Drinking Closer to Home
Page 33
“Why do all your friends’ names end in Y?” Allen asked.
“Tammy,” Jamie recited. “Debbie . . . Debbie’s I E.”
“But it sounds like a Y.”
“So does my name.”
“You’re I E,” Betty said. “You’ve been I E since you were born.”
“Yeah, but Jamie sounds like Jamey with a Y.”
“There’s no such thing as Jamie with a Y,” Allen said. “But there is Debby with a Y.”
“Well Mom’s a Y—Betty!”
“I’m a different generation,” Betty said. “I don’t count.”
“And she’s not your friend, she’s your mother,” Allen said.
“Oh, there’s also Kathy and Suzy and Pammy,” Betty said.
“No one calls her Pammy except you,” Jamie said.
“Too many Y’s,” Allen said. “You need friends with more solid names. Carol or Ann.”
“‘Too many Y’s,’ Allen said. ‘You need friends with more solid names. Carol or Ann.’”
“No way I’m hanging out with Carol or Ann.”
“They’ve got good names.” Allen sat on a stool at the counter, picked up his fork and knife, and held each in a fist on either side of his plate.
“They’re dorks,” Jamie said.
Betty slid the omelet off the pan and onto Allen’s plate just as their neighbor Leon walked in.
“Betty,” he said, and he kissed Jamie’s mother on the cheek. His right hand grazed one breast as they pulled away from the kiss.
“Allen.” Leon stuck out the hand that had just touched Betty’s breast to Allen, who was hovered over his omelet, oblivious.
“Did you find some?” Allen asked.
“I stuck it in your trunk,” Leon said.
“What?” Jamie asked.
“Nothing,” Allen said, although he must have known that Jamie knew they were talking about marijuana. They rolled it in front of their daughters, they smoked it in front of them, they left abalone ashtrays full of Chicklet-sized butts all over the house. Yet the actual purchasing of it was treated like a secret—as if the girls were supposed to think that although their parents would smoke an illegal substance, they’d never be so profligate as to buy one.
“So what are you going to do in Death Valley?” Leon asked.
Allen lifted his left hand and made an O. He stuck the extended middle finger of his right hand in and out of the O. The three of them laughed. Jamie turned her head so she could pretend to not have seen. Unlike her sister, Jamie was successfully able to block herself from her parents’ overwhelming sexuality, which often filled the room they were in, in the same way that air fills whatever space contains it.
“And what are you doing home alone?” Leon winked at Jamie.
“Debbie and Tammy are staying with me,” she said. “I guess we’ll watch TV and eat TV dinners.”
“You want an omelet?” Betty asked Leon, and her voice was so cheerful, her cheeks so rouged and smooth, that it just didn’t seem right that she should walk around half-naked all the time.
“Sure,” Leon said, and he slid onto the stool next to Allen as Betty prepared another omelet.
Jamie looked back at the three of them as she left the kitchen. Allen and Leon were dressed in jeans and tee shirts, being served food by chatty, cheerful Betty. Wide bands of light shafted into the room and highlighted them as if they were on a stage. It was a scene from a sitcom gone wrong. There was the friendly neighbor guy, the slightly grumpy father, the mother with perfectly coiffed short brown hair that sat on her head like a wig. But when the mother bent down to pick up an egg shell that had dropped, the friendly neighbor leaned forward on his stool so he could catch a glimpse of the smooth orbs of his friend’s wife’s ass peeking out from the fringe of her too-short shorts.
“It was a scene from a sitcom gone wrong. . . .”
Jamie wished her life were as simple as playing Colorforms; she would love to stick a plastic dress over her shiny cardboard mother. If it didn’t stick, she’d lick the dress and hold it down with her thumb until it stayed.
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Also by Jessica Anya Blau
The Summer of Naked Swim Parties
Praise for Jessica Anya Blau and
Drinking Closer to Home
“Jessica Anya Blau’s second novel is not only a wise and pitch-perfect depiction of family dynamics but also happens to be unrelentingly, sidesplittingly funny. I dare you to forget this family.”
—IRINA REYN, author of What Happened to Anna K.
“If you took Jonathan Franzen, soaked him in Southern California culture, sprinkled him with biting insight and twisted humor, you would get a book that tasted something like Drinking Closer to Home. The Stein family is unlike any you’ve ever encountered, and yet the truth of their story is absolutely universal. Jessica Anya Blau is effortlessly hilarious and deeply profound. This is a stunning novel.”
