Halfway House

by Katharine Noel

  “Cobwebs?” she asked.

  “Just static.” His fingers brushed against sticky threads. “No, cobwebs.”

  His sister bowed her head under his hand. Her crooked part shone white. From her hair he slid a small ball of silk: not cobwebs but the delicate egg sac of a spider. He showed it to her on the tip of his finger, tiny black dots stirring in the center of the gauzy thread.

  Next to them was an ancient swing set, its sky-blue metal freckled with rust. Gently, he pulled his finger along the side rail until the sac stuck. Angie shut the back door of the U-Haul and shot the bolt. “God. You’re married. My baby brother.”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t know why he hadn’t told her before they married; somehow it had seemed cleaner this way.

  She kicked a tire. “Why do people kick tires anyway?” She kicked it again. “I can’t believe we fought so much. I ruined the whole weekend.”

  “No, it was still nice.” She looked at him and he amended, “Okay. Not so nice.”

  “I wish we could do it over.”

  There was nothing to say to that. Angie toyed with her keys.

  “Can you imagine when they find it?” she asked. “The couch?”

  He began laughing. “Maybe they’ll get used to just ducking underneath it whenever they go up or down.”

  “Or maybe they’ll use it. They’ll move the TV onto the landing.”

  He heard himself whoop with laughter, something that only happened with Angie. “Can you see them, all lined up on the couch?”

  “Isobel—” She was laughing too hard to get the words out. She tried again: “Isobel—”

  “I have to say, I don’t think this is going to improve her feelings toward you.”

  They were laughing so hard his stomach ached. Angie leaned against the U-Haul.

  Finally they wore down to an occasional giggle. He looked at her. “Don’t go. Stay here.”

  “I can’t. I just … I can’t.”

  They didn’t hug. He reached for her hand, clasping it, then bringing it to his lips. She smiled. Pulling herself up into the cab of the truck, she started the engine. He took a step back. Foot still on the brake, she put the U-Haul in gear, then rolled down the window. “Luke?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re my best friend,” she said. “You’re really my only friend.”

  He nodded, throat closing. He’d always thought of heartache as just a term but now he felt it: an ache in his chest.

  He followed her for a few blocks in his car. Each time she turned a corner, the U-Haul listed and then swayed, righting itself. There was a sign for Route 91. She went right and he stayed straight. The truck curved up, around the entrance ramp. Glancing over his shoulder, Luke could still see the orange of the truck, could still see it, still see it—and then it was gone.

  His breath made a silvery cloud in the air of the car. He turned onto Route 121, passing the old vinyl banner—GUYS: GIRLS DIG CLEAN CARS!—of the detailing place. He saw, for an instant, Isobel, back arched as she yawned, nipples pressing against the fabric of her robe. It might be awhile before they even discovered the couch. Or they might have found it already. He imagined them looking down at the sofa, wedged against the walls so that it floated three feet above the stairs, and began to laugh again. He pulled over to the side of the road and put his head against the steering wheel, laughing until he could barely breathe.

  He stayed like that, head against the wheel. His face was wet.

  For as long as he could remember he’d wanted Angie to get better. And when he’d driven Wendy away, the only other thing he’d wanted was to have Wendy back. Now Angie was making a life for herself, and he’d married Wendy. He’d had those two desires for so long that, without them, he didn’t know who he was.

  Blowing out a hard breath, he shifted the car into first and pulled back onto the road.

  He felt half outside himself. The feeling persisted as he passed his mother’s clinic, then the car dealerships and the Hard Times Café. Here and there on the ground were patches of old snow, bruised green with shadows. He turned onto the familiar streets that narrowed and narrowed to his house.

  As he walked up the lawn, he could see his father in the kitchen, lifting the kettle. Wendy came to an upstairs window. Her presence startled him, something so clearly in the present and not the past. She was watching for his return. She wore a white nightgown, and her hair, not yet brushed and tied back, tumbled around her face. She raised her hand. He started to raise his own in response, then realized she couldn’t see him. She wasn’t waving but putting her hand to the glass, shielding her eyes to look out.

  He stood motionless under the oak, trying to see his house as a stranger might: solid and unremarkable, small squares of light where a man and a woman separately began the day. He wanted to hold on to the feeling of suspension; there was something he almost understood, seeing his life from outside like this. The neighbor’s sprinkler whirred; The White Mountain Times lay in its yellow plastic wrapper in the driveway.

