The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer

Author:Meg Wolitzer [Wolitzer, Meg]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FICTION, Desire, Man-woman relationships, Contemporary Women, Family Life, Women - Sexual behavior, Erotica, Sexual behavior, Women
ISBN: 9781594487880
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2011-04-04T21:00:00+00:00

10.

The entire Chorus of Women had been a real disappointment, Ms. Heller told them, and they all deserved to be replaced. “February is much sooner than you think, people, and just look at you,” the drama teacher said in a frantic pitch as she paced back and forth before the stage. The girls stood in a row, slouching and yawning from general exhaustion and being yelled at. They didn’t want to displease their drama teacher, who could be very difficult, but whose opinion mattered to them. Willa Lang, second from the right, had given up on getting Eli’s mother to really like her. Ms. Heller was not particularly nice to Willa, and various cast members had noticed this and mentioned it to her. She had made her peace with it, though, for what mattered to her was only that Eli still liked her. She thought about him all the time; it was debilitating to think about someone so much.

Even now, at rehearsal, it was as if they were together the entire time, for while Willa stood onstage under the hard white lights, he was there in her brain, observing her onstage, taking in the full length of her. Willa was among the girls who were “a real disappointment.” Though she had been to every rehearsal, her attention was only intermittently in ancient Athens; more to the point, it was here in Stellar Plains, on the old sofa in the furnished basement of the Hellers’ house, with Eli.

Thinking about him onstage, she half-smiled serenely to herself.

“Willa, what’s funny?” Fran Heller asked, positioning herself right below Willa Lang and peering upward.

“Nothing. Sorry.”

Later, on Farrest together, with Willa as the ninja and Eli as the centaur, she wrote him about how his mother seemed so critical of her lately.

“obviously she doesnt like me,” she said.

“i cant imagine why not. u r exceedingly likeable,” he wrote.

They were about to say goodbye and log out for the night, when he casually told her that Ms. Cutler had called him into her office and said that she was paying special attention to him; that he could probably go to Harvard or Yale on a scholarship, and that all he had to do was keep his eye on the prize, whatever that meant. Willa didn’t know how she was supposed to respond, so she didn’t say anything. A little later, she went downstairs to get ice cream, and there were her parents sitting on the couch in the den under that awful yellow piece of cloth, already eating ice cream themselves. Some British mystery show was on TV. “Come join us!” called Willa’s mother.

“Can’t,” Willa said. She left her parents there, their disembodied heads eating ice cream and watching TV, and she barely noticed anything about them. They were her parents; that was all she knew, and all she needed to know. She loved them, but she didn’t think about them as much as she used to, or even very much at all. Willa climbed the stairs.

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.