Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
The Grateful Class of ’68
Okay, Listen
There’s an Ex
You’ll Be the First to Know
Nice to Meet You
For Reasons I Never Understood
Holiday with Strangers
Teacher’s Pet
Hence the Note
What Are You Looking For, Exactly?
Whatever Works
Correct Me If I’m Wrong
There’s Proof and There’s Proof
Gold-Dome Dirt
It Still Sounds Fishy to Me
Was This My Life Now?
Holden’s Willing Accomplice
Well, That’s a Surprise
Suddenly There Are Girlfriends
When Did I Get So Mean?
The Reevaluation of Daphne
I Took It Upon Myself
Hit Play Again
It’s Nothing
Miss Daphne
Nine-One-One
Who Are You Again?
Happy Hour
I Thought I Knew Everything
Further Confusion
Judge and Jury
No Turning Back
Two Birds with One Stone
The Day Job
Take Your Seat, Daphne
What’s So Secret?
Be Nice
Just That Simple
Mind If I Take a Few Pictures?
Pie in the Sky?
Just Like That
Sisters
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Sample Chapter from ON TURPENTINE LANE
Buy the Book
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2019 by Elinor Lipman
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lipman, Elinor, author.
Title: Good riddance / Elinor Lipman.
Description: Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018006362 (print) | LCCN 2018013818 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544808287 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544808256 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction. | Jewish fiction. | BISAC: FICTION /Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Humorous. | FICTION / Jewish. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Humorous stories. | Love stories.
Classification: LCC PS3562.I577 (ebook) | LCC PS3562.I577 G66 2019 (print) |
DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006362
Cover illustration © Ali Mac
Author photograph © Michael Benabib
v1.0119
For Anita Shreve, perfect friend
1
The Grateful Class of ’68
For a few weeks after my mother’s death, I was in possession of the painstakingly annotated high school yearbook that had been dedicated to her by the grateful class of 1968.
Yes, she’d been their English teacher and yearbook advisor, but that didn’t explain her obsessive collecting of signatures and tributes next to every senior’s photo. I could picture her—age twenty-three, her first job after college, roaming the corridors of Pickering High School, pen and book in hand, coaxing the shyest, least engaged boy or girl to sign—Write anything. I want to remember every one of you. Could you personalize it, just a few words?
But there would be more—her own embellishments, her judgments and opinions, written next to those photos in her small legible hand, a different color ink (red, green, blue) for several milestone reunions, which she attended compulsively, starting with the fifth and continuing until her last, their forty-fifth.
Her margin notes were coded but easily deciphered: “M” for married. “S” for single. “D” for dead; “DIV” for divorced. “DWI,” said a few. “AIDS?” suggested one notation. “Same dress she wore at 15th” my mother recorded. “Very plump” was one of her milder put-downs. “Braces.” “Pregnant.” Occasionally, “Still pretty.” “Looks older than I do” was one of her favorite notes. “Still holds PHS record for 100-yd. dash,” said one. And “danced w. him” appeared often.
Had I known about this project as it was happening? I hadn’t. Several reunions were held before I was born, and later ones, attended even after she retired, weren’t discussed with her two daughters. After all, we might know some of these graduates as the parents of our friends or our own teachers or custodians or police officers or panhandlers, townspeople still.
A handwritten codicil on the last page of my mother’s will said, “My daughter Daphne will take possession of the Pickering High School’s yearbook, The Monadnockian.” And nothing more.
I took it back with me to Manhattan, where it stayed on my shelf for a month until I read a magazine article about decluttering.
The test? Would I ever reread this novel, these college textbooks, these magazines? Did I really need a Portuguese-English dictionary? What about the panini press and my dead BlackBerry? The expert recommended this: Hold the item in question, be it book or sweater or socks or muffin tin, to your chest, over your heart, and ask yourself, Does this thing inspire joy?
I hugged the yearbook. Nothing. Well, not nothing; worse than that: an aversion. Apparently, I didn’t want, nor would I miss, this testimony to the unsympathetic, snarky side of my mother’s character.
The best-selling decluttering wizard said the property owner had to be tough, even ruthless. I certainly was that. Good-bye, ugly white-vinyl, ink-stained yearbook with your put-downs and your faint smell of mildew! Maybe it was my mother’s legacy and a time capsule, but it had failed to stir emotion in my bosom. Possessing too much stuff anyway, in a cramped apartment, bookshelves overflowing, I threw it out. Or rather, being a good citizen, I walked it down the hall to my building’s trash closet, straight into the recycling bin.
2
Okay, Listen
I’d never met Geneva Wisenkorn despite our residing at opposite ends of the same hallway. Our introduction came in the form of a note slipped under my door announcing, “I found something that belongs to you. Are you home?” followed by an email address and phone, office, and mobile numbers.