  In a moment, he would make himself move. He would walk up and unlock the door, and daily life would reclaim him. The smell of toast, the radio playing classical music. He would step into the front hall. Close the door behind him. From the bedroom he’d had since childhood, Wendy would call down, Luke? Is that you?

  Acknowledgments

  I am incredibly grateful to the Wallace Stegner program at Stanford University, and to my teachers Elizabeth Tallent, Tobias Wolff, and John L’Heureux. Thanks also to Elizabeth Evans, the Creative Writing program at the University of Arizona, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Kim Witherspoon, Eleanor Jackson, and my wonderful editor, Elisabeth Schmitz.

  Molly Breen, Judy Breen, Julie Orringer, Malena Watrous, Angela Pneuman, Lysley Tenorio, Tamara Guirado, Otis Haschemeyer, Jack Livings, ZZ Packer, Adam Johnson, Ed Schwarzchild, Tom Kealey, and Tom McNeely read versions of this novel and provided astute criticism and encouragement. I want also to thank Gould Farm, where I had the luck and privilege of working and living for two years.

  Thanks to my parents, Margaret Wilkins Noel and Gordon Noel, for their unflagging love and support, and my amazing sisters, Margaret Lea Noel and Jennifer Noel, who read drafts of the novel and were there for me through every step. And thanks most of all to Eric Puchner, first and last reader, love of my life.

  A GROVE PRESS READING GROUP GUIDE

  Halfway House

  A Novel

  Katharine Noel

  ABOUT THIS GUIDE

  We hope that these discussion questions will enhance your reading group’s exploration of Katharine Noel’s Halfway House. They are meant to stimulate discussion, offer new viewpoints, and enrich your enjoyment of the book.

  More reading group guides and additional information, including summaries, author tours, and author sites for other fine Grove Press titles, may be found on our Web site, www.groveatlantic.com.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. In the beginning of the novel, Angie is a gifted, dedicated student and a brilliant swimmer. She has friends, a solid family, and a promising future. She is successful by most of the usual standards, especially those of college admissions directors. Yet she is felled by mania in a variety of ways: irrational behavior, anger, and depression. Discuss the range of Angie’s struggles. Insomnia plagues her: “Waking up, there was a moment Angie didn’t feel bad. Then it descended again onto her chest, like a cat that had merely stood to change position and was now settling more securely” (p. 72). Her battles are legion and monumental. She has to fight to appear sane or well; she has to find out who she is; she has to strike a balance with her parents between childhood and adulthood. The usual coming-of-age problems are magnified by her illness. She has to struggle against hurting herself, finding ways to feel safe. She fights sadness and alienation as she tries even to like herself. Pick some of these battles and talk about them. Are there any clues to her fragility before her public breakdown?

  2. Th
e inciting force for the Voorster family trial by fire is Angie’s breakdown and persistent illness. Their loyalty to her and to the family both sustains and tests them. Cite moments when all of them—Pieter, Jordana, and Luke—are harried almost to breaking by their fears for Angie. Then, beyond Angie, each embarks on other trials. Give examples (e.g., Pieter pushes himself to near death by skating alone in a blizzard). How much of the characters’ pain is self-inflicted and how much is instigated by others?

  3. What makes Halfway House a work that touches us on many levels? Is it that we all have known people like Angie and her family? Do we recognize the fine line or sudden trapdoor between sanity and mental illness? Have people in your own life described their fears in vivid terms? Some have said depression is like being locked in a black bag. Others have described the sense of self seeping out like sand. What other images, in the book or in your life, have made you understand mania or depression?

  4. How honest are the characters in the book? To themselves? To others? Is honesty a redeeming trait of the Voorster family? When are times they subvert it?

  5. Do the various angles of vision provide a coherent whole narrative? Are we left with rich but distinct viewpoints, almost a Rashomon collage of the whole story? Can competing interpretations be true in a work of fiction? In life?

  6. What is the result of suffering in the story? Does it raise characters to a higher level? Or debase them? Does it cause them to reach out to each other? Which ones? Do any react to suffering by shutting down or growing petty and querulous?

  7. Explore the various implications of the title. How is the actual halfway house distinct from the larger world? How is it similar? What insight do we gain about the NIMBY (not in my backyard) phenomenon? Could the title refer to the Voorster house as well?

