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The
Pursuit of Alice Thrift by Elinor Lipman Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Personality Elinor Lipman’s latest novel, The
Pursuit of Alice Thrift, provides a romantic, but not sloppy story of a
medical resident, Alice, and the unusual man, Ray Russo, who seeks her hand
in marriage. Lipman explores societal expectations, and takes the concept of
the attraction of opposites to its extreme. Alice finds dimensions of her
personality unfolding as Ray pursues her. She seems to find herself through
Ray and others. Lipman awards readers with a plethora of throw away lines
that may make you laugh aloud. My favorite was when Alice reveals her ATM
password: “edema.” Only a doctor would come up with that. Mother-daughter
relationships get plenty of coverage on these pages, as well. Here’s an
excerpt from Chapter 14 (pp. 98-107), “I’m a Normal Person,” that captures
the dynamics between Alice and her mother: With
professional and residential upheavals looming, I didn't undertake anything
socially drastic. I purchased a greeting card, a black-and-white photograph
of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and wrote inside. Hi! I'm moving to
my own place on Feb. I, an exceptionally
clean studio in hospital housing. Will
call when I get a phone. Or you
can page me. Sincerely, Doc. I mailed it to
First-Prize Fudge and wrote Personal on the envelope. I hadn't heard
from Ray since I'd beeped my getaway from the bar near Fenway Park, but even
I knew, in my uninsightful way, that between the lines of my cheerful tidings
lay a bold invitation. He
didn't answer. I tried to remember what I'd written; I also tried to remember
what traits he possessed, other than his willingness to abide my company,
that made me want to resuscitate the friendship. He wasn't intelligent or
attractive. He wasn't interesting, except perhaps as someone I might have
interviewed—after venturing into a bad neighborhood with a tape recorder and
a whistle—for an undergraduate sociology course. In his plus column I could
write entertaining and outgoing and shares food.
If I were prone to oversimplification and romance, I might say. Opposites
attract, but that very notion seemed so unscientific, so puerile, that
I dismissed it out of hand. As
my mother folded each of my undergarments into thirds and arranged them in my
suitcase, she asked nonchalantly, "Have you ever heard, in your medical
travels, of Asperger's Syndrome?" "It's
neurological. A form of autism, I think." "Nicknamed
the Little Professor Syndrome." She frowned at the compromised elastic
in a dingy pair of cotton underpants and lobbed them into my wastebasket.
"Sufferers have very high IQs—sky-high—but their social skills are
nonexistent," she continued. "Your father read the piece, too, and
we can't stop talking about it. He's been doing some research on-line and
found a study at Yale." She walked to the closet door and asked me to face
her. She put her hands on my shoulders, signaling, Pay attention. Head up.
Make eye contact. "How are you today, Alice?" she enunciated in
Beginning Conversational English. I
shrugged. "Tired. Depressed." "Good,"
she said. "That makes me feel better." She went to her shaggy woven
book bag and took out an underexposed Xerox, its pages stapled and
highlighted in pink. "It was the cover story in last Sunday's magazine
section . . . and now I'm quoting directly: 'When you ask them at first,
"How do you do?" they will say something like, "Why do you
want to know?" They
simply don't understand social games.' " I
said, "Are you talking about me? You think I'm autistic?" She
held up an index finger. "Wait, I underlined it. . . . Here it is:
'Asperger's kids cannot decipher basic visual social signals. This leads
people to see them as emotionally disturbed. Or brilliant.' " I
took the pages from her and skimmed the opening paragraphs. "Ring
any bells?" she asked at my elbow. I
read silently until I came to ". . . a neurological disorder that
disproportionately affects males," pointed that out as if it settled the
matter, then asked, "Don't you think that if I were autistic, someone
would have diagnosed it by now?" "Not
this kind! It was only made an official syndrome in 1994." "And
do you think a lot of autistic kids graduate from college summa and go
to Harvard Medical School?" She
frowned. "I wondered about that, too. But you could have something less
than a full-blown case. You could be compensating because Daddy and I are
such extroverts that you learned coping strategies." Had
I learned to cope and compensate? I walked over to my bed, which was stripped
to the mattress ticking, and lay down on my side, facing the wall. "There
are a lot worse neurological problems a person could have," my mother
coaxed. "You could have been born with cerebral palsy or epilepsy or
Tourette's. Asperger's is a walk in the park compared to—" "I
don't have Asperger's! And you're not qualified to diagnose anyone, either.