My wallet? My keys? I checked my pocketbook. All there. Had a misdelivered piece of mail or dropped glove been traced back to me? I went to my laptop and wrote to this seemingly thoughtful stranger, asking what possession of mine she’d found.
She wrote back immediately. “A high school yearbook. We need to talk!”
No, we didn’t. I hit reply and wrote, “Thanks anyway, but I recycled that,” then added a postscript—“It has no meaning or value, sentimental or otherwise”—in case she was looking for a reward.
“Contact info?” she answered.
My first mistake: I sent it. Immediately, my phone rang. After my wary “Hello,” I heard, “I think you’ll be very interested in what I have to say.”
I asked how she knew the yearbook, which I now decided I needed back, belonged to me.
“Because I found it with magazines that had your name on the subscription labels.”
I said, “I’d never forgive myself if a yearbook with all that personal stuff written in it got into the hands of a stranger.”
“Then why’d you throw it out?”
“I thought it would go to some landfill! Or get turned into whatever recycled paper gets turned into.”
&
nbsp; “I know the rules. If it’s trash left at the curbside or at the dump, the possessor has relegated ownership.”
The possessor has relegated ownership? Was I talking to this ragpicker’s lawyer?
“Finders keepers, in other words?”
“Precisely.”
I tried again. “Maybe there is some law on the books about garbage rights, but the polite thing, the neighborly thing, would be to return the yearbook, which any jury would see had personal content.”
“A jury? Are you going to call a lawyer? Or 911? I’d like to hear that conversation.”
“Why contact me in the first place?” I asked. “You found the yearbook. Why not just keep it? I’d never know.”
“Because I wanted to go about this in the most professional manner possible. Believe me, intellectual property can be a real shitstorm. We should talk—face-to-face, I mean. I want to get this settled before I leave for my writers’ retreat.”
Get what settled? So far, it was just a question of the keeping or the giving back. In case she thought she had leverage—that she’d expose my mother’s poison pen—I said, “You realize that the owner of the book is dead and it’s too late to embarrass her?”
“Embarrass her? I’m stunned you would say that! Your mother wasn’t writing for her own amusement. There’s no question she had a future audience in mind.”
Did she? What audience? Who else could possibly care? “I don’t know what you want from me,” I said.
“Permission.”
Was I catching on? Not yet. She asked again if we could talk face-to-face. I said, “Is this really necessary.”
“Be there in a jiff,” she said.
She rang my doorbell forty minutes later, finding me newly annoyed with her interpretation of a “jiff.” Her breathing was labored from the short walk, no doubt attributable to her extreme bulk. I recognized her—having shared elevator rides or exchanged nods in the mailroom—due to her colorful, bigger-than-life appearance and persona. She was large, wide, round-faced, with black curls that tumbled around her face, eyeglasses upswept, employing rhinestones. Her outfit could be called a dress if one were kind. It had no shape, only volume, in blocks of red, yellow, and black. She might be forty; she might be fifty. I couldn’t tell.
“Sorry it took so long, but I didn’t want to come empty-handed.” She passed me an open shoebox lined messily with wax paper that contained several layers of cookies. “I figured who doesn’t like chocolate chip? They should be cooling on a rack.”
No yearbook in sight, however. “Cookies,” I said. “Really, you shouldn’t have.”
“They’re Pillsbury slice and bake. I always keep a package in my fridge.”
“Come in,” I said.
As soon as she stepped into my living room, I could see she was puzzled. Is there another room? Who lives like this? She looked around, asked if the hallway . . . went anywhere?
“To the bedroom and bath. And my kitchen, of course.”
“It’s very . . . cute. What do you do?”
Even though I’d progressed no further than registration, I said, “I’m studying to be a chocolatier.”
“Where?”
“Online.”
She couldn’t have looked less impressed. “Are there jobs doing that? And do they pay?”
With that, I officially categorized Geneva as a boundary-challenged chatterbox whom I didn’t want to be chummy with. “Haven’t we just met?” I asked.
“I know! Very bad habit, asking personal questions. It’s not so much nosiness but a failure to know what’s personal and what’s just conversation. I get it from my mother, who thinks it’s perfectly polite to ask a near stranger why they didn’t have children or how much they paid for their co-op or how much they tipped the doorman or, once . . . oh, never mind. I need more people who can tell me when I’ve crossed the line.”
We were still standing. I motioned toward the couch and said I was going to put some of these cookies on a plate.
“No! The cookies are for you,” she said. “I have that highly annoying type 2 diabetes. If I lose weight, they tell me I’ll shake it. No cookie, but do you have vodka?”
I did. I poured us each a glass and returned. She raised hers, and said, “To your mother, the most committed yearbook advisor who ever lived.”
After my half-hearted clink, I said, “I don’t understand why you’d want someone else’s yearbook from a class she didn’t graduate in.”
“I ate it up! It’s fascinating. It’s got a point of view and—what the fuck!—an attitude! I can’t wait to hear more about her.”
“Such as?”