  8. How are youth and age contrasted in the novel? Does the author divide her sympathy and close attention equally among the different ages? Does the term “coming-of-age” have to be limited to the young? Which characters show significant growth in response to the events in the book?

  9. As the story progresses, do Angie and her family have retrospective understanding of her illness? Often in books about psychiatric patients, we have a central character, the doctor, who interprets events for the patient and for the reader. Which characters approach this role, however fleetingly? Can anyone be seen as a trusted adviser? Is it oddly Angie with her “funny off-center way of looking at the world” (p. 149) who sometimes seems to have the best insight about other people? Is it she who is sometimes the linchpin? Give examples. In the absence of dependable advisers, what other resources do characters turn to for solace?

  10. Dilemma has been defined as a situation in which a character must choose between two courses of action, both undesirable. Do you see the people in Halfway House caught in dilemmas? Are they trying to reconcile conflicting roles? Give examples.

  11. Is the disintegration of Pieter and Jordana’s marriage credible after they had started with so much passion? Is one partner more to blame than the other? Is it Angie’s illness alone that has taken such a toll on them? Can you predict their future at the end?

  12. How is betrayal a recurrent need and blight in the novel? How does it affect Pieter, Jordana, Luke, and Wendy? For Luke, “[e]very time he thought of Wendy, it felt like taking a step and pitching down a staircase” (p. 236). For Pieter, “Jordana carried his identity more than he did” (p. 137). After his discovery of her adultery, “[h]e didn’t feel he had enough of a self to talk to other people—to smile, to pour a drink—without ripping in two” (p. 138). What makes some couples able to pick up and re-create their lives together and others incapable of it? How is the idea of betrayal relevant to Angie? Does she feel her whole identity has been betrayed by her chemistry?

  13. After reading the novel, what are your conclusions about the mental health system? Does the administering of drugs seem appropriate and effective? Do you think overwork and underpayment erode the quality of caregiving? Does the financial burden on the family seem necessary? Fair?

  14. Where do issues of class absorb or define characters? Inside institutions or halfway houses? Outside? Would you say that mental illness is a democratizing force? A leveling one?

  15. How does work shape characters’ lives? Pieter’s? Jordana’s? Angie’s? Luke’s? For whom does work seem more important than human relationships? Can work or art become crippling in its obsessiveness? Does a driven artist have a choice?

  16. The brother-sister relationship, that of Luke and Angie, is richly explored. How is Angie Luke’s nemesis? How is she also his redemption? Wendy observes that Luke was only “really upset when his sister was in trouble. His sister was also the one person who could make him howl with laughter” (p. 172). Taking Angie’s mental illness seriously is something Luke resists at first. Then, “[t]he night she’d fallen down the stairs at the Burnt House, almost four years ago, he’d gotten it—really gotten it, for the first time—that she wasn’t faking. It was like that optical illusion where you saw an old woman and then realized the picture could be a young woman as well: a tiny shift, but it had rearranged everything” (p. 149). Do you recall a similar image when Luke finally locates the wandering Angie on the roadside?

  17. The central house, the Voorsters’, endures in a reconfigured state at the end. The house (not her home anymore, she reminds herself) even remains a strong point of reference for Jordana. Describe the actions and reactions of the different characters at the last supper when the family convenes. Whose do you find most poignant? Do you have more empathy for Pieter or Jordana after this family meal?

  18. Has Angie found an answer for herself in San Francisco? Do you expect her equilibrium to last?

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING:

  An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison; Undercurrents by Martha Manning; Imagining Robert by Jay Neugeboren; Unholy Ghost, edited by Nell Casey; Wintering by Kate Moses; A Seahorse Year by Stacey d’Erasmo; Mystery Ride by Robert Boswell; Atonement by Ian McEwan; Talking in Bed by Antonya Nelson; Museum Pieces and Time with Children by Elizabeth Tallent; Light Years by James Salter; The Last Good Chance by Tom Barbash; Middlemarch by George Eliot; Portrait of a Lady by Henry James; Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Letham; Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell; Anagrams by Lorrie Moore; everything by Alice Munro, but especially The Beggar Maid and Friend of My Youth; Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro; Superior Women by Alice Adams; Rabbit, Run by John Updike