The Time of Her Life
Read The Time of Her Life Online
Authors: Robb Forman Dew
THE TIME OF HER LIFE
“The Time of Her Life
examines the fragility of family ties, the ease with which they can be broken, the carelessness of what passes for ‘love,’
and the terrible, lasting damage that can result…. Everything about this novel is right: the characters, the interplay of
plot and theme, the wonderful prose, and the depiction of the world of children—a world Dew seems to know better, and to convey
with greater understanding, than any American writer since Carson McCullers.
The Time of Her Life
is the work of that rarest of people, a
real
writer, and it will knock your socks off.”
—Jonathan Yardley,
Washington Post Book World
“A sensitively drawn but far from sentimental portrait of a little girl without a childhood…. With
The Time of Her Life
, Dew establishes herself as a master of exploring family love, with all its pain, joy, and intimate distances.”
—Anita Creamer,
Dallas Times-Herald
“A writer of great sensitivity to the intricacies and ambiguities of family love…. Dew’s skill as a writer has permitted her
to convey all the ambiguity and pain of a family dynamic without the least resort to reductiveness.”
—Julie Rolston,
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
“Dew has powers of observation akin to an Updike or Cheever.”
—Bob Moyer,
Grand Rapids Press
“Dew puts her sensitive ear to a family’s heart…. She comes up with a beautiful, personal language with which to describe
its pulse.”
—Lisa Schwarzbaum,
Detroit News
“Intensely focused, elegantly written fiction…. With extraordinary depth and emotional detail, Dew dramatizes a family in
crisis.”
—Janet Wiehe,
Library Journal
“Dew tangles with potent themes…. She is also capable of turning a simple phrase in a way a poet might envy.”
—Alida Becker,
St. Petersburg Times
“An accomplished, chilling, and memorable book, one that establishes Dew as a novelist of the first rank.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“The quality of Dew’s writing is exceptional. She is able to take an introspective subject and create the kind of excitement
that makes it almost impossible to put the book down, a rare achievement for a novel that depends on character development
rather than action for its impetus…. Robb Forman Dew writes from within the innermost souls of the people in her story. She
makes her readers think as they think and feel as they feel, and the experience is as gripping as any daring adventure novel.”
—Anne Price,
Sun Magazine
“Engrossing…. Dew already has made a good start in delineating a territory all her own, a part of American life that is as
ineffable as the emotions she is able to make substantive and meaningful.”
—Vincent Leo,
Columbus Dispatch
“Content, structure, and the moral and emotional clarity of its author make
The Time of Her Life
a powerful and complex book…. Dew’s own development [as a writer] is as subtle and important as the plots of her books.”
—Myra Goldberg,
Village Voice
“Astonishment is the rule in Robb Forman Dew’s fiction. And it is our response to her remarkable literary talent.”
—Dan Cryer,
Newsday
Fiction
The Evidence Against Her
Fortunate Lives
Dale Loves Sophie to Death
Nonfiction
The Family Heart: A Memoir of When Our Son Came Out
A Southern Thanksgiving: Recipes and Musings
Copyright © 1984 by Robb Forman Dew
Reading Group Guide copyright © 2003 by Robb Forman Dew and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including
information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may
quote brief passages in a review.
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
Originally published in hardcover by William Morrow and Company, 1984
First eBook Edition: October 2009
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and
not intended by the author.
The first chapter of this novel originally appeared, in slightly different form, in
The New Yorker
. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to use material in this book: On page
223
, lines from the song “Tell Laura I Love Her” by Jeff Barry and Ben Raleigh, copyright © 1960 by Edward B. Marks Music Company.
Used by permission. All rights reserved. On page
218
, lines from the song “Twilight Time,” lyric by Buck Ram; music by Morty Nevins & Al Nevins. TRO, copyright 1944 and renewed
© 1972, Devon Music, Inc., New York, N.Y. Used by permission. The correct words of the song are: “Heavenly shades of night
are falling, / It’s twilight time. Out in the mist your voice is calling, / It’s twilight time…”
ISBN: 978-0-316-09036-0
Contents
A Preview of
The Evidence Against Her
For Charles,
“… my cause, my proper heat and center.”