—KATIE ARNOLDI, author of Point Dume
“I have never encountered such exciting, eccentric, and lovably flawed characters as those Jessica Anya Blau creates in Drinking Closer to Home. This hysterical literary portrait of dysfunction makes me simultaneously grateful that my own family isn’t this zany, and jealous of their close-knit ability to laugh even in the face of life’s most difficult trials.”
—ALLISON AMEND, author of Stations West
“If you think you’ve read enough novels about mixed-up families already, go ahead and read one more. Jessica Anya Blau’s Drinking Closer to Home is a phantasmagoric, hilarious carnival ride.”
—MADISON SMARTT BELL
“Jessica Anya Blau’s Drinking Closer to Home is heartfelt and hilarious as it explores every nook and cranny of this wonderful (and wild) family. If you want to know why we love our parents and siblings even as they drive us to drink and distraction, you must read this book.”
—RON TANNER, author of Kiss Me, Stranger
“Family agonies observed under plenty of sunshine with a sharp eye, an even sharper pen, and the forgiving heart of a wise writer. As perfectly pitched as it is comically painful, Drinking Closer to Home echoes a profound Tolstoyan truth about family. Many novelists have a sense for place; the gifted ones deliver life with such fidelity that the truth hits very close to home indeed.”
—MARISOL, author of The Lady, the Chef, and the Courtesan
“All families are eccentric in their own way, but this hilarious and heartbreaking novel introduces readers to one that exists on a plane all its own. Drinking Closer to Home is a testament to the impossibility of ever truly ‘leaving home,’ and the great triumph of this book is in Blau’s skillful illumination of how that’s both a blessing and a curse, not just for her characters but for all of us. This novel will stay with you for a very long time.”
—SKIP HORACK, author of The Southern Cross and The Eden Hunter
“The sharpness of Jessica Anya Blau’s voice and wit never ceases to amaze me. From the first page this surprising novel takes a classic tale—adult children going home again—and turns it on its head. An absorbing, heart-wrenching read.”
—KATIE CROUCH, author of Men and Dogs
“Jessica Anya Blau’s emotional turf is kinship, from its betrayals to its bonds—and in her second novel, Drinking Closer to Home, she covers this territory with an honesty so raw and funny I wanted to read parts aloud to strangers. It’s riveting and startling. It is not afraid of the dark. It has real heart.”
—DYLAN LANDIS, author of Normal People Don’t Live Like This
“The hilariously irreverent sibling triad in Drinking Closer to Home had me laughing so hard at their gallows humor that I didn’t realize how devastated I was until I was fully under their spell. This unconventional joyride of a novel is also an unexpectedly powerful and multilayered exploration of unbreakable family bonds.”
—GINA FRANGELLO, author of Slut Lulla
bies
“It might surprise Jessica Anya Blau to hear that her stunning new novel struck me as old-fashioned, so maybe I’d better explain. She creates characters that have a lot more depth and more of a past than one often sees in fiction these days, and she never loses sight of the world they inhabit. Furthermore, she’s of the school in which actions come with consequences and secrets bring surprises. She’s lavished such attention on these people that I found it impossible not to care about them—and equally impossible to forget them. Blau is a magnificent writer, and this is one special novel.”
—STEVE YARBROUGH, author of Safe from the Neighbors
“Chekhov knew that laughter and tears are only a breath apart. So does Jessica Anya Blau. The family in her marvelous Drinking Closer to Home is a raucous sextet—emphasis on the first syllable, please—unraveling its past in a Santa Barbara hospital room. They eat bad food, they take no prisoners, and they make beautiful, hilarious music through time and all the spaces in the heart. And spleen.”
—JAMES MAGRUDER, author of Sugarless
“In Drinking Closer to Home, Jessica Anya Blau has created an unforgettably unique family—Buzzy, Louise, Anna, Portia, and Emery—and done them a great service by placing them in a compelling story that is alternately funny and sad as hell. I don’t think I’d last twelve days in this family, but I could read about them forever. With this novel, Blau announces herself as a fearless writer, capable of anything and everything.”
