Would she have wanted Debbie to get rid of hers? They were different questions, weren’t they? Debbie stares at the phone and wishes she could conjure up her mother’s voice. Wishing makes her a child again, stranded in a dark room, in a big crowd, on an airplane for the first time. She still has so many things to ask. What happens next?

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.