In Case We're Separated (21 page)

“Are you cold?” he said.

“A little.” He insisted on giving her his sweater, a woolen pullover. He took it off and held it out to her, but she wouldn't put it on over her white nylon cardigan. She took that off and handed it back to him. “Around your shoulders, at least. It will make a little difference.” To please her, Bradley tied the white sleeves around his neck. The sweater did give him a little warmth. “Now,
you
wouldn't drown a girl in the lake,” his mother said, and it took him a minute to remember
An American Tragedy
.

The lake looked entirely different from the other direction. Bradley remembered a brown boathouse, but he didn't see it. He came to the entrance to an inlet. Could the resort be
in
it? Had he come out into the wider lake, not realizing because the curve was gentle on that side? This inlet seemed too wide to be the one he'd bypassed, but he didn't enter it. Now and then they passed a dock, but never one that looked familiar. Children he'd seen swimming had disappeared. Bradley realized that he had no idea how their resort would look from the water. He couldn't remember how close to the shore the office was, whether the shed from which they'd taken the canoe would protrude from the trees. Maybe they'd already passed the resort. He paddled, rested, paddled. They made slow progress against the wind. Bradley looked at his mother, bulkier than she really was in the brown sweater, like a sturdier, more practical mother. She'd never wear brown. His throat was sore from the mishap at lunch. It felt as if he'd been crying, or as if he was getting a sore throat, the cozy kind that makes it permissible to shed responsibility and go to bed with tea and books. He'd liked that kind of illness as a child. Bobbie would bring him alphabet soup and chocolate pudding.

In his mind, Bradley again stood in the office, idly waiting for the woman who owned the resort to end her telephone call, staring at the map. Looking at the now cloudy lake, he struggled to form the map again in his mind, the kidney shape of the lake, with an extra lobe. He pictured the smudged black print, the lake's firm outline. The resort was marked with a star, closer to the western than the eastern end. It was on a wide, gently curved bay. Then came the inlet, then another bay, and then a peninsula.

“Someone will come along,” his mother said, and he knew she knew they were lost.

“That's right,” said Bradley, but he saw no boats. The tangled woods came down to the lake, and it seemed that nobody lived in them. Stroking and stroking, his tired hands gripping the paddle, his throat aching, Bradley brought his mother a little farther, then again a little farther, over the water.

Acknowledgments

I'd like to offer warm thanks to The Corporation of Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony, and to Paul Beckman, April Bernard, Susan Bingham, Kevin Callahan, Heather Gould, Donald Hall, Susan Holahan, Andrew Mattison, Ben Mattison, Edward Mattison, Jacob Mattison, Zoe Pagnamenta, Joyce Peseroff, Jennifer Pooley, Sandi Kahn Shelton, Emily Sklar, and my astonishing editor, Claire Wachtel.

My mother, Rose Eisenberg, told me an old story that became the basis for “I Am Not Your Mother.” She believed unfailingly in my work, and read and reread it as long as her eyes and mind allowed. No daughter, no writer, could ask for more.

About the Author

A
LICE
M
ATTISON
grew up in Brooklyn and studied at Queens College and Harvard. She is the author of four novels, three previous collections of short stories, and a volume of poetry. She teaches fiction in the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in
The New Yorker
,
Ms
. magazine,
Glimmer Train
,
Ploughshares
,
Agni
,
The Threepenny
Review
,
The Michigan Quarterly Review
, and
Shenandoah
. Mattison lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

 

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www.AuthorTracker.com
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Praise for
In Case We're Separated

“When writers erect a visible scaffold around their work, they usually incorporate that architecture into the story. . . . What's different about Mattison's approach is that she has made the scaffolding invisible. . . . Radiant. . . .
In Case We're Separated
is a book filled with felicitous writing and ferocious insight.”

—Sue Halpern,
New York Times Book Review

“Alice Mattison writes well about secrets, the kind that are kept for generations despite dedicated, relentless prying by friends and family. As a young writer, she was the undisputed queen of wackiness, but with
In Case We're Separated
, Mattison has matured into the kind of writer that makes you laugh.”

—
Los Angeles Times

“Devastating. . . . Mattison's stories have an arresting focus and navigate the clichés of Jewish-American fiction firmly and knowingly.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“A jewel of a collection. . . . Masterful. . . . You'll want to read the stories again to find the repeated objects, and to solidify the characters' relationships in your mind—and you'll find the stories are every bit as rich and satisfying the second time around.”

—
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Also by Alice Mattison

NOVELS

The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman

The Book Borrower

Hilda and Pearl

Field of Stars

 

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

Men Giving Money, Women Yelling

The Flight of Andy Burns

Great Wits

 

POETRY COLLECTION

Animals

A Note to the Reader

This book's thirteen stories imitate in prose the thirteen stanzas of a double sestina, using repeated topics or tropes in something like the way a sestina—the poetic form described in the story “Brooklyn Sestina”—uses repeated words. In the changing order prescribed by the sestina pattern, each story includes a glass of water, a sharp point, a cord, a mouth, an exchange, and a map that may be wrong.

Copyright

Some of these stories appeared in the following journals and anthologies:

 

“In Case We're Separated,”
Ploughshares, Best American Short Stories

“I Am Not Your Mother,”
Ploughshares, The Pushcart Prize

“In the Dark, Who Pats the Air,”
Shenandoah

“Brooklyn Sestina,”
Michigan Quarterly Review

“Election Day,”
Michigan Quarterly Review

“The Bad Jew,”
Glimmer Train

“Future House,”
Glimmer Train

“Pastries at the Bus Stop,”
Ms. Magazine

“The Odds It Would Be You,”
The Threepenny Review

 

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

 

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2005 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

 

IN CASE WE'RE SEPARATED
. Copyright © 2005 by Alice Mattison. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

 

F
IRST
H
ARPER
P
ERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED
2006.

 

The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

 

Mattison, Alice.

      In case we're separated : connected stories / Alice Mattison.—1st ed.

         p.   cm.

      ISBN-13: 978-0-06-621377-4

      ISBN-10: 0-06-621377-0

      1. Domestic fiction, American.   2. Mothers and daughters—Fiction.

  3. Grandmothers—Fiction.   I. Title.

 

   PS3563.A8598I5   2005

   813'.54—dc22

2005043422

 

ISBN-10: 0-06-093789-0 (pbk.)

ISBN-13: 978-0-06-093789-8 (pbk.)

Epub Edition © AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 9780062110497

 

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