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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781451643190 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Free Press |
| Publication date: | 04/05/2011 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Lexile: | 1010L (what's this?) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
I was sentenced to life on my grandfather’s dairy farm in the summer of 1976. The arrangement was supposed to be temporary, a month or so until my mother recovered from her water-skiing accident, but after one week, on the first day she was able to get out of her hospital bed and walk, a blood clot traveled up from her leg, blocked the vessels to her lungs, and killed her. My father had been the one driving the boat, the one who steered too close to the dock. Three days after the funeral, he walked out of the insurance agency where he worked and wasn’t heard from again.
Though my grandfather, Cal, spent months trying to track him down, it was no use, and that’s how, at the age of five, I came to be spending my nights in the bed my mother had slept in as a child. Cal made a gift to me of my mother’s arrowhead collection, which he’d helped her assemble when she was little. He also decided to repaint her bedroom for me and said I could pick the color. He was trying to be nice, but I wasn’t ready for nice. At Taylor Hardware, I chose Day-Glo orange, held the sample card up for my grandfather’s approval, and then proceeded to pick out three more hideous shades of orange—one for each wall—daring him to say no. Instead of stopping me, instead of telling me one color would do, he’d simply nodded. “Anything you want, sugar plum,” he said. Naturally, I threw a tantrum. What I wanted was my mom and dad, not stupid paint for a stupid room in a stupid old farmhouse. I’m sure everyone in the store thought I had it coming, but rather than drag me out to the parking lot for a spanking, as he’d surely have done with my mother, Cal just picked me up and held on as I kicked. My grandfather’s relationship with my mother, his only child, was a difficult one, and the subject of her death always left him at a loss. Whenever I asked about her, Cal would either fall silent or try to deflect my questions with anodyne bits of wisdom, mostly quotations from the tattered Bartlett’s he kept by the toilet. His standby, the old chestnut that exasperated me most, was a line from Hubert Humphrey: “My friend, it’s not what they take away from you that counts; it’s what you do with what you have left.” At the time, of course, I was too young to appreciate what my grandfather was doing with what he had left—raising yours truly—and in all my worry over what had been taken from me, I failed to consider how much had been taken from him. My grandmother, Josie, had passed away before I was born, and shortly after my mother’s death, my great-grandfather died as well. The Colonel had been living in the Alzheimer’s ward of a nursing home in Blythewood, a low brick building that smelled of Pine-Sol and pea soup. I hated visiting him, but Cal always brought me along, telling me that one day I’d be glad I’d gotten to know my great-grandfather. There wasn’t much left to know. During our visits, the attendant would park the Colonel’s wheelchair by the window, where the sunlight lent his eyes a misleading sparkle. On the rare occasions he addressed me, he called me by my mother’s name, Maddy, but usually he’d just grab my wrist and shake it, moaning, oh oh oh. Looking back on those visits, I now see that if they were unpleasant for me, they were torture for Cal, who wasn’t just seeing his father; he was seeing his own future self. Over the years, he’d watched his grandfather, his uncle, and now the Colonel succumb to the same disease—smart, willful men reduced to drooling and diapers. He’d seen the ugliness of it, the anvil weight on his family, and he was determined not to go down the same road. Driving home from the Colonel’s funeral, he took a long swallow from his silver flask and swore he’d take matters into his own hands before it came to that. I never forgot that vow, though when I was old enough to understand what it meant, I told myself it was just talk, that my grandfather would never intentionally leave me. But in the end, Cal was true to his word. When his mind started to go, he fought back with a handful of sleeping pills, leaving me the farm where I now live with my husband, Lyle, who was hired to renovate the farmhouse in the months before Cal’s death. My grandfather first told me he was sick during the spring of my sophomore year at Carolina. He was starting to slip, was how he put it. “Maybe it’s something and maybe it’s not,” he said. “The doctors don’t know for sure yet.” It was early April, and I was at the farm for our weekly cocktails, the two of us sitting out front beneath the mossy live oaks, a pitcher of Cal’s peppery bloody marys on the wrought-iron table between us. I watched Lyle and his crew stacking steel beams alongside the house as Cal told me that over the past few months, he’d begun forgetting things—names, appointments, the day of the week. He figured it was probably old age, no reason to get all bent out of shape, but just to be safe, he’d gone to the VA for a checkup. They’d given him a physical and a mental-status evaluation. Now they wanted him back for more tests. I stared into my drink, thinking about how he’d forgotten my birthday that fall, how I’d been so busy with classes and pledge meetings that I blew it off, even though it was exactly the sort of lapse I’d always been on the lookout for. Cal patted my knee and told me to cheer up. “Like Yogi Berra said, it ain’t over till it’s over.” Then he stared into his drink, too. “Course, he also said the future ain’t what it used to be.” The pecky-cypress paneling in the master bedroom of our house is pitted and scarred, the handiwork of a thousand woodpeckers, or at least that’s what I imagined as a five-yearold. When I’d asked Cal about his funny-looking walls, though, he told me the pockmarks weren’t the result of woodpeckers or worms or beetles, as many people believed, but rather a rare and little-understood fungus. “What makes pecky hard to find,” he said, “is that you can’t tell if a cypress is infected until you chop down the tree and cut it open.” When he’d purchased the farm, in 1939, the house wasn’t a house, it was a grain barn. He divided the building into rooms and framed doors and windows using wood from an old sharecropper’s cabin. After that first drafty winter, Josie shivering next to him in bed, he decided to insulate and panel their bedroom