“Husband, marriage, interests, hobbies, wardrobe. Crushes, boyfriends, lovers?”
“Okay. This just got creepy. I’m her daughter. She left it to me in her will, and now I’m asking for it back.”
“Why?”
Why? Did I not just say why?
“It tells a story,” Geneva continued. “Correction: It tells a hundred stories. I remember the exact moment I knew this had my name on it: next to one girl’s picture, a pretty brunette with a perfect flip, under ‘Future,’ she had ‘beautician.’ Your mother drew an arrow across the page to a good-looking guy, thin face, Italian last name, whom she married. What do you think his future was?”
“I have no idea.”
“Ballroom dance. Guess how that turned out, at least according to your mother’s note. You can bet the ‘D’ stands for divorced and the ‘H’ is for homosexual.”
I said, “No, it didn’t. ‘H’ meant ‘home’ or ‘here’—that they still lived in Pickering.”
The expression greeting that remark clearly meant Poor you; born yesterday.
Next I tried, “Let’s just say my mother would be flattered that a total stranger finds the yearbook so interesting. Fine. You’ll read and enjoy it, and when you’re done, you’ll return it.”
“I don’t think you understand.” Then, as if it explained and justified everything: “I’m a filmmaker.”
I swallowed the rest of my vodka and poured a refill. “Are you saying you’d like to turn the yearbook into a movie, because I don’t see—”
“Not a feature film. A documentary that explores what happened to the class of nineteen sixty-eight—where are they now? Who’s married, divorced, happy, straight, gay, dead, cryogenically frozen? Dreams fulfilled—or dashed!”
“But who wants to watch a documentary about small-town nobodies?”
“People love reunions! We all have reunion hopes, don’t we? Go to your reunion, find your old boyfriend, and run off together!”
I told her that it wasn’t just my permission she needed but also my father’s. I threw in my sister’s, too, and my father’s cousin Julian’s, a lawyer, knowing not one of us would give this cockamamie plan a green light.
She said, “Let me remind you: I rescued this from the rubbish heap. But I’m all about collaboration. Sure, ask your relatives how they’d feel about an award-winning filmmaker putting Pinkerton High School on the map.”
“Pickering. If . . . just if this went forward, and you found some of the graduates, would they see what my mother wrote about them? Because she’d turn over in her grave.”
Her expression said it all: What a wonderful idea! Hadn’t thought of that but wow! Just the tension this project was missing!
A threat of last resort: “If I told the building super that you picked through everyone’s garbage, word would get around.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because it’s disgusting! People throw away personal stuff. They declutter!”
“And you know what I’d say to that? ‘I’m a documentary filmmaker, which makes me a researcher, even a scavenger. More power to me.’”
I asked what these award-winning documentaries were.
“Too many to name.”
“Any one I might have seen?”
“Most recently: on TV, last Passover.”
“Passover?” I repeated.
&
nbsp; “On the Jewish Channel.”
I said I had basic cable, which didn’t include the Jewish Channel. What was the film about?
“The last matzo factory in Brooklyn.” She handed me her empty glass. “I thought you’d be thrilled. The documentary-watching world will get to know a woman who otherwise lived in near obscurity. I’m hoping to find archival footage of her—the teacher all the boys and probably half the girls were in love with! No wonder she kept going to reunions!”
What to digest first—that this woman was going to make a movie about a New Hampshire yearbook? Or that my mother was a sex object?
I said, “I never got the idea from her notes that anything like that was going on.”
“Don’t get huffy. Of course you wouldn’t see that. She’s your mother.”
I asked if she’d forgotten that New Hampshire was the center of the universe every four years, with reporters flocking there for the presidential primary. Granite Staters are always being filmed. It’s ho-hum. Good luck finding people who aren’t sick of having a microphone stuck in their faces.
When this seemed to have the desired dampening effect, I added, “Maybe you’ll need to find a yearbook from a state that gets less attention.”
From a pocket within the folds of her voluminous dress, she produced a phone. I could tell without a view of the screen that she was Googling something.
“I’ll admit,” she finally said, “that I wasn’t factoring in the primary, but it could be just the thing that could get me the money I need.”
Money? I told her I didn’t follow.
“New Hampshire is one of the original thirteen colonies,” she announced.
Was she thinking she’d find yearbooks from the other twelve colonies? “Do you mean a yearbook series?”
“No! I was just thinking grants: Frontline. The National Endowment for the Arts. Daughters of the American Revolution. Kickstarter. Dartmouth.”
“Dartmouth?”
“New Hampshire, right? I’d release it in an off year just as residents were missing all the attention.”
She rose, nodded grandly, turned at the door, and said, “We both know your mother would be all for it.”
What kind of bargaining chip did I have? Geneva had the yearbook in her possession. And I, who didn’t believe in visitations from the other side, found myself wondering whether this was exactly what my mother would have wanted.
Good Riddance Page 1