Welcome to My Planet by Shannon Olson

Author:Shannon Olson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

At home, my mother and father are just finishing dinner with Conrad, one of my father’s old partners in medicine. It’s a funny thing to see them all sitting at the table together, sipping wine, talking and picking at what’s left on their plates, since, barring Christmas and Easter celebrations with the relatives, my parents haven’t entertained in years.

The last time I saw their friend Conrad his hair was black. Now it’s gray, his wife has left him and he tells my mother and father stories about dating and bachelorhood at sixty.

My mother is eager to show off my brother and me; we are her accomplishments, semiproductive adults working on advanced degrees, not in prison or on welfare. My choice of a boyfriend, one who is friendly and smart, is further proof of her good work, and she sits us down eagerly, telling Conrad a little something about each of us, grabbing coffee cups and retrieving the spongy, boozy trifle from the refrigerator.

There is something incongruous about this dessert—the whipped cream and buttery pudding of it refusing to blend with the rum-soaked sponge cake—your tongue must deal with each thing separately, the whipped cream leaving a slippery, buttery coating on the roof of your mouth, the back of your throat feeling the burn of the rum, which moves through you with a kind of hazy sharpness, an intensity of feeling buffered by the Jell-O pudding.

I am thinking about this as Conrad asks us why we didn’t like The Bridges of Madison County; all the women he is dating now, he says, weep over this book.

Well, basically, I say, it’s Robert Waller’s own narcissistic fantasy about being a sensitive new-age guy and screwing a beautiful farm-wife who isn’t a virgin but is an almost-virgin because she doesn’t love her husband.

“Now see,” says Conrad, “That’s not what the women I know say about the book. They all say it’s a story about finding true love, a companion.”

“Well, I think—” says my mother, who is interrupted by my father.

“But it’s crap,” says my father. “I read this thing in the paper, I think it was by Jon Hassler.”

“Jon Hassler’s a friend of mine,” Conrad says to me, and I nod; my mother moves forward in her chair and places her elbows on the table, raising a finger as if to queue up, or to emphasize a point that was never made.

“Well, so, you should know this,” my father continues. “He just railed against this book, and I thought, Geez, what a strong reaction, and so I read it. All the critics hated it so much, I thought I better read it. And it’s true. I mean, the writing is very simple and plodding and clanky and uninteresting, and I thought, Hell, I could do this.”

My mother moves farther forward, now leaning on the table, her finger still in the air, and begins to take a breath. My brother and boyfriend, not having read the book or seen the movie, are silent. “I thought—” says my mother, who is again interrupted.

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