Precious (37 page)

When my sister finally did come through the door there was no friendly greeting to my mother (whom I seem to recall was also there in the kitchen), but rather an explosion of yelling and tears. “That’s it!” my sister screamed. “I’m leaving.”

Next, where there should be more action—a succession of movements or some dialogue, or the escalation of an argument between what I eventually learned was my sister and my father, the details of which I still don’t know to this day—there is, in my memory, only white space, blankness.

I once heard a writer talk about the notion of truth in fiction. He was relating an event from his life, one that later inspired a short story. He and his girlfriend of two years had had an argument, over all things, about how he stacked dishes in the dishwasher. The argument swelled in the way they often do. It was early and he hadn’t yet showered and dressed. The fight made him late for work. In his anger and haste, he dressed quickly, and in the process of rummaging for clothes, pulled out one blue sock and one black sock from the drawer. Later that morning he looked down and discovered the mismatched pair. At the same moment, a song was playing over the sound system at the store where he worked. I have always imagined it must have been a sad song, because he said that for some reason the music, together with the mismatched socks, led him to a further realization, a very plain truth: The relationship would fail.

Years later, he wrote a story about the end of a relationship. Most details of the breakup were different from those of his own. The couple in the story was much older and long married. There was no argument over dishes or incompatibility. The reason for the breakup was not the same, though the feeling of loss was similar, I’m sure. However, there were two lines about, of all things, a pair of mismatched socks. The other lines—all of them, really—were crafted to bolster and sustain those two lines of truth taken from his personal life, that little detail that, for whatever reason, was long held in his memory and seemed to contain something worthy of a story. What the narrative afforded was a new context and meaning, a place to put a fragmented image, a way to breathe life into a single, lost moment again.

This is the truth: I don’t remember how long I stayed under the table the day my sister left home forever. I don’t recall if I scrambled out and ran after her, perhaps wanting to soothe her or perhaps even wanting a bit of gossip—to find out what exactly had happened to make her issue such a proclamation as
That’s it! I’m leaving
. Or perhaps I simply kept waiting, magically willing away the chaos of the house, the tears, and the screaming. What I remember next is another fragmented image of that same day: I stood outside. It was a terribly hot day, very sunny. My sister rode off down the drive on her bicycle. That is the last image of her I hold in my mind, the last time I ever saw her. In reality my mother might have been outside, too, or my father, or my brothers, but in memory this scene is made very intimate—there is only my sister and me, her pedaling off, my watching her leave.

Then, more white space.

That day my mother, who was always well-meaning, didn’t want me to be upset, so she called my oldest sister and charged her with my care for the rest of the day. After Carole left, my other sister took me and a friend to a local amusement park. I remember sitting in the back seat of our car, asking if Carole was going to come home, so I must have been worried. But I’m also sure that my worry quickly gave way to delight when we got to the park. I went on rides, ate cotton candy, had a hot dog. I must have forgotten about my sister at some point, dismissed the argument in a naïve way, as simply a fight that would blow over in time and not as the terrible thing it actually was: an altercation that would leave my family forever broken.

I must have laughed.

• • •

I never found out the exact nature of the argument between my father and sister, or discovered, at least in those immediate years following her departure, what could have been so terribly bad that she would have wanted to run away forever. Indeed, my sister’s departure on that bright, sunny day was too painful a thing to talk about at all, and, when pressed, everyone in my family seems to have a different story surrounding those events, complicating the truth further and keeping it just out of reach.

In my family, we argue about the nature of truth and memory.

“You’ve got it wrong,” my brother once told me at one of those rare moments when we actually talked about our sister at all. “You weren’t five when she left home, you were seven,” he said. “And I pumped the bike tire for her; it had a flat.”

I cannot begin to explain how this one statement devastated me years after the fact, how it trapped me in a lie I didn’t even know I’d committed. What was most upsetting was the realization that came with my brother’s statement: I could not remember anything of those two lost years that I had suddenly recovered, that span of time between five and seven. Yet surely things must have happened. My sister and I must have joked around. She must have brushed through my always tangled hair. I must have accompanied her to the mall, played board games with her, bickered with her. Because I remember myself as younger than I actually was, I have effectively wiped out time and history with her; I have lost entire years I shared with my sister.

But why do I remember myself as younger? Was I particularly vulnerable at that moment, susceptible to the moods of the house? Is this why I remember myself as smaller? This error of memory leads to even more questions and doubts: Why, for example, do I remember that the floor was smooth and cool under me? Was it really so dim in the kitchen on what I also remember to be a sunny day? Most likely my mother or father had turned off the lights to help cool the rooms in those pre-air-conditioning days. But perhaps, too, I am adding details without realizing it, so that I can give this memory verisimilitude; the more detail there is, the easier the moment is to recall and the longer I am able to hold on to it. Perhaps I need to flesh in details to moments that, for me, are all I have left of my sister, ones that are inadequate at best. Or maybe this is the inherent problem of memory and of truth, that both exist only as fragments—mere moments—those isolated from the larger context and day. Who looks back over any remembered event, good or bad, and recalls every single detail?

I think that there is something in the brain that resists such fragmentation and that is the stuff of stories. What I can say are the following truths, these moments in a day that changed my life: My sister ran away from home and never came back. It happened on a very hot summer day. I was hiding under the table when she came through the door, crying. She rode off later on her bike, and I spent the rest of that day at an amusement park, playing with another girl my age.

