by Margo Rabb
I looked at the stuff. I didn’t understand it.
“The minute you were born, the nurse put you in my arms, and I felt like all my life I’d been waiting for you. I couldn’t stop kissing your velvet skin and spun-sugar hair and tiny seashell fingernails. At night you’d fall asleep on my chest and I couldn’t bear to wake you. I’d sit in the rocking chair, holding you, letting the love wash over me in waves. The fairy tales were right—there were stars and moons, my dream come true.” She stared at me. “That feeling never changed. It will never change.”
She’d never told me this before. Not in words.
But she had told me—she’d told me in the phone calls and texts, so many of them; in that hand on my forehead, knowing it wasn’t a stomach bug at all; in wanting to keep me nearby for college; in trying to protect me from the grief and pain. I’d always seen it as overbearing, or as something I didn’t understand, and maybe it didn’t always take the right form, but it had been there, all around me, though I’d never before let myself see it for what it was.
My eyes hurt. Under the table, her fingers closed over mine.
No one wrote romances about mothers and daughters. There were no epic cowboy and jungle tales about mother and daughter love. Our table held a paperweight and a striped silk tie, a baby’s cap and a book of poems, and our hands lay beneath it, hidden like the stitches of a quilt.
PART NINE
MAD LOVE
her wounds came from the same source as her power
—Adrienne Rich
Kaddish
As the sun sank toward the horizon and the city grew even more alive, we walked along the beach near the Santa Monica pier. Annie, Lulu, Janet, my mom, and me. The air was warm as bathwater; we carried our shoes and felt the sand squish between our toes. (Except for Janet, who didn’t take her sneakers off.) We walked past little kids building sand castles, and people playing volleyball in bathing suits, and we watched a man with a white beard comb the sand with a metal detector.
My mom and Lulu talked and laughed and caught up on their lives. As we stood at the edge of the ocean, my mom told us that she and Larry had decided to postpone the wedding. They’d been rushing things. They weren’t quite ready, not yet.
“While Eva was away, we had a lot of time alone together. I don’t know if he’s right for me, or if it’s still too soon. And I forgot how much laundry men make. Even when they have their own apartment, all their laundry ends up at your place.” My mom rolled her eyes. “I’m not ready to have a man in my life that much of the time just yet. Maybe having one sometimes is just fine for now.”
“Sometimes is definitely good,” Lulu agreed.
“Sometimes is good,” Janet said in an entirely different tone.
We started walking again. Maybe there were people in our lives who left us—like Will—but they served another kind of purpose. They made you do things you’d never have done otherwise. If I hadn’t met Will, I wouldn’t be here right now. None of this would’ve happened.
Janet watched the waves lap at our feet. “Watch out for jellyfish. Even when they look dead, their sting is a pain in the tuchas like you never felt in your life.”
We walked for over an hour. When it was time to leave and return to the hotel, I paused at the shore. Annie and Janet stopped with me.
I opened my bag.
I thought about how honoring the dead means making a hundred little choices. What to keep, how to remember. The people who are left behind have to curate the memories. That’s the job we have to do.
I’d keep the paperweight, the postcards, the real things. The things that he would want me to keep. I took out the Toffee Crisp wrappers and the receipt.
“What are you doing?” Janet asked. “There’s a $100 fine,” she said as I flung the wrappers and paper into the ocean.
“Oh, too late.” Janet shook her head. “Yitgadal v’yitgadash. There go some Toffee Crisps that meant a lot to Frederick Roth, and now they’re being returned to—”
The wind had picked up, and instead of carrying them to the ocean, they flew up and over us, back to shore.
“—to the beach,” Janet said.
“Hey!” the white-bearded old man called, waving his metal detector. “Whatcha doing? Ya littering! Ya littering!” He ran across the beach, chasing the wrappers as they flapped in the breeze.
We started laughing. My dad would love it. It was better than any funeral he could wish for—the old man in his chase like a modern dance, the flying Toffee Crisp wrappers, the warm sand, the wind and the sea.
To leap
It almost seemed like a bus station. An incredibly clean, expensive bus station.
Women in giant sunglasses and heels tottered across the floor, little girls dragged their tiny pink suitcases, and mothers juggled babies. All these people going about their lives fearlessly. Or so it seemed.
We’d gotten there two hours early. To get used to it. To prepare. My mom was determined not to take a pill this time, as she had on the flight out. (She’d taken two.) “It’s just a flying subway, really,” my mom said. “A subway with wings.”
I felt a familiar whirring in my stomach, my skin growing colder. We stuffed my mom’s tote bag with magazines, sandwiches, juices, Skittles, Snickers, Tic Tacs, and granola bars, as if we were traveling for a week. She picked out a new bottle of perfume, though she already had two others in her checked baggage, including the bluebonnet one I’d given her. We picked out a gift, a lavender-scented household cleanser set, for Janet, who’d given us her frequent flyer miles for the tickets.
We sat and read in a coffee shop—almost like any other coffee shop—except there were planes out the window. We ordered two giant pieces of chocolate cake.
My mom closed her magazine. “I’m so freaking scared,” she said.
