Guy didn’t show up, although he’d once been a good friend of my father’s. But Juniper was there. She was frazzled, “not centered,” she said, but she sat on the other side of my mother, her back straight, her head tall, dabbing her eyes lightly with a tissue, like a professional mourner. She said to me at one point, “I know something about loss.” And although I wasn’t buying her perfect performance, I believed that she’d become good at suffering because she’d had to.
Of course, I was keeping my eye out for Vivian. Even though the crowd was a nice size, there weren’t enough people for Vivian to blend into. She didn’t go through the reception line. She didn’t sign the book. She kept her red hair tucked up in a wide-brimmed black hat. She wore sunglasses, even indoors. She was taller than I’d imagined her, more sure of herself, too—but that could have been age and experience, not a misinterpretation of Vivian during the summer of ’85 when she was just twenty-four. She was striking in her hat and sunglasses, but then she took off the glasses to wipe her eyes, and when I got a good look at her face, she wasn’t as pretty as I’d envisioned her. It wasn’t just age, either. She was a plain-looking woman who’d always been plain. It was shocking to see her so different from the woman in my imagination, deeply unsettling. It started a chain reaction of doubt, and I could feel the other stories shift restlessly in my brain, a kind of nervous giggle passing through them, whispers of Is this right? Is that?
When she went up to the casket, she put her hand on my father’s chest. She kneeled down and whispered something to him or to God—I couldn’t tell which. And then she left. I wanted to run after her, catch her by the arm, and tell her that she had changed my life, but I couldn’t decide if it was for the better or for the worse. And I also wanted to hug her because I’d always been kind of in love with her and still plagued with that instinct to take care of her, although now it didn’t seem she needed to be taken care of. I realized that maybe it hadn’t been her that I’d wanted to take care of so intensely but myself at fifteen, a kid whose life had suddenly shifted, a kid without bearings; and despite the fact that I suddenly had two fathers, what seemed an abundance, I really had no fathers. I wanted to tell her that I’d tried to become her, in a way, and that part of me would always be her.
But I also wondered if my father had seen something in Vivian, softer, gentler, that had allowed him to tell her things that he couldn’t tell my mother or me. I wonder still if he confided in her about the war, about his leg. It dawned on me while I was sitting there, not running after Vivian Spivy, that I didn’t really know my father, that I couldn’t really know him without knowing that moment of his life. I’ve tried to envision him running the wounded soldiers from the rice fields of the Mekong delta in Vietnam to the camouflaged medical tents, his hands clamped on the stretcher, a soldier’s boots bobbling at his chest, and then, as if hit by a gusted boom, his body thrown to the worn field where bloated water buffalo rotted, hooves reaching—and his leg, scattered clumps of wet red flowers, sun-polished, dazzling. I imagined him waking up every morning, his fake leg propped up, leaning casually against the wall. It always shocked me as a young girl when I came across it unattached, like part of a lover I might have one day. And for him, what was it like for my father to see this unaging reminder, his fake leg always pink and young? I wanted to know if he had told Vivian his secrets.
But, as I said, I didn’t charge after her. My mother wasn’t steady. She didn’t see Vivian and I don’t think she remembers the funeral much at all. She was a statue of herself, almost stone. She let people hug her, shake her hand, but she didn’t respond to them. At one point during the priest’s eulogy, she grabbed my hand. She said, “Help me, Lissy. I’m drifting up. I cannot breathe.” I thought back to that first night my father was gone, how in the kitchen I felt we were underwater, and then of my mother almost drowning in the convent pool. I thought, She wants to be saved, but from what? Drowning or surviving? I held her hand in my lap. I wrapped my arm around her arm. I said, “I won’t let go.”
