Authors: Hannah Pittard
Reunion: A Novel (22 page)
I
n the movie version—the screenplay that is my life—the shot would end here, with me on the top bunk, my hands behind my head. The camera would pull up and away. It would break through the invisible ceiling, pull up and out, show the roof of the house, the neighborhood, the trees. We’d see a sweeping overhead of Atlanta, at night, when it’s prettiest. We’d continue up—up and up and up—until Atlanta wasn’t even a city, it would just be a map, just a piece of the state, a piece of the globe, a piece of the world.
The director would call “Cut” and I’d roll out of bed and thank the crew. I’d thank Matt Damon, my costar, my best friend, my right-hand man. I’d take off my costume and put on my own clothes and go back to my other life, my real life, and I’d speak my own words, not someone’s lines, and everything would be easy-peasy. But this isn’t the movies. This is my life. And sometimes life is easier than the movies and sometimes it’s harder. Right now, though, it’s just longer and slower. No one’s there on the other side of a camera, waiting to edit out the boring parts.
I look up at the ceiling, which is so close I could touch it if I wanted, and I realize there are no glow stars here. Mindy hasn’t put any up yet. Maybe she’s forgotten. And maybe she won’t remember. Maybe six months will turn into a year. She’ll go from six to seven to eight years old. By the time she remembers, it’ll be too late. She’ll think she’s too old for glow stars and so she’ll never sleep under them again. Which strikes me as just about the worst thing in the world.
My first stop once I’m back in Chicago will be the toy store. I won’t even go home. I’ll get the taxi to take me straight there, so I don’t forget. And I’ll buy as many as forty-five dollars can get me. But they won’t be for me. They’ll be for Mindy. If I send them, she’ll have to put them up. Because when you’re given a gift, there are expectations. Even if she already thinks she’s outgrown them, she’ll have to put them up. Her mother will make her. If Nell is still here, I’ll have Nell make her. It seems absolutely essential that I—that
we
—keep her young as long as we can; that she see life through the eyes of a little girl for as many more days as possible. Growing up is inevitable. What’s the point in rushing it?
I close my eyes and imagine the camera panning away. I close my eyes and wait for sleep, thinking,
This is the night. This is the night I will finally sleep all the way through without a single dream or thought to disturb me. This is the night.
I
t’s five in the morning and Elliot’s in the kitchen eating a bowl of cereal over the sink. Only the stove light is on, so I plug in a string of tiny lights that circle the ceiling. The room fills with a milk-yellow half-glow. The lights must be left over from Christmas. It’s sentimental—maybe even mawkish—but it’s hard not to imagine Sasha hanging them by herself six months ago, her first Christmas alone in this house, our father still alive, still at the condo, just then by himself.
“Coffee,” I say to my brother. The only neutral greeting I can think of. “Thank God.”
He turns, unsurprised, and nods at me.
I wheel my bag toward the back door and park it there. When I turn back, Elliot’s got an empty mug in his hand and is holding it toward me.
“Thanks.” I walk over to the counter and go through the boxes of cereal that Sasha left out for us before she went to bed. Mindy is lucky. Sasha is a good mom. They’re going to be okay.
I pour myself a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal and hop up on the counter near the fridge. Elliot is washing his dishes in what appears to be a deliberately slow manner. I have misinterpreted so many actions this past week. I have misread so many signs. But I feel confident just now that his thoughtful gestures at the sink are a silent invitation for me to speak, and so I do. Carefully. Quietly.
“At some point,” I say, watching the flakes in my bowl expand as they absorb the milk. “At some point, you’re going to have to talk to me again.”
He nods at the suds in his hands. “Yes,” he says. He does not turn to look at me.
“At some point,” I say, venturing further, “you’re going to have to forgive me.”
“Yes,” he says. Still he does not look at me.
I don’t want to speak out of turn; I don’t want to push him away, but I feel he needs to hear it, and so I say, “And you might have to forgive Rita, too. At some point.”
“I know,” he says.
“Okay.”
“But it’s not going to be right this second.”