“Me too.” I laughed at her honesty; she giggled too. To everyone around us, we probably looked deranged: mother and daughter devouring cake like it was their last meal.
We walked toward the gate.
I thought of Elizabeth Bishop, traveling the world. Or Edna St. Vincent Millay, touring the country, reading to packed theaters. Or Adrienne Rich or Nikki Giovanni or Marie Howe, or all those women at once. Those women took risks, they loved and lost, they wrote about it. They took their disasters and turned them into something beautiful. That’s what I wanted to do with my life.
I thought of Annie and Janet, who were on a train right now barreling toward Texas. I thought of Lulu, who was driving back to Tucson. And I thought of my mom.
She stood beside me as we faced the gate. All this time I’d been searching for true love when I already had it. Every poem is a love poem, my dad had said. I’d always thought he meant romantic love—but there were so many kinds of great love: mother and daughter love. Father love. Best friend love. Aunt love. Mother’s-best-friend love. Friendish friendesque love. Love for the living and love for the dead. Love for who you really are, for those weird parts of yourself that only a few people understand. Love for the things you yearn to do, for putting words on a page. Love for traveling, for meeting new people and seeing new ways to live. Love for the world, for it being a hard pain in your ass. Love for the questions, for the ever more complicated questions.
I watched the display of destinations.
AMSTERDAM
BANGKOK
DUBLIN
EDINBURGH
FLORENCE
LONDON
MADRID
MELBOURNE
NAIROBI
PARIS
ROME
SINGAPORE
TAIPEI
TEL AVIV
TOKYO
Places that someday I would see.
The sun filtered through the giant windows, dappling the floors and seats and walls with diamonds of light.
I took that leap, and I was flying.
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks to my extraordinary editor, Alexandra Cooper, and my wonderful agent, Emily van Beek. I
’m grateful to the incredible team at Harper: Megan Barlog, Rosemary Brosnan, Renée Cafiero, Kate Engbring, Barbara Fitzsimmons, Erin Fitzsimmons, Megan Gendell, Victor Hendrickson, Kate Morgan Jackson, Susan Katz, Nellie Kurtzman, Jenna Lisanti, Alyssa Miele, Diane Naughton, Andrea Pappenheimer, Sandee Roston, Patty Rosati and the entire School and Library Marketing team, Olivia Russo, and Booki Vivat.
Thank you to the readers of various drafts of this novel for their wisdom and advice: Allison Amend, Dalia Azim, Judy Blundell, Shana Burg, Becky Hagenston, Jodi Keller, Dika Lam, April Lurie, Anna Sabat, Mary Helen Specht, Cecilia Ward, and Lara Wilson.
Thank you to Brian Anderson, Bob Ayres, Pinckney Benedict, Sam Bond, Patti Calkosz, Doug Dorst, Benjamin Dreyer, Valerie Greenhill, Bethany Hegedus, Shelby Hogan, Robin Lauzon, Kirk Lynn, Justin St. Germain, Stacey Swann, Nina Brown Theis, Marsha and Rich Wagner-McCoy, and Bobson Wong for the fact-checking help.
I’m grateful for the support and encouragement of Lynne Barrett, Michelle Beebower, Sarah Bird, Edward Carey, Nichole Chagnon, Elizabeth Everett, Carrie Fountain, Deborah Heiligman, Devon Holmes, Marthe Jocelyn, Varian Johnson, Sheri Joseph, Ana Knezevic, Iva Knezevic, Mila Knezevic, Elizabeth McCracken, Linda Sue Park, Jackie Rabb, Helen Reid, Karleigh Ross, Sharmila Rudrappa, Andrea Silber, Laura Silber, Cynthia Leitich Smith, Rebecca Stead, Michael Taeckens, Hannah Tinti, Julien Yoo, and Jennifer Ziegler.
Thank you to Adrienne Brodeur at Zoetrope: All Story for publishing the short story that inspired this novel. I’m also grateful to the following sources of information: the documentary film My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports; Too Young to Remember by Julie Heifetz; and the reporting by the New York Times on the crash of Air France 447 and the recovery of its wreckage.
Thank you to SCBWI for the Work-in-Progress grant that helped support the writing of this book, and to Cecilia Ward for providing a place for me to write the first draft while I had a young baby at home. Thank you to the MacDowell Colony, the Writers’ League of Texas, and to Meghan Dietsche Goel, Mandy Brooks, and all of the staff at BookPeople in Austin.
Enormous thanks to Lara Wilson for the long talks about motherhood, writing, and grief, and to Dika Lam for the daily laughs (including the manroot jokes), and for keeping me going every day.
Thank you especially to Marshall, Delphine, and Leo, with all of my love.
List of Works Referenced
As I wrote this book, I started each day by reading a poem. Many of the selections below are from my favorite poems, which continually inspire me; these poems take loss and grief and turn them into something beautiful. As a reader and a writer, poetry is my first love; it captures, in the words of Dylan Thomas, how “your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.” And in the words of Rita Dove, “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” In Audre Lorde’s words, which I believe can be applied to fiction as well, “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” I’m enormously grateful for the work of all the authors included here, and I hope that readers will love their books as much as I have.