First of all, mostly boys get it. Second of all, I'm a normal person who
might be challenged in the personality department, but that's all. And how do
you think it makes me feel to hear that my mother thinks I'm autistic?" "Feel? Feelings are exactly what I'm looking for," she
said. "There aren't enough in this family since Nana died. I want you
and me to have what Nana and I enjoyed for sixty-two years, which is to say
an exquisite friendship." She
picked up the pages again and flipped to another highlighted passage. "
'Consider Glenn Gould,' " she read. " 'The eccentric Canadian
pianist, who died in 1982 and who retired from the concert circuit at
thirty-one, was notorious for his bizarre behavior: He had a phobia about
shaking hands, ate nothing but scrambled eggs and Arrowroot biscuits, and
rocked incessantly at the keyboard.' " She tossed the pages onto my
night table. "I'm
finding this very reassuring, because I know you don't have a phobia about
touching people. You not only have to touch them but you have to cut into
them and probe their organs and glands. Correct?" "Correct." "But
let me ask you this—is the reverse true?" "The
reverse of what?" "The
reverse of a hand-shaking phobia. In other words, do you like to be
touched?" Did
I? While I tried to remember, she jumped in. "Stop me if I'm getting too
personal, but I've had a lot of free time lately to imagine what goes on
inside the head of Alice Thrift. I mean, is physicality something you think
about? Yearn for? Jump into with both feet when the opportunity presents
itself?" I
said, "That's three different questions." "And
look how long it's taken me to ask you even one! Nana knew more about what
was going on inside my head than I did. Even when I'd moved away from home,
she knew where I was going, with whom, when I was menstruating, and what I
was making for dinner. I could tell her anything, and she never recoiled,
never shrank from any personal details. Her EQ was off the charts." With
her daughter maybe, inside their two-person cocoon. I didn't point out that
Nana's so-called EQ dwindled in the company of her grandchildren. Julie and I
were dropped off at her apartment when my parents couldn't find a
baby-sitter, and it was understood that we would bring our own food, and then
get tutored in contract bridge by displaying our hands solitaire-style on her
card table. I
said, "I don't think a mother and a daughter should talk about personal
concerns, because sooner or later the daughter is going to have to hear
something she'd rather not know." She
smiled coyly and sat down on the edge of the bed. "When your father and
I first met—" I
put my hands over my ears. She pried them away and snapped, "Don't act
so autistic." I
said, "If you insist, I'll listen. But remember that I'm not Nana." "I
don't insist," she said, then plunged ahead: "Your father and I
despised each other at first sight. I thought he was brash, rude, egocentric.
He was getting his MBA, while I always fell for the boys who wrote for the
literary magazine." She smiled a private smile. "Poets, of course.
When along comes this guy—micro, macro, macho. All business, and I mean that
literally." "I've
heard this story," I said. "No.
You've heard the sanitized version. What might be instructive is the truth:
that I slept with him not too long after we met, just for the fun of it. Just
to get it over with, just to be with someone who wasn't sensitive and
artistic—without the slightest intention of falling in love. But that's where
it happened: in bed. Well, there weren't any etiquette books that tell you
where to go from there. You jump into bed because you want to be like those
girls who hung around the Village, who had sex without looking back, and what
happens? You wake up, happily twisted in the bedclothes, wanting to be Mrs.
Bertram Thrift." I
blinked. "And your point is?" "My
point is that I could confide every word of this to my mother. My girifriends
were too conventional—go steady, get pinned, get engaged, buy your trousseau,
get married, lose your virginity on your wedding night in the Plaza. I knew
that I could tell my mother everything, and she wouldn't call me a slut or,
worse, dissolve into tears." "How
did you know she wouldn't?" "Because
of how she raised me. She wasn't ashamed of her body or her bodily functions,
and that kind of thing sets a tone in a house. If one takes a bath and voids
with the door open and if one's daughters can perch on the edge of the tub
and have a conversation with their naked mother, some threshold is set."
She lowered her voice to confide, "Once, right after her divorce, we
spent a week at a nudists' colony in upstate New York, one that accepted
children. Her friends didn't know. She wasn't a committed nudist, but she was
curious. We didn't go back because she didn't particularly like the people,
and I think, between you and me, she was looking for some male companionship
at that stage. Ironically, it proved to be an unbelievably dull vacation.
Everyone talked politics, everyone was married, nobody flirted, and everyone
sagged." She smoothed her dark hair back toward its French twist.
"I tried very consciously to continue that tradition and hold court in
the bathtub, but you and Julie and God knows your father would close the
bathroom door when you walked by. Maybe I should have tried harder." "Why?" "Because!
I might have broken down some resistance. I might have made you more open,
more physical, more . . . unconstrained. And Julie! I should have tied her
down and made her bathe with me in order to demystify the female body so she
wouldn't grow up to see it as a sexual object!" I
said, "I don't think it works that way." "The
point being—one of several points I wanted to make—that it's not too late.
