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Excerpt: from Cristina Henríquez's novel,
The World in Half
A Stop Smiling Author Event Spotlight
Monday, October 19, 2009
On Thursday, Oct. 22, STOP SMILING and Chicago Public Radio will present An October Sort of City: Chicago Authors Talk Chicago, an event that will showcase four Chicago authors rhapsodizing about the city that shaped their lives and work. Click here for event details.
The following is an excerpt from The World in Half (Riverhead), a novel by Cristina Henríquez, who will present her work at the event. Excerpts from the three other authors — Joe Meno, Deb Olin Unferth and Eula Biss — will be posted here throughtout the week.
Click here to read an excerpt from Deb Olin Unferth's novel, Vacation
Click here to read an excerpt from Eula Biss' book of essays, Notes From No Man's Land
From The World in Half:
My mother is humming in the bathroom when Lucy arrives. It’s the last Thursday in December, and gusts of bitter wind rattle the house periodically. The sky outside is as gray as a stone. She’s been in the bathroom for more than an hour now, and so far she has completed the entire score of West Side Story and at least a dozen repetitions of “O Christmas Tree.” She won’t admit it, but she’s nervous. “If this woman’s coming here to see me,” she said yesterday, “I might as well make sure she sees something good.” I tried explaining that Lucy wasn’t coming to judge her.
“Yes she is.”
“Trust me, she’s not.”
“Don’t be naïve,” she said. “Everyone is always judging everyone else.”
Lucy shows up, exactly like she said she would, at eight a.m. sharp. Through the window I can see her — a heavyset woman in a camel-colored mohair coat and a man’s fedora — shifting her weight from foot to foot and rubbing her hands together to keep them warm. She has a giant canvas tote bag slung over one shoulder.
“Ding dong,” she says, when I open the door. “Avon calling.”
“Excuse me?” The frigid air from outside rushes in.
“I’m sorry. That was a joke.”
“Are you Lucy?”
“I like to start things off with a joke. Folks usually get a kick out of it. You might be too young to understand that particular one, though. It started in the sixties. Or was it the fifties?” She waves her hand. “It’s not important. Yes, I’m Lucy. Lucy Carter from Sunrise.”
We have to wait another thirty minutes before my mother comes out of the bathroom. In the intervening time, I make Lucy a cup of hot tea, which she sips on the couch while we talk idly abut whether each of us is from the area (Lucy is originally from Minnesota, though she’s lived here since she was six years old), and the dreary winter they’re predicting we’ll have this year, what I’m studying in school, and how expensive gas is these days. Because it would seem awkward not to point it out, I explain why there are towers of magazines stacked up against one of the living room walls. The magazines are my old copies of Science that my mother dug up from the basement a few days ago. She woke up that morning and said, while she peeled the shell of a hard-boiled egg, “Do you know what we need, Mira? We need order.” The next thing I knew, she was dredging up every back issue of every magazine we’d ever owned and sorting them by issue date. The Science magazines are next to my National Geographics, the yellow spines layered on top of one another straight as railroad tracks. Lucy eyes the towers approvingly and says, “Well, that makes as much sense as anything, I guess.”
When we’ve exhausted all that and still my mother has yet to make her entrance, I take Lucy on a quick tour of the house. I show here where we keep the flashlights and the batteries in case the power goes out, and where we keep a fire extinguisher under the kitchen sink. I tell her which days the trash is collected, and what time the lamps in the living room are set to turn off every night, and how to jiggle the toilet so that it flushes on the first try. I tell her that I’ve already written out a rent check for the month and that she needs to drop it at the owner, Mrs. Sakac’s, house on Colfax before the fifteenth. I show her that I’ve stuck a Post-it note on the check with Mrs. Sakac’s address. Lucy takes it all in without asking questions or for clarification. Just as we’re about to head down to the basement so that I can show her how to use the washing machine, the knob to the bathroom door rattles.