Small Silent Things
Page 24
“Yes,” he says.
“Mike’s Pastry,” she says. “It’s just a few blocks away. Some people like Modern, but I prefer Mike’s. It’s cash only. Do you have any cash?”
And she is chattering and blathering on as she did when she was a small child, only now in English, and about flavors and sweets, Florentine and traditional, powdered sugar or not, but there is some of the same rhythm in her speech, and his heart pounds when he thinks: We are, at our essence, always the same. We are! We are! The same inside as we were before, and this thought heartens him.
My child, he reminds himself. My grandchild, he thinks, looking at the tiny baby in her arms. He does not allow himself to think of Vestine. I am the one left. No. We are the ones left. And this time, he finds the joy.
AS HE MAKES HIS WAY BACK FROM THE PASTRY SHOP, HE FEELS CERTAIN HE has made the right decision. The lie is right. The truth is wrong. Our story will begin right now. He has expanded his family. He has gathered them, as Abrahm and he once gathered banana leaves. The almost loss of Jocelyn and Lucy has made him clear about so many things, about what can be done, about what can’t, the weight and value of people, another human being’s fragility. He knows that there is not a way to tell the true story, so he cannot tell it.
The box in his hand is full. The smell of the pastries is sweet. He has bought an extra one for Lion, who waits for him at the Royal Sonesta, asleep in the hotel bed. A dog in my bed? How can I call myself African?
He has not been silent this time. He has told a story. A story that will allow his daughter’s life, his grandson’s life, to go. Lucy and Jocelyn are safe. Oh, what a large family I have! He presses the Walk button. He walks.
Acknowledgments
I AM MOST GRATEFUL TO JOHN BERAN, MY HUSBAND, MY WRITING PARTNER, and my very best friend. We have almost reached that perfect middle where I have been in this world, in love with him, longer than I have been in the world without him. All this time spent together, and our wonderful marriage, makes me a very lucky woman.
I am deeply indebted to my editor, Amber Oliver, for her flexibility, understanding, and vision. Thank you for taking a chance on a debut writer. I appreciate the hard work that she and everyone else at Harper Perennial did to make this book exist in the world.
My writing life is less lonely because of the writers and friends that have supported me, especially Dana Marterella for never, ever, being judgmental, and for talking me and this book down from the ledge more than a time or two; Theresa Heim for sharing her own work with me, and for being a careful reader of all my work from the very beginning; Chieh Chieng and Lance Uyeda for their belief in my writing when my own confidence waned. Thank you to Jill Smith, who taught me the kindness of strangers. Our abiding friendship started with a starving dog on the side of the road. Thanks to Yoshiun Wong for sticking with me, on and off, the tennis court. Thank you to Michelle Latiolais for introducing me to all sorts of unique fiction.
All my love to my family, especially my sister, Tracey Montilla, who has always picked up the phone for me, has always had the answers to most of my questions, and, most importantly, has always taken care of me as only big sisters can; my mother, Anneliese Jaensch, who taught me to value books and stories, using her own stories to teach me about my Oma and Opa, the war, and where I come from. Thank you to my father, Charles Page, who has always known I could do it and is not averse to claiming genetic responsibility for my talent. Also, much love to my husband’s parents, Marilyn and David Beran—the best in-laws in the world.
Like many mothers, my biggest blessings are my two fabulous daughters, who keep me young, and happy, and inspired. Thank you to my eldest, La La, who teaches me what brave is, and what kind is, and who was absolutely meant to be mine. Kisses to my youngest, Izzy Bee, who is smart and serious and sweet. I hope she will forgive me for putting Goo Bob Beran in the book.
Almost last, but definitely not least, this book is immeasurably better because of my brilliant, generous, half-therapist, half-agent, and whole friend, Laura Usselman, who has shepherded this book from the start. She has gently pressed me to keep improving the book without making me give up my intentions for it. She is my ultimate reader and absolutely crucial to my process.