“Okay.”
“You were out of line.”
“Yes.”
It’s an odd time to have the realization, but whatever mojo my brother was missing when we got here has found its way back. This isn’t a spiritual discovery I’m making. This is a fact. He’s mad at me and I know he’s mad at me and he’ll be mad at me for a good long while, but even knowing this, I’d still rather be in a room with him in it than a room with him not in it. It’s as simple as that.
“You didn’t have to get up,” I say. His flight is five hours later than mine. “But I’m glad you did.”
Nell coughs from the kitchen door. “Good morning,” she says. She’s got her hair in a pile on top of her head again. It feels like a million years have passed since she knocked on the bathroom door at Dad’s place, my wet sheets bundled in her arms. But it’s only been three days, and I have no idea when I’ll see her again.
Elliot, in this jokey kind of way, says, “What? You again?” and then pushes the cereal boxes toward her.
Peter says he’s never understood the way we interact. He says it’s not normal. Whenever Nell or Elliot calls, I answer by saying, “What do you want?” And Peter always leaves the room, kind of disgusted, muttering, “What kind of greeting is that?”
I tried explaining it to him once. I told him that it’s how we say
I love you
. He told me most people just use their words. I told him that words don’t always mean what you think they mean. He said maybe that’s why my screenplays never work out. He should have known then. We both should have known.
“Elliot is tolerating my company,” I say, feeling it’s all right to goad him a little. To remind him we are all fallible. “He doesn’t talk much, though. He’s a taciturn thing.”
Nell looks at Elliot. “You haven’t told her?”
“No,” says Elliot. He pours himself another cup of coffee.
“Tell me what?” I say.
What I’d like is for my brain to turn off, to give up on guessing, to stop trying to see into the future, into someone else’s soul. It’s so noisy in my brain. Will he tell me he’s dying? Will he tell me he doesn’t love me anymore? The questions are jockeying for position when all I want is for them to stand still already.
“We can talk on the plane,” says Elliot at last.
“What plane?”
I’m slow. So slow. I must be the slowest person on the planet.
Nell pushes me off the counter and takes my spot. I hand her my dirty bowl and my dirty spoon, and she fills them anew with cereal and milk. “Elliot’s going with you,” she says through a mouthful of food. “We switched his ticket.”
I look at Elliot. He shrugs and says, “Someone has to help you move out.”
There are a million things I could think to say—there are a million things I
want
to say—but I choose the easiest and simplest one.
“Thanks,” I say. And to anyone else listening—our invisible audience—it would seem so insufficient a response. But to Elliot and to Nell—these two people who have been there, for better or worse, since the beginning, who know me best of all even as they are continuing to get to know new sides of me and I of them—it is enough. It is plenty. It borders on too much.
“I can’t pay you back,” I say. “Not anytime soon.”
He nods—which means he knows, Nell has told him e
verythin
g—and leans back against the island and studies his cup of coffee. “It’s funny,” he says.
“What’s funny?” says Nell, again through a mouthful of cereal, and I can’t help it, but my heart swells with what must be the feeling of happiness at just being in a room with these people and at just knowing they are mine and I am theirs.
“Do you ever feel like you’re still sixteen?” he says.
Yes.
“Because I feel like I’m still sixteen.”
Yes.
“And you’re fifteen.”
Yes.
“And you’re eleven.”
With knees like a giraffe.
“The only thing that’s changed is how we look.”
Yes, yes, yes.
“And now you have a family,” says Nell. She puts her spoon down on the counter. She’s ready to get serious if she needs to, ready to defend Rita, to defend the sanctity of family and forgiveness, et cetera, et cetera.
“Now I have a family, sure, but even that doesn’t change things.” He pauses, shakes his head, says, “I can tell you this. I can tell you that if, twenty years ago, someone would have suggested that I’d be the first one to have kids—the
only
one to have kids—I would’ve laughed.”
He brings the coffee cup to his mouth but doesn’t take a sip.
“This isn’t my life,” he says, as if there’s nothing more to add to the matter.
