The Good People of New York by Thisbe Nissen

Author:Thisbe Nissen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780375413476
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2001-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

AT THE EMMONS School, a short local bus ride from the house, Ben is in the eleventh grade, Miranda the ninth, and Jenny eighth. Jenny is nice enough, if somewhat bland and uninspiring—kind of like her father, Miranda thinks. She’s a girl who owns Fair Isle sweaters and argyle socks and drinks from juice boxes even when she’s at home. And whether Ben is a product of his mother, Felice, whom Miranda has never met, or simply a freak of nature, a slap in the face of his own DNA, he is certainly unlike the rest of his family, at least as far as Miranda is concerned. Ben is a guitarist, but not in the every-teenage-boy-fancies-himself-to-be-Jimi-Hendrix sort of way; Ben just plays the guitar, all the time, alone in his basement. He’s a mournful boy, always hiding behind his overgrown hair, sullen and cautious, watching. He’s very private, it seems. But if Miranda sits in the far corner of the living room, in the chair next to the heating vent, she can hear very well down into his basement den, and she can listen to him singing old Townes Van Zandt songs, John Prine, scores and scores of Dylan. Sometimes the songs he picks out on the strings are fragments; stilted and tentative enough that Miranda imagines he is composing as he goes, and she imagines how it would be to have him write a song for her, about her, torn and tortured over a love that he knows he cannot have. In Miranda’s mind Ben is like Joni Mitchell, pouring his simple sorrow through the soundhole on his knee. Lately it seems he is forever playing that Neil Young song, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” and when she hears it, she feels it is something unspoken between them, a code, a bond. Ben, Miranda decides, is the reason behind all of this—the move to Brooklyn, everything. Whether or not Steven Stone is her mother’s boat to end all life-mate boats, it seems fatedly and cosmically and unquestionably clear: this has all happened because Miranda and Ben are meant for one another.

He doesn’t socialize much—not in the house at least—so it’s hard to get to spend any time around Ben at all. He rarely eats dinner with the rest of them, and seems to operate on a schedule that, no matter how much Miranda alters her own—either slowing down or speeding to the breakfast table each morning, then dawdling like mad, walking different routes to the bus stop—she cannot manage to overlap. It’s not that he’s unfriendly, or dismissive, or curt, he just always seems to be so far away, and all Miranda can think is that she wants to go to that place too—wherever Ben is. Miranda’s world, which had felt a little unruly there for a while, is suddenly very very small and very very neat. She does not have to think about her mom, or her dad, or her creepy orthodontist, or the friends she’s left behind, the new friends she has yet to make .

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