One for Sorrow, Two for Joy by Elise Juska

Author:Elise Juska
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2007-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

Claire stands in front of the phone in the Conneelys’ upstairs hallway. It’s nearly 4:00 in Ireland. 11:00 in New Hampshire. On a Friday, Bob would be leaving for the institute at noon. She can’t call him there and risk making small talk with Margie. Claire can only imagine what’s being said about her at the institute—the gossip scurrying through the department, the sympathetic looks Bob must be attracting from secretaries and faculty wives and female researchers who don’t know how to turn their ovens on.

She stares at the phone, black with a thick cord and rotary dial. From downstairs, she hears the Conneelys’ after-school scrambling, a kettle whistling, the barking of a dog and backdrop of the TV. Logic would dictate the distance should make this call more manageable, Bob just a speck in a far-off time zone, but it is the opposite; in the distance Bob is abstract, intimidating. When he answers, what will she say? She just needs to let him know she arrived safely. She should have done it sooner; she promised, in the note. Bob has probably been calculating time differences and flight times and the thought makes her feel guilty, but more than that, vaguely repelled, the image so raw and sad.

Claire stares at a wall of built-in shelves; it is the wall she always dreamed of having. The books are messy and disorganized, genuinely slipshod, their spines seamed and bindings sprouting white threads. Behind her is Lillian’s bedroom, the door closed. To her right, a grandfather clock supplies an ominous ticking. Claire thinks of how many conversations she and Bob should have had, all the practice they needed leading up this one. It’s no wonder, in New Hampshire, she was diagnosed a tooth grinder. “We’ve got a grinder here!” Dr. Howarth had shouted to his assistant, as if alerting her to a feisty fish on his line. Dr. Howarth was a “rural dentist,” which meant his assistant was his wife and his office was on the first floor of their two-story home. The office was often permeated by the sounds of kids playing and the smells of dinners cooking, ham hanks and video games and the front screen door slapping. He recommended that Claire try sleeping with her mouth hanging open—before they resorted to anything “trickier”—but, she thinks, had he been a real dentist, he would have peered in there and seen the true culprits, extracted the little rabble-rousers one by one: The unhad conversation the morning Claire blew the tire. The evening of the dinner party. The day Bob told her he was offered the institute job.

It was a January afternoon, snow-crusted and freezing, the kind Claire would grow to dread in New Hampshire but in school—and maybe, in the course of one’s life, this could be true only in school—made her feel brainy, cozy, and content. She was curled up on her bed studying when Bob arrived at her door. “I have news,” he said.

He must have been running. He was slightly out of breath, snowflakes still melting into his hair.

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