—J
OHN
C
ROWE
R
ANSOM
“Winter Remembered”
Once every summer a mass of humid air settled over Lunsbury, Missouri. For perhaps ten days in July or August a muggy silence
predominated, and everyone became short-tempered and uneasy in the still heat. Otherwise during the year there was a pervasive
susurration of wind that rustled through the streets and down the alleys, across the golf course and between the houses, moving
the light objects—Frisbees, aluminum lawn chairs, a scarf—from one place to another in any backyard where they had been left
behind. An open door would soon slam shut. Papers on a desk near an open window would drift away and lie in trembling, shifting
disarray across the floor. There was always something afoot, afloat, in motion. Sometimes the weather was severe, but from
day to day it was more often tame. Since Lunsbury was a settlement of sixty thousand people, with many good-sized buildings
and sycamore trees planted strategically in long rows of windbreaks, the force of the air that shifted from the Pacific coast
across the plains was divided and channeled through the maze of the community.
The movement of the trees was whispery in this season. It was autumn, and the dried leaves stirred in the full-blown heads
of the old trees or rolled and spun across the grass in turmoil. In the summer, when the leaves were full of sap, there was
a tender, fleshy chafing. When winter came, there would be the creaking of the bare, abrasive branches, and then again, with
spring, the softer sigh of young leaves and the tall, spurred grasses that grew in the meadows, in the ditches, and untended
patches of real estate.
All of the residents enclosed within their own quiet rooms had more than an ordinary sense of security. When they shut their
windows and went to bed they had an unusual knowledge of being protected from the elements. And those prevailing westerly
winds were some part of the reason that—against all odds on this Saturday morning—Claudia Parks came out of sleep in her closed
and silent house in a state of optimism. She awoke as though she had been out running; her body was loose and warm, and she
was carried along into the day on an early surge of animation that led her mildly to consider good will, good luck, new chances.
Her turn of mind so early-on had the same frail and opalescent quality as the crescent moon that hung late in the first light.
Before she went down to fix breakfast, she brushed her short hair until it was full of static electricity and stood out around
her head like a cloud. It had no sheen, and her hair didn’t curl so much as curve in soft brown puffs against her cheeks.
It bobbed as she moved around the kitchen but then settled around her head once more when she came to rest. Electrified wisps
and tendrils
frizzled outward against the backlighting of morning windows, softening the outline of her image in the white kitchen.
Claudia had drawn her eyes all the way around with dark pencil that was artfully smudged, and she had exaggerated the pale
wedge of her face by blending a little pink color beneath her cheekbones so that they bore the strength of her looks in a
wide, gleaming winglike span above her fox-pointed chin. But she had left off there and wandered into the kitchen, and in
the fluorescent light the triangle of her face was shadowed into a pinched and haggard look by her uncolored mouth and darkened
eyes that seemed huge and hollow-socketed beneath her indistinct and unpenciled brows.
Claudia had on her scarlet robe that billowed and undulated around her ankles with each step. It was a finely made robe that
descended in long tucks to the waist, where its fullness was released, and the sleeves were also pleated from the shoulder
and then let loose in exorbitant width to be caught up again in more banded pleats and a pearl button at the wrist. Her movements
as she broke eggs into a blue bowl and took dishes from the shelves were as red and startling as the flight of a male cardinal
in the snow. However, that robe was three years old, and it was by the force of her own complicated vision that she didn’t
notice that the elbows were worn thin as gauze. She almost never remembered to run the robe through the lingerie cycle of
the wash, and the cuffs were darkly edged and fraying slightly. All down the front were strewn tiny scattered holes where
ashes from her cigarettes had flown and caught as she swung her arm in an expansive gesture.
“Oh, well. Don’t worry,” she would say as she brushed at the tiny flickers where the cinders smoldered, “ashes keep the moths
out.”
Her daughter, Jane, sat at the table and paid sullen attention while her mother fixed breakfast and talked to her. Claudia
transferred the milk to a pitcher and the jam to a crystal dish, and she put the silver down on woven mats with matching cloth
napkins. But she put the mats down on a table gritty with scattered sugar that had spilled during some other meal. She stood
at the counter staring out the window as she waited for the toast to pop up, and she put her cigarette on the windowsill as
she poured out orange juice. She forgot it there, and later in the day she would be surprised to find the dark burn it had
left on the white paint. The sunlight fell across her face and bright red robe with a shaft of light that caught her in its
narrow beam and enhanced the peculiar tension that was Claudia’s alone; she had a waveringly suppressed and dramatic energy
that was with her rain or shine.
