Jincy Willett - Winner of the National Book Award

Excuse me?

…don’t panic…just checking…you’ve used a new shampoo. Your hair smells of almonds.

It’s Hilda’s. I ran out of Prell.

Did you.

Look, big deal, I’m a perceptible object.

You’re wonderful.

I most certainly am not.

And I love your mind, I hold your inner self in the highest regard, but Dorcas baby, here you are. Look. See? There’s your shadow.

…

Dorcas?

Six more weeks of winter.

Aren’t you cute. I could never have gotten to your mind without my senses. So I ask again, how do you pull it off? Mental sensualism?[He burlesques this ridiculous word: sssen-ssyooallism. It is a gauntlet, a white-glove slap in the face.]

…

Now you’re pissed at me.

I went to college too. You’re just playing with words. You’re wasting my time.

I’m sorry. Sit down. I’m truly sorry.

I was referring to the sensual experience of reading. The book is real, the chair I’m sitting in, the lightbulb is real, everything is three-D real. Whoopee. I read in time, okay? You win. The time is real. The time is gone. The time—

Take it easy.

I read Ray Bradbury when I was twelve years old, on a Congregational church retreat in Framingham, babysitting for the minister’s children in a freezing cold log cabin, late at night, while the others were singing around the campfire. I read by the light of a kerosene lantern, and the lantern grew dimmer and dimmer, until I could barely see, and the darker it got the scarier the story became, and then, upon the last line, the light went out. Something Wicked This Way Comes was the greatest book I ever read in my whole life. It is more real than the minister’s children, or Framingham, Massachusetts.

Ethan Frome. I was eighteen, a freshman at Bates, alone on my dormitory floor over Thanksgiving break. Snow fell in big wet clumps, four days in a row, you never heard such silence.

American Tragedy, I’m in the back seat of the car, we’re driving to Franconia Notch to look at the flume, whatever that is, Abigail is hungry and bored, demands to stop every hour for one thing or another, Father lectures us all on passing landmarks, and I’ve caught the edge of our car blanket in my rolled-up window and made myself a little cave. They fry Clyde Griffiths for having entertained a criminal thought. I am rapt and appalled. “The Old Man in the Mountain, Dorcas,” mourns my mother, “You’re missing it all.” The blanket is a tattered old strawberry quilt of our grandmother’s, I can see it still, with my eyes .

Ditto Hunchback, same quilt, different destination, Quebec City, or Ausable Chasm, and when they pry Quasimodo from Esmerelda and his bones crumble into dust, I cry like a baby, a marble baby, Niobe. I don’t make one audible sound .

All right.

See how it works?

I see. I do.

These are my memories. This was my youth. This is my life.

I believe you.

Go to hell.

In the end I suppose he did.

Hilda’s antepenultimate chapter is called “Hunger.” (A good plain title, for Hilda.) She covers over a year in fifteen pages, taking the story from their departure from Agincourt in late 1977 to the brink of February 13, 1979. The details are vague, because the DeVilbisses were absent most of that time, and Abigail apparently wasn’t very forthcoming. I can actually sympathize; she didn’t confide in me much, either.

What basically happened was that after Guy and Hilda left for France, things fell apart. I wasn’t expecting that; I thought we would continue as before, only without the annoying hosts. There was no reason I could see to alter our daily routine. Yet immediately the atmosphere turned sour. Abigail and Conrad, returning from dropping them off at Logan, were at each other’s throats as they slammed the Plymouth doors. Undoubtedly he had started it, whatever it was, but my sister was giving it back to him, and this was new. She wasn’t going to bend any more. That night she sent us out to the Blue Moon, just to get a bit of peace. He was in a foul, uncommunicative mood. Not rude specifically, but cold, distracted. This had a shameful effect on me: I found myself trying to amuse him, and when I realized this, and even in my ethically compromised state, I was disgusted. Perhaps, I said, it’s time for me to move back to my own home. This roused him to a semblance of his former charm, and the evening ended amicably. But it was the beginning of a new era, the last era. The Bad Time.

He was chronically nasty with Abigail, to little effect, which worsened his mood. He had always been able to hurt her. But now she was too busy exercising and starving to pay much attention to him.

Every morning before sunrise, she would jog to Fort Mansfield and back, and at lunchtime she would drag out the rowing machine she had ordered from Hammacher-Schlemmer and sweat through two soap operas. The rowing noise, a steady, rhythmic thunder, drove Conrad crazy, and he was always shouting at her to knock it off, Dorcas and I can’t concentrate, as though we were engaged in some great creative National-Book-Award–winning endeavor, instead of playing In the Manner of the Adverb and debating whether rye or bourbon made the perfect boilermaker.

By Christmas she was truly thin. The exercise had tightened her skin, and for the first time since Anna she had a waist. She looked ten years older than me. Nobody was happy with the new Abigail. She took no pleasure that I could see in her hard-won slenderness. Instead of reveling in a new wardrobe she schlumped around the house in voluminous old clothes. Her hair was lank and often unwashed, and she didn’t bother with makeup. She was totally focused on shedding weight, but as an end in itself, rather than a bridge to some idyllic future.

I was so worried about her that I surreptitiously made an appointment with Dockery Dick and tricked her into his office. When we pulled up she didn’t want to go in (“What is this? Another intervention? Shame on you.”), but went through with it anyway. I don’t think she had the energy to kick up more of a fuss. The visit was a disaster. The Stooge was delighted with her weight loss, not to mention her monogamous state, both of which he took as the gifts of a benevolent, intervening Christ, and the beaming lunkhead actually followed her back out into the waiting room to ask me if I wasn’t just so proud of my sister.

Unhappiest of all was Conrad. The man thought he had issued an impossible challenge, and now he didn’t know what to do. That he could no longer insult her body drove him wild.

I remained with the H. C. at Watch Hill for almost three more months, commuting to Squanto on weekdays, spending the occasional night in my own home with Anna, but always returning for the weekend. I stuck it out through Thanksgiving and Christmas and into the New Year. Anna came down for the school Christmas break, during which time everyone was civil, and she and I saw a snowy owl late one afternoon, perched atop the Flying Horse Carousel. After she left, the atmosphere became so noxious that I threatened more than once to decamp, and each time they stopped me. Not together: It wasn’t a concerted effort. They did nothing in concert. He always managed to behave agreeably for just as long as it took to change my mind. And Abigail needed me.

One especially acrimonious night she followed me out to the car, which I had loaded up with my original suitcase and six paper bags full of accumulated odds and ends. “Look,” she said, “I know it’s rough. But it’ll just get worse if you leave.” She looked so negligible. There were hollows under her eyes, and I could not remember the last time I had heard her make so much as a wisecrack.