“But it
is
,” I say, and I feel suddenly and wonderfully sure about this.
It is.
I first encountered the word
irmus
after reading Ann Beattie's article “Me and Mrs. Nixon,” which can and should be found in the
New York Times.
The story Kate is thinking of on page 116 is by Patrick Somerville and is part of his lovely collection
The Universe in Miniature in Miniature.
Thanks to Helen Atsma for giving this book a home; Maria Massie for finding it; Ben Warner, Anna Shearer, Greta Pittard, and Stacy Stinchfield for being early and enthusiastic readers; MacDowell Colony for giving me time and space to write; bookstores and booksellers everywhere for persisting; my family—you know who you are—for existing in the first place; and, finally, Andrew Ewell, my husband and my most encouraging critic, for being the only person I consistently want to be in a room with.
Hannah Pittard is the recipient of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a Henry Hoyns Fellowship from the University of Virginia. Her first novel,
The Fates Will Find Their Way
, was a semifinalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her stories have appeared in
McSweeney’s
,
American Scholar,
Oxford American
, and many other publications. She teaches fiction at the University of Kentucky’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.
The Fates Will Find Their Way
Questions for Discussion
- Do Kate’s descriptions of her childhood sound appealing to you? What about her descriptions of Nell’s and Elliott’s upbringing? Did your interpretation of whether their childhood was a happy one change at all over the course of the novel?
- What is the significance of setting in
Reunion
? Does it tell you anything about the characters that Kate lives in Chicago, Elliott in Colorado Springs, and Nell in San Francisco? Every character in
Reunion
is touched by marital infidelity in some way—Kate and Elliott in particular. Was Kate right to encourage Rita to make her emotional affair physical? How did her experiences with her father’s adulterous behavior and with her own affair drive her decision? How did Elliott’s experiences color his reactions to Rita’s admissions? - Why doesn’t Kate tell her siblings about her debt? Do you think she was right to keep her financial situation from her siblings, or do you think she should have told them earlier?
- What is the significance of the condo porches, which Kate says are “for the mailman and only the mailman”? What about the glow stars that Kate resolves to buy for Mindy? Are there any other recurring images or memories in the story that may indicate themes of the book?
- Kate often claims to be the only one in a situation who is seeing things the way they truly are. Do you think that’s true? Or did you ever find yourself identifying more with one of the other characters? Which character did you identify with the most?
- Throughout
Reunion,
Kate contemplates—at her agent’s urging—whether to write the very story she’s experiencing. She even contemplates various opening sentences, including the sentence the book does, in fact, start with. How does that narrative device change the story for you? How would you describe Kate, as a narrator? Is she reliable? Is she a protagonist or an antagonist? - We learn right away that Mindy resembles Kate physically, but they seem to have more than appearances in common. In what ways are they similar? Is Mindy ever a foil to Kate? What other similarities do you notice among the family members?
- Do you believe divorce is the only solution for Kate and Peter? Is Peter’s desire to have children irreparably incompatible with Kate’s commitment to remaining childless? Is Kate’s adultery unforgiveable? Do you think Peter and Kate are being fair to each other about their differences and shortcomings?
- At the funeral home, Kate observes: “This has happened before. All these things have happened to other people before us. The world has thought of everything.” Do you find this comforting? Does Kate?
- How would you describe the Pulaski family? Does your description differ from the way the characters describe it themselves? Who is a member of the family? Are they close? Dysfunctional? How does the author indoctrinate the reader into the inside jokes and rituals of the Pulaskis? How has the family changed by the end of the book?
A Conversation with Hannah Pittard
How did you come to write
Reunion
? Is any of the story drawn from personal experience, or are the Pulaskis purely fiction?
This is a tricky question.