After everyone had filed out and my mother had been helped into the backseat of Juniper’s car, I went up to the casket alone to say my good-byes. I didn’t want to see my father dead. I was afraid I’d see him as my mother had last seen her father, the rosy-cheeked formaldehyde-steeped version. I expected a chorus girl, something shrunken and doll-like. But I had to see for myself. I put both hands on the edge of the casket and tipped forward slowly. The body looked like him, but sagged, lifeless. I decided then to remember him not as this stiffened version in its suit and tie, but as a gardener, the way I’d last seen him, steady but uncertain, concerned about the thickness of the hedge and if the rain would hold off long enough for him to get through the row. His uncertainty, his nervousness is one that comes from experience, not the way we usually think of experience and certainty but equally true. I loved my father, and I cried softly alone at his casket because I wished that I had told him that I was his child, because that’s the truth I’ve chosen, that he was going to be a grandfather, which would have made him intensely proud, and, too, because it seemed profoundly unfair that my father’s nobility was unremarkable. I would have liked there to have been a more glorious death, a more glorious rite. But, like Joseph’s passing, my father’s passing was quiet, biblically overlooked. I think if people tried to live their lives like Joseph, not Jesus, capable of difficult common commitments, like fatherhood and marriage, not expecting reward, not expecting their sacrifice to grant them a seat at God’s abundant table, the world would be a better place. I still cry when I think of my father. I close my eyes tight and I can still see him, poised with clippers over the hedge, looking up at the sky, the distant rolling clouds.
When my mother can’t sleep, she calls me up late at night for girl talk. Tonight, she says, “Lissy, do you think my hair’s too weak to hold another permanent?” Her hair is overworked, brittle at best. I sit up in bed, prop the pillows behind my back.
“No, your hair’s fine. Go for it.”
Church is gone, working his way across the country in a rented Winnebago with Matt, who’d just gotten back together with Sue, the ab roller issue resolved and forgiven if he’d move out of his parents’ basement. Matt agreed but threw in the trip with Church, to postpone the inevitable. Before Church went to pick up Matt a few days ago, he double-parked the motor home outside my apartment building, leaving only the narrowest strip for angry drivers to pass through. He gave me a walking tour of the cramped facilities. I was wearing an oversize shirt to hide my slightly pouched belly. I’m four months along. I knew that by the time he came back, I wouldn’t have to tell him. It would be obvious. I’d wait until then.
“So what are you going to be when you grow up?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t mind declaring something dead. You know, being famous for that.”
“God’s already dead,” I said.
“Yes, and history is ending. I’ve read it in the Times. And science is dead; well, there’s a rumor going around about it at MIT—a friend of mine goes to grad school there. It’ll come out in the science section sometime soon. Literature’s dead, of course, poetry especially. It’s a hot ticket.”
“Could you declare death dead?”
“That’s nice. Death is dead.”
“But can you pull it off? I’m still looking for a loophole.”
“Like Nietzsche really pulled off killing God. It’s just a declaration.”
“Youth could be dead. Being young didn’t feel like being young.”
“How about culture?” he said, and then we laughed. “Culture is dead in America!” We slapped our knees and then we fell silent a minute. Church got serious. “Why don’t you come with me?”
“What? I can’t come, Church!” I said, my eyes wide, incredulous. But, really, I considered it for a split second, imagined selling my sturdy Buick, putting everything in storage, and riding out across country, heading west, a seemingly endless frontier, in Church’s shiny Winnebago. My nesting instinct woul
d kick in. I’d stitch curtains by hand, little tiny ones to match the windows, and booties for the baby. But no, I couldn’t. I knew too much. “I can’t just trade one insanity for another,” I said. “I have to stick to my own insanity. I’m trying to ride it out.”
“Oh,” he said. “I guess so.” And he put his hands on his hips, looked around his little Winnebago, and smiled broadly, saying, triumphantly, “God, I feel so American middle class!”
I imagined somewhere down the road, Church would cover the extra toilet paper roll with Ruby’s red, white, and blue toilet paper cover crocheted circa 1976. He’d string up the fridge magnet of Jesus and hang it on the rearview mirror and cruise across country, sipping beer out of Dino’s beer-can baseball hat. As he pulled the Winnebago out, he waved wildly and beeped the horn to the tune of “shave and a haircut, two bits.” It was, so far, his crowning achievement, his most glorious hour.
