The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [0]
THE AGE OF GRIEF
“Impressive.… Sharp portraits of marriages and other family-style relationships.… Smiley makes it all happen with the unobtrusive control that one comes to rely on her for.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“An absorbing collection.”
—Newsday
“The author masterfully creates convincing, sympathetic characters and compelling situations. Her graceful, sincere style illuminates delicate internal perceptions and memories, creating vivid images for our deepest fears and dreariest routines.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Artful.… Smiley … is equally adept at probing the inner lives of her characters and simultaneously anchoring them in externalized reality.… And because she usually eschews exotic characters, most of us can comprehend what she is driving at in terms of our own lives.”
—The Kansas City Star
Jane Smiley
THE AGE OF GRIEF
Jane Smiley is the author of ten works of fiction, including The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love & Good Will, A Thousand Acres (for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award), Moo, and Horse Heaven. She lives in northern California.
ALSO BY JANE SMILEY
Horse Heaven
The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
Moo
A Thousand Acres
Ordinary Love & Good Will
Catskill Crafts
The Greenlanders
Duplicate Keys
At Paradise Gate
Barn Blind
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JUNE 2002
Copyright © 1977, 1981, 1984, 1986, 1987 by Jane Smiley
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1987.
Some stories in this work were originally published in the following publications: The Atlantic, Mademoiselle, and TriQuarterly.
“The Age of Grief” was originally published in The Quarterly, Vol. I, Spring 1987. Copyright © 1987 by Jane Smiley.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Smiley, Jane.
The age of grief.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78727-9
I. Title.
PS3569.M39A7 1987 813’.54 87-45120
www.anchorbooks.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
The Pleasure of Her Company
Lily
Jeffrey, Believe Me
Long Distance
Dynamite
The Age of Grief
The Pleasure of
Her Company
W hen Florence comes up the sidewalk toward her duplex, she can see that the large Victorian house just to the south has new owners. It is the one lovely place on her otherwise undistinguished block—porched, corniced, many-peaked, and recently painted Nordic blond with piqué white trim. Each of these last few evenings she has admired, as she does tonight, how neatly the trim glows in the twilight. She threads her way past boxes and pieces of furniture the owners have left on the sidewalk. There are two piles of women’s clothing. Dishes and cutlery are stacked beside the curb, and a slender-legged plant stand supports two ferns and a grape ivy. A brown box, its lid agape, contains the Oxford English Dictionary, abridged edition, and two Mexican cookbooks. Draped over the back of a kitchen chair is a white dress, perhaps a wedding dress, its bodice shaped into fullness with blue tissue paper. One of its stiff lace cap sleeves has fallen off the hanger. As Florence notices this, a breeze lifts the skirt. She rearranges the sleeve on the hanger and, shy of being caught, hurries the rest of the way home. In the morning when she turns with her coffee cup to gaze out the window of her kitchen, the items are still on the lawn. The dress has fallen off the chair and lies spread on the green grass like a snow angel.
While she is at work, everything disappears, and that night, at last, there are lights in the windows; the stained glass she has coveted