Reunion
is fiction and the characters are fabrications. At the same time, the story is drawn loosely from my own life. In the summer of 2011, my paternal grandfather killed himself. As Kate isn’t close to her father, I wasn’t—for various reasons I won’t go into here—close to my grandfather. But my father asked me to go to his funeral, and I did. So did my brother and sister. So did my mother, who’d been divorced from my father for more than two decades. Everyone kind of came out of the woodwork—friends of my father whom I hadn’t seen in years, some that my father hadn’t seen in years. We showed up because he wanted us to. It was a slightly surreal occasion. (It was open casket). I remember thinking,
This is something worth writing about.
I tried, many times, unsuccessfully, to use it as an excuse to write a memoir or nonfiction. But I couldn’t stop making things up. So I ended up with Kate, who is very far from me, except that she’s also a liar. I lie to make a story better. She lies because she can’t help it.
Although the characters in
Reunion
have chosen to live all over the country, the majority of the story takes place in Atlanta. Why did you choose that as a setting for the novel?
I was born in Atlanta. I’ve always wanted to write about it. (I like being from the south. I also like being away from it. As I write this, I live and teach in Chicago. But in just a few months, I’ll be moving to Kentucky. I’m both nervous and excited by the prospect of the move. My husband—to whom I am happily married, by the way—and I are ready for a change. I think Kentucky will be a nice gateway state. It’s the south, yes, but it’s also not the south. Let’s see whether or not I even agree with what I’ve written once I live there.) At any rate, Atlanta is where my grandfather lived and died. I suppose there were certain details surrounding his death from which, for whatever reason, I never thought to deviate.
Your first novel,
The Fates Will Find Their Way
, employs an omniscient second-person narrator, which is very different than the perspective you’re writing from in
Reunion
. Was one style of writing more natural for you?
Honestly, both voices came to me very naturally. The struggle, if anything, was to write from a woman’s point of view. I am a woman—obviously—but when I was still in school, the stories I wrote from a female point of view were often more harshly critiqued. One classmate once told me that the women in my fiction were mean. He told me they were unlikable. At the time, this bothered me enough to focus almost exclusively on the male point of view. (I’ve always liked writing from the opposite gender, so the decision to ignore women for a while wasn’t an unhappy one). After
Fates
, I wanted to write something completely different. Plus, I liked the thought of grappling with a quote-unquote unlikable protagonist.
Reunion
is as far from
Fates
as I could get: It’s first-person singular, present tense, and takes place over an abbreviated period of time. I suppose it was just a challenge I gave myself. Jonathan Lethem is constantly changing what he writes about and how. In that way, I might call him a bit of an inspiration.
Reunion
addresses many issues in the news—debt, suicide, hoarding. How do you think the book plays into the broader national conversation on these issues?
Money is everywhere. I’m not talking about actual dollar bills; I’m talking about its presence in our thoughts, conversations, dreams. And yet, it’s this thing that still makes us uneasy. We feel uneasy when we have it; we feel uneasy when we don’t. I’m aware of which friends have more than I do and which friends have less, and I hate that awareness. Any time I start being aware of “awareness” that I’d like not to have, I know there’s something worth writing about. It’ll just nag at me until I do: a little dollar bill sign tugging at my sweater, saying, “Here I am. Here I am. What about me?” I have a very close relationship with early-twenties credit card debt. I suppose I felt, in some ways, that I had a responsibility to write about it. Also, I thought the little dollar bill might not shut up if I didn’t.
Did other novels or authors influence the writing of
Reunion
? If so, which ones?
The epigraph comes from an amazingly precise John Cheever story that I adore—one I teach every year, so it’s always in the back of my mind—but I’d be lying if I said his story directly influenced
Reunion
. One day, when I was writing this novel, my husband asked what I was working on. I told him. He said, “I know what you should call it.” I said, “What?” He said, “You have to give me credit, though.” He’s a writer and a teacher, also. I said, “Sure, but only if I use it.” He said, “Reunion, after the Cheever story.” It was perfect.
More directly, though, I might say that Jess Walter’s
The Financial Lives of Poets
or Francine Prose’s
My New American Life
influenced
Reunion
. I read those books back to back. They’re both heartbreaking and hilarious. They filled me with an intense energy and giddiness. I knew I wanted to write something funny, fast, and fiscally oriented.