Although my brother, Ricky, is not in this world anymore, I am grateful and honored to have been his little sister. Each happy space is tainted by the absence of him—even this one. But the Kurt Weill in these pages is us, and something he taught me, and I love it, and miss hearing him play it, and of course, I also miss him.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
* * *
Meet Robin Page
Q&A with Robin Page
About the Book
* * *
A Behind the Book Essay on Small Silent Things
About the Author
Meet Robin Page
ROBIN PAGE was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and has degrees from UCLA and University of California, Irvine’s MFA program. She is married, has two daughters, and lives in Los Angeles. She has powerfully mined her experience as a transplanted midwesterner, a woman of color, and a mother in these pages.
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Q&A with Robin Page
1. What was your writing process like for Small Silent Things?
Because this story has three separate narrators, I had to find a way to organize them. I had separate, compartmentalized passes early on: one for the story, then another for the theme of resilience, and then one for the theme of damage. I always use index cards and put lists on my wall to remind me of what my intentions are for the characters. I also listen to music, especially when I get stuck. It can bring me to a character’s emotional state, and it gets me in the mood to write. I have a musical history that relates to my childhood, my family background, my neighborhood, and my characters do too. A song can bring me back to a moment in time, and I remember that party, that car ride, those friends, because of the music. I listen to a different set of songs and genres for each character.
2. What real life experiences did you draw from in order to write this book?
I am a mother of a daughter under ten, and I also have an older daughter. Love and exhaustion are ever present emotions in my life. A mother is protective, caring, worried, afraid, thrilled, overwhelmed, invested, frustrated, angry, happy, helpless, and a million other emotions in relation to her children, AND a human being that carries her own burdens. This is problematic and amazing. Jocelyn allows me to explore some of the emotional complexities of that role, while Simon and Claudette allow me to explore family. What is a family? How do we identify ourselves? What is the impact of family secrets? What is the importance or insignificance of biology? Can we create our own families? Can we release our biology? My older daughter is adopted, and so these questions intrigue me.
I’d also say the loss of my brother to AIDS, and the grief that I carry because of that, informs the novel. Jocelyn’s story is not a parallel to mine, but the seeds of the things I’ve experienced allow me to begin creating her, and then she takes on a life of her own. In this same way playing ladies tennis helps me to create Jocelyn’s social life. Tennis in the real world has everything in it—racism, classism, sexism, bias against difference, friendship, infidelity, health, competition, so it’s a very fertile world to explore in fiction.
3. How did you decide on the two central characters, Jocelyn and Simon? And why do you think they needed each other in their lives?
I was very intentional about making Simon and Jocelyn very different from each other. Simon is perceived as an African American in the US, even though he is not that at all having lived his childhood and much of his adult life in Rwanda. He is not what he appears to be. A facade obscures his true past and true self. It’s the same with Jocelyn. She is African American, but not exactly. She is a wealthy black woman in an upper-class neighborhood, but not exactly. All of the facades Jocelyn presents hide her true
origins, her past abuse and poverty, her present grief, anxiety, and fear. The facade is armor, but the truth will find its way out. Of course, neither character is just their history, but the suppression of their histories is problematic for them, and ultimately one of the things they share.
4. You talk a bit here about serious topics such as mental health, trauma, HIV, among others. Why did you decide to write about these topics?
The older I get, the more I am surprised if someone I know is not having mental health issues. Mental health, trauma, HIV, abuse, are all things that get hidden, swept under the rug. Once you put a lid on them it is inevitable that they will explode and boil over in destructive ways. I did not seek help for my grief after my brother died. I just pushed forward. Many, many years later, when I wasn’t expecting it, I had to deal with it, and other issues, or I was going to be flattened. Enduring doesn’t work, and yet, we, as black women in particular, are taught to “take” what life gives us, to endure, to be resilient, and the consequence of this is a lack of practice in relation to acting (especially in our own defense). We also have this expectation of children—they are young, they’ll get over whatever is done to them. I do not believe that, and it’s important to me that we are serious about pain and its impact, so that we don’t repeat damaging behavior. As a community we have to make it okay to seek mental health help. We have to acknowledge and respect another person’s experience and support rather than shame them.