When my mother calls tonight, I’m alone, the bed empty. There’s no lover to roll over (this never was my love story), no husband to pat my leg to acknowledge the good-daughter role I can’t seem to beat. My breasts are tender. I keep one hand on the soft pouch of my stomach. When I tell her, she will help me. I know this. She will be wonderful and say all the right things, because she knows exactly what I want to hear. I want to be sure that when I tell her, though, I am already strong, that I no longer need to hear the things she’ll say, although I’ll still want to.
My mother tells me how she saw Mrs. Defraglia scurrying around in her backyard wearing a thin white nightgown, calling, “Kitty, kitty, kitty,” and that now she can’t fall back to sleep. “It reminds me of my mother,” she says. “At the alley door, that last time.” She believes now that we all confuse one thing for another. My grandfather confused selflessness with love, and my grandmother confused love with weakness, and my mother says, “I’ve been guilty of both.” She adds, “Don’t let me define love for you.” But I believe they are all right, that love is selfless, it is a weakness, a giving in, a constant falling, something I am just beginning to understand.
Eventually, my mother asks tonight as she always does, “Why don’t you come and visit with me for a while?”
“I have to go to work tomorrow. I live six hours away,” I remind her.
Sometimes, like tonight, she cries and whispers, “We never said a word. Year after year, we held our breath.” It’s hard on her now, all of that silence. She worries if that silence was really saying what she thought it was saying. I remind her sometimes of the advice she gave me before my father showed up after the summer that never happened, not to stare at spilled milk, and now it seems all we do together is pour it on the floor and ponder. Nothing is ever wiped clean. She has regrets.
And I suppose my father did, too. Tonight I imagine him coming out of Vivian’s place on Hamilton Avenue, how he shuts the door gently behind himself because she is still sleeping and takes a few steps toward the car before he notices it—my mother’s big blue station wagon. For a split second, it just seems out of place, a dull, ordinary object, a simple explanation; then slowly it washes over him, that my mother has been there, that she knows. He runs his hand along the hood, steps inside, and starts the car with the extra set of her keys on his ring. He adjusts the seat for his long legs and sits there in the idling car for a long time, before he goes back inside to wake Vivian, to begin what he thinks is a new life. Tonight my mother says, “Our mistakes lead us to grace.”
But she doesn’t regret what she says was the most important thing—and this is the part of the story I try to remember, the one moment I try to hold inside of me like a tea light floating in water; maybe with effort, it can become my own brand of faith—how late during the summer that never happened, when my mother and I were home again in Keene, she heard a car in the driveway. I can see her now as she walks downstairs to the front door and turns on the porch light. She opens the door to find her husband. I imagine them blinking like two unlikely saints caught in a brilliant halo. It is a confession, repentance, forgiveness. They are both desperate, both afraid. It’s the way we should live our lives.
She says, “What are you doing out there? Come in. It’s late.” And he steps inside.
Tonight my mother is quiet. I can hear the thin static of the line between us. Out on the street, people are laughing; in the distance, a car alarm. My mother says, “I’m surprised to find myself alone. I still expect him to come to bed.”
I say, “It’s funny how a life suddenly becomes your own.” And then I imagine us again as swimmers, now at night, alone, our wet heads moonlit. This time we’re calm. Our toes push off the silty floor, and we let our bodies rise. This time, we aren’t stretching away from the water. We let the water hold us up, a buoyancy the child inside of me already knows, by instinct. We drift on our backs, stare up at the sky, the fattening moon. We wonder how we couldn’t have known it before, how to give in, to float.
girl
talk
Julianna Baggott
A Readers Club Guide
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The following questions and author interview are intended
to help you find interesting and rewarding approaches
to your reading of Julianna Baggott’s Girl Talk.