—KEVIN WILSON, author of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth
“Drinking Closer to Home is as raw and heartbreaking as it is tender. Jessica Anya Blau has written an honest, haunting portrayal of a beguiling yet maddening family who together come of age amid the shifting morals of a country on the cusp of tremendous cultural change. With humor, compassion, and a keen insight into the human psyche, Drinking Closer to Home proves that despite the best of intentions, where we come from and where we end up are even closer than we could ever imagine.”
—ROBIN ANTALEK, author of The Summer We Fell Apart
“Imagine a home with a nudist mother, a bird that perches on the living room curtain rod and shits on the couch, and an empty pool in the backyard filled with bikes. Imagine growing up in this home and then returning as an adult to the hospital bedside of this nudist mother. Drinking Closer to Home is a gloriously rich portrait of three adult children who discover that the tensions and hurts they still have between them are inextricably tied to their laughter and their love.”
—SUSAN HENDERSON, author of Up From the Blue
“Jessica Anya Blau has written a very funny—but also deeply humane—novel. The central characters writhe in a particular kind of family agony. It might just remind you of your own family. (It certainly reminded me of mine.) Parental love and booze and drugs and all the complications of becoming an adult: this is a smart book—a book that makes you cringe and laugh out loud.”
—PAULS TOUTONGHI, author of Red Weather
Praise for Jessica Anya Blau and her previous novel,
The Summer of Naked Swim Parties
“Recovered Judy Blume addicts, brace yourselves for a relapse: Jessica Anya Blau’s debut novel, set in Santa Barbara, California, during the summer of ’76, is a poignant, gleeful ode to the turbulence of growing up—and a delicious thrill if you crave return visits to adolescence. . . . Blau’s writing is frank, witty, and occasionally hilarious; her account of Jamie’s experiences will evoke vivid recollections of first loves and teenage angst. The Summer of Naked Swim Parties has plenty of good period detail (one group-therapy session includes a hippie couple and their son, Tugboat), but it’s not a nostalgia piece. It’s a dead-on portrayal of the simple yet shocking revelations of youth: friendship can be tenuous, sex is not contractual, and the importance of family trumps everything.”
—Time Out New York
“Jessica Anya Blau’s debut novel, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, is a delight: a California beach girl’s hilariously painful adolescence in the High 1970s.”
—JOHN BARTH
“[Y]ou finish [The Summer of Naked Swim Parties] wishing it were twice as long. It’s hard to recall a debut as warm, charming, and comically satisfying. . . . Blau conveys Jamie’s world with compelling insight and wit. . . . It’s a good measure of Blau’s skill that she takes what could easily be a tired stereotype [surfer Flip Jenkins] and instead fashions a comic creation of vivid complexity. . . . [Blau’s] sharp observation and affectionate humor [give] surprising depth to this shimmering novel.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“You may think you’ve heard this story before, but no one tells it as wittily, winningly, wisely, and well as Jessica Anya Blau.”
—MADISON SMARTT BELL
“Sadly, not a photo essay, but rather a witty account of the agonies and ecstasies of a girl coming of age in late-seventies California.”
—New York magazine
“If books could be trains, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties would be a high-speed zephyr, traveling at great speed from California to Baltimore, providing great scenery and good company. To carry the metaphor further, this novel has energy and power and will be a great ride for everyone who reads it. Ms. Blau is a writer of wit, intelligence, deep feeling, humor, and imagination, and she gets into the head of a young person like almost nobody since J.D. Salinger. All aboard!”
—STEPHEN DIXON
“Reading this heartfelt and humorous coming-of-age story is the perfect way to spend a hot summer day. . . . Blau’s writing style flows beautifully, so you will glide through this book and not want to put it down. So get out your crochet bikini, whack on your favorite Jimi Hendrix tune, and enjoy the ride.”
—Cosmopolitan (Australia)
“You’re fourteen years old in 1976 and your parents throw naked swim parties. How the hell are you supposed to have your own private sexual awakening? Jessica Anya Blau creates a charming protagonist, her charismatic Santa Barbara family, and a summer of love, lust and confusion. You won’t want summer—and this wonderful book—to end.”
—ELLEN SUSSMAN, author of Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex;Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave; and On a Night Like This
Copyright
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.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME. Copyright © 2011 by Jessica Anya Blau. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, 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 e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blau, Jessica Anya.
Drinking closer to home : a novel / Jessica Anya Blau.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-198402-0
1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. California, Southern—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.L397D75 2011
813’.6—dc22 2010019007
EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780062042354
Version 02012013
11 12 13 14 15 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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