Excerpt from “O Tell Me the Truth About Love” by W. H. Auden, here, here.
Excerpt from “If Men Could Menstruate” by Gloria Steinem, here.
Excerpts from “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas, here, here, here.
“Funny grief” from “Vilify” by Sherman Alexie, here.
“I dwell in possibility” from “I Dwell in Possibility” by Emily Dickinson, here.
Excerpt from “March” by Mary Oliver, here, here, here.
Excerpts from “I measure every Grief I meet” by Emily Dickinson, here, here, here.
“At his touch, the scabs would fall away” from “Adolescence—III” by Rita Dove, here.
Excerpts from “Wild Nights!” by Emily Dickinson, here, here.
Excerpt from “kidnap poem” by Nikki Giovanni, here.
Excerpt from Women and Economics by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, here.
“You can’t keep weaving all day and undoing it all through the night” from “An Ancient Gesture” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, here.
“There is no music like this without real grief” from “Orfeo” by Louise Glück, here.
Excerpt from “i like my body” by e. e. cummings, here.
“Those who are dead are never gone” from “Sighs” by Birago Diop, here.
“O Love, O fire!” from “Fatima” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, here.
“Time does not bring relief” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, here.
“To touch him again in this life” from “The Race” by Sharon Olds, here.
“Help me to shatter this darkness” from “As I Grew Older,” by Langston Hughes, here.
Excerpts from “Twenty-One Love Poems” by Adrienne Rich, here, here.
Excerpts from “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop, here, here, here, here.
“Feast on your life” from “Love after Love” by Derek Walcott, here.
Excerpt from “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke, here.
“Worn down love” from “The North Ship XXV” by Philip Larkin, here.
“Light, love, life all tumbled”: from “Coda” by Marilyn Hacker, here.
Excerpts from “A Letter” by Yehuda Amichai, here, here, here.
Excerpt from “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe, here.
Excerpts from “Power” by Adrienne Rich, here, here.
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About the Author
Photo by Jackie Rabb
MARGO RABB is an acclaimed novelist whose debut, Cures for Heartbreak, was hailed by critics and young readers alike. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Rumpus, Zoetrope: All-Story, Seventeen, Best New American Voices, New Stories from the South, and One Story, and have been broadcast on NPR. She received the grand prize in the Zoetrope short story contest, first prize in the Atlantic fiction contest, and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award. Margo grew up in Queens, New York, and has lived in Texas, Arizona, and the Midwest; she now lives in Philadelphia with her husband and two children. You can visit her online at www.margorabb.com.
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Praise for Cures for Heartbreak
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book for Young Adults
An ALA Booklist Editors’ Choice
A Book Sense Children’s Pick
An Association of Jewish Libraries Notable Book
A New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age
A TAYSHAS High School Reading List Selection
A Capitol Choices Noteworthy Book
★ “Rabb leavens impossible heartbreak with surprising humor, delivered with a comedian’s timing and dark absurdity. Rabb is an exceptionally gifted writer. Readers will cherish this powerful debut.”
—ALA Booklist (starred review)
★ “Black humor, pitch-perfect detail, and compelling characters make this a terrific read. As Mia struggles to make sense of her mother’s death and her father’s illness, she also sees humor in everyday situations, and her irreverent commentary brings the story to life.”
—School Library Journal (starred review)
★ “This is undeniably a book of anguish; it’s also one of raw strength and casual, clever humor in random and surprising places, making it a compelling as well as tearful read.”
—BCCB (starred review)
★ “When the last page turns, four new and fascinating people have been born into the reader’s consciousness.”
—KLIATT (
starred review)
“Everybody, regardless of age, should read this novel—witty, warm, and gorgeous in its fearlessness.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Told in the first person with humor and tears, Mia’s voice is authentic, and her story of family tragedy and healing rings true. Touching and tender.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Anyone who has grieved the loss of a loved one will feel an immediate connection to Mia, the narrator of this intimate novel. It gives readers a keenly insightful study of grief.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This novel gets at the blinding ache of grief, while also managing to be very funny, very smart, and addictively readable. This is truly a gorgeous and important book, one I’ve been pressing onto friends and their teenaged kids.”
—Cookie magazine
“Rabb concentrates not on the brooding and self-pity that can often permeate this type of novel but on an examination of death’s antithesis—love—as it touches the lives of her father, her mother and even Mia herself. Each chapter collides and colludes to offer both the familiar and the uncharted with humorous and touching detail, breaking and mending the reader’s heart in turns.”
—teenreads.com
“Intense, poignant but also very funny, Mia’s story of the year following her mother’s death explores the nature of grief as it is experienced by a Jewish teenager, her older sister, and her father. There is much pain in the story but also much wisdom, not to mention a smart look at school, friendship, and romance.”
—Association of Jewish Libraries
“Mia’s full of conflicting emotions that are expressed in sometimes humorous ways. She wonders whether it’s OK to date shortly after her mom dies; is it OK to wear her mom’s clothes; return to school—and how to feel normal when nothing feels normal anymore. It’s an experience that will help people understand grieving and know there is recovery.”