I'm here for you now. God closed the door that was Nana and opened the one
marked 'Alice.' " She nudged me with her hips until I moved closer to
the wall, then lay down next to me. "Doesn't
this feel good?" she asked. "Doesn't it make you want to talk late
into the night?" I
said, "Not really." "Go
ahead," she said. "Tell me something. Anything. Big, small, as long
as it comes from here." She rapped her fist against her left breast. "Like
what?" She
waved her arms above both of us. "The sky's the limit. Your dreams and
aspirations. Your fantasies. A handsome internist you spotted across a
crowded room." I
could conjure only round-shouldered, myopic internal-medicine residents,
married nonetheless. I said, "Well, you know it's always been my dream
to do reconstructive surgery on patients in the Third World." "I
know," she said. "But why?" "Why?
Because in many cultures the disfigured are shunned. Imagine having the power
to return someone to society and to rescue him or her from loneliness, if not
total isolation or even death—" "And
this is important to you—rescuing primitive people from loneliness? Are you
sure you'd be good at that?" "I'd
learn. I have ten more years of training before I'd be eligible to
even—" "I
didn't mean surgically. I mean psychiatrically. Do you think that you have
the interpersonal skills to be a humanitarian?" I
said, "You asked me about my dreams and I told you. Is that so hard to
understand—someone who's born with a cleft lip makes her way to my clinic and
leaves with a perfectly aligned vermilion border?" "You're
right, absolutely." She smiled. "What else do you want to confide
in me? Anything more immediate? More Alice-centered?" I
closed my eyes and said, "No, thank you." "I'm
sorry. I apologize. I know that if it can be learned in a textbook, you'll
study till you get it right, so what am I worried about?" I
said, "Well, here's something you can worry about: I almost killed a
patient during a gallbladder operation this week. How's that for a good juicy
secret?" I abridged the rest: the exhaustion, the retractor, the nicked
hepatic artery, the hostilities, the sentence. "Terrible,"
she murmured. "You must have been scared to death. But thank goodness no
one died . . . and now, how humiliating to be watched like a hawk." She
waited a beat, tapped my forearm to signal a new topic. "What
about your love life? That's more along the lines of what I was trying to elicit." I
said, "You know I'm working a hundred and twenty hours a week—" "What
I know is that it takes a special man to understand and to accept
that. Probably another doctor, don't you think? Which is why I like the ring
of hospital housing." I
said, "I work with doctors day and night. I don't have to go to a dance
in the common room to meet any." "Dances?
Really? They hold dances in your new building?" "No.
And if they did, do you think I'd go?" Her
right arm crossed over her face and covered her eyes. After
a minute I tried, "Morn? . . . Joyce?" She
answered with a sniffle and plucked a tissue from my bedside box. After
another interval I nudged her and said, "Okay. Here's an inside scoop:
Once I'm settled in, I'm going to invite Ray over for what I'm labeling a
housewarming." "Ray?" "Ray
Russo. The man who drove me to Nana's funeral?" "Not
the candy vendor?" I
said as a matter of fact, yes. "Have
you been seeing him?" I
said no, hardly, but he'd taken the day off from work to attend a total
stranger's funeral, and this was my way of saying thank you. She
rolled onto her side, propped herself on her elbow, and peered at me.
"You're beet-red. What kind of thank-you did you have in mind?" I
could have said, "Beans and franks and a video." I could have said, "No
comment," or, "None of your business." But she was stretched
out beside me, still sniffling, still wearing black, and building monuments
to sixty-two years of mother-daughter candor. So I said, "I'll probably
make sandwiches and buy a bottle of wine, and then, if all goes well, I'll
lower the Murphy bed." "For
what?" "For
what normal, sexually active people do on a bed." She
sat up. "Please tell me you're joking, Alice." I
said no, of course not. When did I ever joke? And why did the suggestion of
me having sex render her flabbergasted? She
inhaled and exhaled as if exercising great forbearance. "Believe me. I'm
not objecting to the sex. Far from it. I'd put myself up against the most
broad-minded parents in this entire country. What I'm reacting to is 'First
we have dinner and then we have intercourse.' It just sounds so passionless.
So . . . autistic." I
said I wished she'd stop throwing medical terms around. As for passion,
hadn't she just spent the last half hour bragging about her active dislike
for my father, precoitally? "Your
father was a graduate student at Wharton! Your intended partner sells
granular fudge out of the trunk of his car. I just don't see it. Is it
convenience? Or desperation? Or—you won't like this one bit—pity?" I
climbed over her and returned to the closet. After much pointless clanging of
hangers I called out, "You may think you're as broad-minded as anyone in
America, but you won't acknowledge Julie's girlfriends, and you think I can't
date someone unless he has diplomas framed in his office." "Does
he have an office?" "Probably." "Did
he go to college?" "It
hasn't come up." After
another silence she asked, "Are you attracted to this Ray?" The
only acceptable answer was yes, so I said it: Yes, I was attracted to Ray.