We hope this guide enriches your enjoyment
and appreciation of the book.
For a complete listing of our Readers Club
Guides, or to read the guides online, visit
ReadingGroups.SimonandSchuster.com/
A Conversation with Julianna Baggott
Q: One of the most refreshing things about Girl Talk is its unique combination of so many different themes and genres. It is at once an exploration of memory, a coming-of-age story, a comedy of contemporary manners, a love story, and, of course, an engaging portrait of the mother-daughter relationship. What inspired you to tell this particular story? And how do you describe your novel to people?
A: I don’t think I ever once thought to myself: I’m going to sit down and write a memory-exploring, coming-of-age, comedy of manners/love story about mothers and daughters. I have an instinct to collect things—not Hummels or snow globes, but memories, small moments in my life. My mother once woke me up to ask me if her bathing suit was flattering. I tagged it and put it on a shelf in my brain. It slipped its way into an essay. The essay became a short story about a woman waking her daughter for a girl talk that leads them one night to try to catch her husband in an affair. I mused: what if it wasn’t just one night, but if he disappeared for an entire summer? The plot exploded. I had a novel. While writing it, I rummaged all the tagged shelves in my brain and took down all the things that seemed to fit, and all the while, I never forgot my mother in her bathing suit. I never forgot that these were real people in a very real world.
Q: Lissy is charming and funny and twisted and poetic. But what really makes her work as a compelling protagonist is that she’s also so very ordinary: her perspective is so easy to identify with; her ambivalent reactions to her mother’s behavior during “the summer that never happened” are so real; and her preoccupation with the past is poignant and, I think, universal. Did her voice, and her choices, come easily to you?
A: At times, Lissy was very easy for me. I enjoyed writing her hysterical scene with Peter and the “Love that Lemon” campaign, her harangues about Freudian theory, and the dialogues with Church were pure pleasure. And a number of aspects of Lissy come from my own life (for example, although I’m married with three kids, I’ve spent a small fortune on unwarranted as well as warranted pregnancy tests). But Lissy was often a witness to what was going on. Like I am as a writer, she stood back and watched, and I wanted to make sure that she wasn’t on the sidelines, but really present, and so I had to go back through, making sure she was speaking her mind, reacting and being reacted to.
Q: Along with novel and short-story writing, you’re an acclaimed poet, a fact that is abundantly evident in the vivid imagery that fills Girl Talk. Does either type o
f writing come more easily to you? In what ways does your poetry feed your fiction, and vice-versa?
A: I’m a cross-trainer. When I get bored of sprinting, I do a marathon. When I get too wearied by the marathon, I go back to sprinting. I find it liberating to have an idea, an image, an eavesdropped conversation and to be able to decide what genre it’s most suited for. There are images that repeat no matter what I’m writing, including essays and screenplays. My poems are more personal, more autobiographical. One friend has called my book of poems “a backstage pass to my fiction.” I don’t think my poems would be happy to be dismissed as such, but I understood exactly what she meant when she said it.
Q: There are many moments in Girl Talk when you manage to convey so much emotion with very few words. For example, the scene when Dino realizes that Lissy is Anthony’s daughter. He doesn’t really analyze—he just reacts by immediately hugging her. Tell us about your choices in writing scenes like this? Is this an instance of your poetic instincts coming to the fore?
A: This scene is pure theater. My father has a stack of index cards which list every production from po-dunk community theaters to Broadway that he and my mother have ever seen. To many, many of them I was dragged along. My sister, who’s nine years older, was a struggling actress living in New York by the time I was ten. My parents took me to the city to see all of her shows, including the ones where you had to cross the stage to get to the only bathroom. I love theater, and writing this scene was purely an act of bringing five irritable people, each with a strong motive, to one spot and letting them duke it out. As for Dino, he isn’t an analyzer, by nature. He got the answer he’d been angling for. He hugged Lissy. He’s an emotional man.