Now, let’s dwell here again, but with a new context, a new problem: A young girl has gone missing at a local park. Her mother grieves. Her best friend feels responsible. Down the street, in another house, a family is in crisis.

To say that the idea of a girl who goes missing is inspired by my sister is a true enough statement, accurate in a sense. But to say that the little girl is also me would be equally true, that I went missing on that day as well. Using images, ones taken from my own experience— the bike, the lost child, the hot summer, the amusement park—I have, in
Precious
, reordered them and given them a new context and meaning, woven together entire pages—entire lies—around what are a few true moments, those details long held in my memory. As a writer of fiction, I do this all in an effort to recover what is lost, to breathe life into something that is gone forever from view.

1.
Precious
is set in a small, blue-collar suburban town in the 1970s. Do you think this setting plays an important role in the story, or merely serves as a backdrop?

2. How does Vicki Anderson’s disappearance mark “the beginning of fear”? How does it affect the course of the novel?

3. Sissy Kisch’s beloved doll, Precious, figures strongly into her friendship with Vicki Anderson and the stories Sissy writes. Why do you think the novel is titled
Precious
?

4. How do characters in
Precious
cope with or mismanage their loneliness? Or feel “on the periphery of things”? How do loneliness and freedom become intertwined for many of them?

5. Consider Natalia: her childhood, her stories, her rituals, and the impact her absence, and eventual return, has on the Kisch family. How does she change? How does the family change? Does Natalia’s return do more harm than good? Is it all “lucky or unlucky”?

6. Discuss the types of obligation in
Precious
: between parents and children, between husbands and wives, between sisters, neighbors, friends, lovers, and strangers. How is obligation enforced? Manipulated? How and why is this used as a means of control?

7. The day she leaves, Natalia tells Eva: “Don’t give up your freedom. The day you give up your freedom, the day you lock yourself away is the day you disappear. In your own skin, you vanish”. What do you think she means by this? How does Natalia attempt to attain freedom? Eva? Frank? Peter? Is anyone in
Precious
free? Do you think this advice haunts Natalia?

8. Examine the characterization of the women in
Precious
: Natalia, Eva, Ginny, Amy, Sissy, Vicki. What similarities do you find among them? What differences? Are they victims, or something else? Do you identify with them? Why or why not?

9. How does Peter justify his relationship with Eva? How do their expectations differ? How does Eva’s expectation that “Love, a life away … Peter would help her forge a greater sense of the world” differ from the reality of the situation? Do you sympathize with Eva? With Amy? With Peter?

10. Discuss the characters who disappear in
Precious
, even those who just feel invisible, or “ghostly.”

11. “There is always a story. No one leaves forever.” How do stories and memories of those we’ve lost serve to “resurrect the dead”? Do you agree with Sissy that “There [is] always a way home again”. Why or why not?

12. The final moments of the book mark a conversation between Sissy and a stranger she meets while traveling. Given the novel’s trajectory and the Kisches’s fates, how do you interpret this final interaction? Does it satisfy, or fail to? And how might that feeling work with the overall tone and theme of the novel?

Read on for an excerpt from Sandra Novack’s

Everyone but You

MY FATHER’S MAHOGANY LEG

M
y father’s mahogany leg arrives via priority mail. Here is the box, lying on the coffee table, and inside the box I find the leg bandaged in bubble wrap along with a note from my father written in shaky, eager scrawl:
Dear Anna: Here is my leg. Do with my leg what you wish, My Darling
.

Of course it goes without saying that this leg is the most impractical thing I’ve ever received, more farfetched than the Publishers Clearing House letter lying next to it, more pointless than the Book of the Month Club and mailings that promise self-help through holistic medicine—
Lose twenty pounds with verbena supplements
and
Alter your mood with St. John’s Wort
.

For starters, I have two legs already. And they are beautiful, very presentable, very
real
legs—thin and muscular, milky and always clean-shaven—legs that look good in skirts and cowboy boots, which I always wear. My legs bustle me around the city, where I flaunt them at men who wait for public transportation, pudgy men and harrowed-looking men in wrinkled suits and balding men in sweatpants who have, once again, decided to walk, then finally decided to ride the bus the last few miles home. My legs hoof it ten blocks to the CD store where I work, peddling Top 20 Hits to angst-ridden, tech-savvy teens with absolutely no sense of the classics.

My legs strut and stroll, prance and pirouette. They are actually really fucking wonderful legs. Over the years I’ve worked hard on them—gymnastics and swimming, painful dance and hovering on pointed toes only to stare out, blankly, into a room of other children’s doting fathers. In contrast, this wooden leg is idle, severed, blunted as a crutch. Like you, My Darling, it is simply an afterthought, an appendage, but hey, better late than never.

That the leg was sent
priority mail
annoys me.

What am I supposed to
do
with a wooden leg, a leg that my father decided to will to me after his death? Should I dance with it around my living room? Cast it into the fire? Chew on it for a while, gnaw at it like a bone?

I think about calling Jimmy #3. In a rapt, seductive tone, I could say: Jimmy, you want a little extra wood tonight? Ha, ha. But Jimmy has no sense of humor, and I am never as funny as I think, so instead of calling him, I pop the bubble wrap around the leg. The cushion of air deflates between my fingertips. The popping sounds festive, like champagne bottles popping at a party that could be going on right now in my apartment if I had the gumption to throw a party, which I do not. I pretend that getting this leg is like getting a rare and beautiful gift, like getting the Hope diamond without its curse, and not like getting something sorrowful, like getting someone’s wooden leg, which is exactly what I’ve gotten.