Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [54]
Claire had been on the radio, three different stations, the morning of her homecoming, and she’d spoken at the high school, a semihonest testament to the instruction she’d received there that enabled her to excel, get out, move to New York, and write a book about her hometown. Many of the students were curious about meeting someone who’d grown up in Bluestone and actually left; a few, seeing in her the idealized fulfillment of their own longing, hung on her every word. It was flattering. Claire felt famous, for once. These students didn’t ask her to explain why she’d called Bluestone—Hatfield, in the book—a “small, dying mill town,” or any of the other mildly critical descriptions in the book of the town’s landscape or social milieu. The hypocrisy and racism she’d depicted, the inclusion of which some of her mother’s friends found deeply offensive, came across to these kids as an interesting history lesson.
Claire had sent her mother a copy of the galleys months earlier, after scrawling a lighthearted disclaimer on the title page—“Remember, Mother, it’s a novel!” —but all Lucinda ever said about it was, “You always did have a peculiar way of looking at things,” and “It’s probably just as well your father isn’t around to see what you have to say about him.” At the book party in New York, Lucinda had seemed flattered by the attention people paid her, even as the ones who’d actually read the book lingered on her face a little too long (searching for signs of melancholy or perhaps the Alzheimer’s that, as Claire had written, ran in the family) or scrutinized her now-veiny hands (at sixteen she’d been a hand model for Joy dishwashing liquid).
They never discussed the specific incidents that Claire had dredged out of the well of her past and laid to dry on the exposed pages of her book—the time her father had hit her mother across the face and Claire called 911; the time Lucinda had gotten sloshed on those blue martinis and went skinny-dipping in a neighbor’s pool with a golfing buddy of her husband’s; the time Lucinda walked in on Claire, at seventeen, having sex in the master bedroom with a minor league baseball player she’d met at a bar. It was as if Lucinda had decided that Claire was a sculptor and she’d created a book that was just a physical object—with its sturdy spine and splashy cover and sans serif typeface—and not what was inside.
Actually, the book was beginning to seem like an object to Claire, too. When she was writing it she couldn’t imagine how she would ever talk about it. Even fictionalized, the revelations felt so intensely personal that she had to pretend to herself that she was writing in a journal; otherwise she’d never have said the things she did. But now that these moments from her life were contained in discrete, tidy chapters, she felt like any salesperson shilling a product. In interviews she said the same things over and over, wavering between candor and subterfuge. She acknowledged painful secrets as if they were someone else’s. And in some ways it felt as if they were—not her secrets anymore, just stories she’d overheard or read or seen on TV.
About a hundred people from Bluestone showed up at the Borders reading that night, an exponentially larger number than Claire had drawn anywhere else. Her mother was there with her sidekick, Martha Belle, and again Claire was struck by the power of her mother’s denial, her steadfast desire to see the book as a thing, a product, rather than the sardonic, barely disguised recollections of a still-wounded daughter. As people filed in, Lucinda situated herself by Claire’s side at the front, greeting friends with the benevolent smile of a proud grandparent: “Come see the baby!” She ignored curious looks and answered insinuating questions with bland responses: “I raised her to have her own opinions,” Lucinda said to anyone who would listen, and, “She’s been her own boss since she was