5. What do you want readers to take away from this book?
Most importantly, I’d like the reader to be in touch on an emotional level with Jocelyn and Simon and to feel empathy where they may not have felt it before. Is there anything in Jocelyn’s story that will make the reader see a person with AIDS differently? Is there anything in Jocelyn’s story that allows the reader to be more tolerant of someone who has survived abuse or is suffering with mental health issues? Is there a warning for us in Simon’s Rwanda? The fiction I love makes me question the real world. I can enter and exit fictional experiences in a safer way than I can enter and exit real life, but nevertheless it informs my views. I’d like readers to walk away from this book seeing, even if just slightly, the real world a bit differently than before.
About the Book
A Behind the Book Essay on Small Silent Things
I’VE PLAYED TENNIS for many years and have watched a number of marriages fall apart around a fantasy relationship with the tennis pro. I wanted to write a literary “affair book” that really considers what might bring someone to adultery, and what the aftereffects were as well. Is it trauma? Is it middle age? Is it a need for something other than what a spouse can give? It was essential to me that the lovers have equal power (outwardly anyway), as opposed, for example, to a professor who has an affair with her student. I also wanted Jocelyn to have an essentially good marriage, one that was sexually passionate, so the answers to why she would choose something else would be less obvious. I had listened to Esther Perel quite a bit while writing, and her idea that “the most intoxicating ‘other’ that people discover in an affair is not a new partner; it’s a new self” is very true for Jocelyn. Jocelyn needs anonymity, a place to hide, a place to look toward, so she doesn’t have to look back. I’m also interested in the fluidity of sexuality, especially in women, so it made sense that it would be a lesbian affair.
My brother, like Jocelyn’s, died of AIDS, and it altered my life permanently. I am disturbed by the fact that women and children in our culture tend to be described as resilient. To be a “steel magnolia” (especially for black women), is considered to be a good thing. As I was writing, I wanted to challenge that. What really happens when women aren’t taught to act against something, but instead are taught to endure? What happens when we keep silent when we should speak? Can friendship, especially between trauma survivors, change the future?
As a mother of a young child, I am always struggling with trying to protect my daughters, and so Jocelyn felt like someone I could write. As far as Simon’s story goes, I have been interested in the Rwandan genocide for a long time, but more generally interested in wars between neighbors and even friends. Our political times are more divisive than ever, and I think we have to be aware of how dangerous it is for the “powers that be” to turn us against one another based on race, gender, sexuality, age, economics, or demographics. What happened in Rwanda can inform us of what could happen in our own country. I wanted Simon to be carrying all the things that had happened to him (and the same with Jocelyn and Claudette). I wanted to emphasize how the deep loss of his daughter and family has stayed with him over the years.
Some of the book’s ideas about race come from my own life. I’m always trying to figure out what it is to be black, to be a woman, to be a mother, to be straight, especially in our unique American culture. Jocelyn’s character was a way for me to question those terms. Simon is also trying to understand who he is—a longtime resident of America but without an American history. He cannot be the same person of color that Jocelyn is, and Jocelyn is not the same as Claudette, and so on. Claudette’s story is an exploration of identity as well. Who is our family? How do we see ourselves when what we think is true about our genetics, isn’t true?
I love to read, so I read a number of books while I was writing. Some of them were “affair” books like Ingeborg Day’s Nine and a Half Weeks, which in novel form is absolutely different than the film. Others were about sexual abuse like Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, and Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body. In relation to Rwanda, I mostly read books by Jean Hatzfeld, and, of course, Paul Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families. I tried to focus on the internal perspective of the survivors and perpetrators—the people. Hatzfeld’s work has both the perpetrators’ points of view and the victims’ points of view. For me, it’s essential to see the point of view of the perpetrator in order to not repeat the victimization. The fact that Simon and Abrahm are lifelong friends complicates our understanding of what it is to be enemies in a genocide.
Finally, as far as the setting for the book goes, I presently live in a small community that is very different, but very near, to the Palisades, so that coastal neighborhood was an easy choice for Jocelyn. I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for two summers, and I thought it would work well for the academic Claudette. The book took me two to three years to write and I’m glad that it exists in the world for people to read.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
SMALL SILENT THINGS. Copyright © 2019 by Robin Page. 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 e-book 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 hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-287924-0
Version 07172019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-287923-3 (pbk.)
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