Pity had no role here, at least not on my side. He'd been very attentive and
gentlemanly. There had been no pressure. Well, maybe he'd asked for a kiss
after the round-trip to New Jersey, but that was hardly worth reporting since
most people kiss as casually as I might order a pizza. But I'd been thinking
things over. Ray was a normal man with healthy needs. Now it was my turn to
signal that I was a mature adult, and ahead of me was the hurdle that mature
adults have to jump. She
crossed to the closet and wrapped her arms around me. "Nana and I went
round and round on this for years. 'Has she or hasn't she? Will she or won't
she?' She was sure that somewhere along the line, at some frat party or
junior year abroad, you lost your virginity. But not me. I always maintained
that, if it had happened, I'd know. And now you've told me, in advance. On
one hand. I'm depressed over your choice of partners. On the other hand. I'm
thrilled that you're confiding in me now." I
said, "Actually, Nana was right. I had sex once in college; at summer
camp, actually." "With
a man?" I
said yes, a counselor at Tattaho. "Voluntarily?" "Of
course voluntarily. He paddled across the lake in a canoe, and we sat on the
dock for a while and reviewed our sexual options, and then we found a spot
behind the infirmary and we did it." "And
then what?" "We
discarded the used condom in the dining hall Dumpster, and I went back to my
bunk." "I
meant, were you in love? Was this a romance? Was it everything you hoped it
would be? Did you keep in touch after camp?" I
said no, none of the above. I hadn't enjoyed it, so I hadn't seen any reason
to repeat the experience. "Till
now?" I
stopped what I was doing—stuffing the overflow of dirty clothes into my
bulging laundry bag—to wonder aloud, "Have you ever thought about how in
every country, no matter how remote, in every culture, every religion, and
every climate, people copulate? Since time immemorial, men and women—without
classes or manuals, without anatomical diagrams or scented candles—have
sought out partners for sex. I find it quite fascinating, and I think if it's
so natural to every species, then I shouldn't have dismissed it out of
hand." "I
see," said my mother. "So this upcoming date of yours is more or
less an anthropology experiment?" "Is
that so terrible? I mean, isn't everything?" She
looked away, plucked another tissue from my bedside box. "I
thought you'd be happy that I was thinking about something that could be
categorized as interpersonal," I said. She
didn't answer. Her shoulders sagged; her glance wandered back to the
highlighted pages. I
tried to think of a topic that would cheer her up. "My new building has
a laundry room," I tried. "And a health club with a juice
bar." "Which
means what?" she snapped. "More venues for your research?" Would
I ever do anything right? Intercourse was wrong. Virginity was wrong.
Socializing with a man below my station was wrong. I couldn't please my
mother; surely couldn't measure up to a dead nonagenarian as confidante and
bosom buddy. I
said, "I'm very tired. Maybe we should call it quits for the day." She
raised her head and shook off the burden of my company. "I'm not giving
up. Who knows when we'll talk again. I mean really talk, like this,
meaningfully. I don't have to like every choice you make—Nana certainly
didn't when it came to me. Now we'll finish packing like the excellent team
that we are, and we'll drive these boxes across the street and toast a new
beginning. I brought a bottle of champagne." She smiled brightly.
"We'll do a few loads of laundry, and you'll share with me your
anxieties about next Saturday night." I
said, "Saturday night?" "Your
date! Your housewarming a deux" I
said, "I'd have to consider that date provisional because I haven't
heard from him in several weeks." She
held up her hand in protest. "I refuse to be discouraged. You didn't
invite Ray for dinner and sex because he's Ray. You invited him
because he represents manhood, a physical tool. So if it's simply a matter of
joining hands with a partner and jumping over a hurdle—there's plenty of fish
in that sea." I
nodded and tried to look amenable. But I noticed that in the face of her
eagerness to banish Ray and to substitute another token, I felt a tug of
loyalty. Hadn't I promised to contact him when I got my phone? How clear it
seemed now: Rapprochement was my responsibility, my move. I had
interpreted his silence as lack of interest. But maybe he was sick and didn't
have health insurance; maybe his office never forwarded my card. He
could be sitting by the telephone or his wife's headstone, gift-wrapped
penuche at the ready, waiting for my call. Was
my mother right? Was I ill-equipped to rescue primitive people from
loneliness? The
time had come to find out. For an entertaining coming of age novel,
enjoy reading The Pursuit
of Alice Thrift. Steve Hopkins, August 22, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the September
2003 issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Pursuit of Alice Thrift.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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