walls. He originally thought he’d get the wood from the Colonel’s sawmill, but this was the Depression: Cal couldn’t afford to buy lumber, and the Colonel couldn’t afford to give it away, not even to his own son. The best he could do was let Cal help himself to the scrap pile, which was where he found, underneath an old tarp, a load of pecky cypress, enough to panel the bedroom and his workshop. In later years, people would develop a taste for pecky and an appreciation for its scarcity, but in those days, it was considered junk wood. Josie didn’t care; she said it had low-country charm. Mainly, though, she was pleased that Cal went to all that trouble for her even as he worked twelve-hour days trying to establish their dairy farm. Her gratitude was not lost on him, and for the rest of her life, whenever he wanted to please her, he embarked on some new project to make the house more comfortable. Just before my mother was born, he added on a whole second story, and in later years he expanded the dining room and added a built-in china cabinet, then converted the front porch into a sitting parlor with French doors. In 1969, he was halfway done painting the house a minty shade of green that Josie picked out when doctors discovered the tumor in her breast. After Josie’s death, my grandfather let the house fall into disrepair, but during the fall of my sophomore year, when he first began having trouble with his memory, he sold off several parcels of land and started using the money to fix the place up. Though I didn’t know it at the time, he did this for me, for when I inherited the farm. At seventy-two, he was no longer able to do the work himself, so he hired Lyle on the recommendation of an old army buddy. In those days, Lyle was more handyman than general contractor, but he worked cheap, and my grandfather liked his manners, the fact that his family was well off, the fact that he’d been smart enough for grad school but then turned his back on all that academic baloney. Inside a month, Cal was inviting him to join us for happy hour. By then I already had my eye on Lyle—a shirtless guy tuck-pointing a chimney apparently being one of my weaknesses—but he seemed more interested in Cal’s company than mine, so I played it close to the chest. That all changed on the afternoon my grandfather told me he was sick. He’d just finished filling me in on his visit to the VA when Lyle and the two guys who worked for him came crawling out from under the house, brushing soil from their jeans. That week they were trying to fix the sloping floor in the living room. The joists beneath the oak floorboards were supported by heavy girders cut from the heartwood of long-leaf pines, and their plan was to reinforce these girders with steel beams, jack them up, and then build concrete pillars to stabilize the floor. After his crew knocked off for the day, Lyle joined us and began to report on their progress, and soon talk turned to the next project, a new roof. My grandfather didn’t mention his health again, but I could think of nothing else, and as he and Lyle droned on about shingles and soffits, I stared out at the fields that once fed Cal’s registered Guernseys and quietly plowed my way through two more drinks. When the sun started to dip behind the bluff, Cal left for his monthly poker game at the country club; as he drove down the lane, he flashed us the peace sign, something he’d picked up from Lyle. Once he was gone, I lit a smoke and emptied the last of the pitcher into my glass. “You ought to make sure he pays you before he blows his brains out,” I said. Lyle smiled, then quit smiling when he saw I was serious, then smiled again because he didn’t know what else to do. “Come again?” I sent him inside to mix another pitcher, and when he returned, I continued to get embarrassingly drunk and told him everything, all the while vaguely aware that I was trying to seduce him, never mind that he was twenty-four and I was only nineteen. When I got around to the part about Cal planning to “take matters into his own hands,” Lyle was doubtful. “Isn’t that just something people say? To give themselves a sense of control?” “You don’t know my grandfather,” I said. I hoped Lyle was right, though. It had always terrified me to think Cal would end up like the Colonel, but even that would have been better than no Cal at all. Still, the few times he’d alluded to killing himself—usually in the fading twilight of a vodka-soaked cocktail hour, and usually in the context of what his father ought to have done—I’d simply nodded along, trying to maintain the sort of grown-up composure he admired. I understood, even as a child, that I was always being compared to my mother, contrary, contentious, confounding Maddy. “You,” he’d say, tousling my hair, “you I don’t have to worry about.” But of course he worried anyway, and as I sat there with Lyle, listening to the crickets and watching the Spanish moss flutter in the breeze, I began to understand why Cal kept inviting him to join us: He was worried about what would happen to me after he was gone. He was worried about me being alone. By now I’d started to get weepy, and Lyle put an arm around me, telling me things would work out. The fireflies were just starting to appear as I took his hand and led him into the house, through the French doors of the parlor, past the pocked paneling of the workshop, and upstairs to the bedroom with faded Day-Glo walls and the curio cabinet lined with my mother’s arrowheads. Copyright © 2007 by Will Allison. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.Table of Contents
Contents
Chapter One 1991 Holly
Chapter Two 1971 Wylie
Chapter Three 1991 Lyle
Chapter Four 1970 Wylie
Chapter Five 1996 Holly
Chapter Six 2001 Lyle
Chapter Seven 1979 Wylie
Chapter Eight 2007 Holly
Reading Group Guide
Reading Group Guide
Discussion Questions
1. This book doesn't start at the beginning of the story. Why do you think the author sometimes showed you the results of a character's actions before revealing his or her personal history? How might it have changed your ideas about Wylie if we read his side of the story first? How were your feelings about Cal affected by this structure?
2. The only two chapters in the novel that are narrated in the first person are chapter 3 (Lyle 1991) and chapter 8 (Holly 2007). Did it feel different to hear the characters speak for themselves in those chapters, rather than hearing their stories from a third-person narrator? How reliable are Holly and Lyle as narrators? Were there any specific passages that stood out to you in these chapters as particularly unreliable?
3. Discuss the relationship between Wylie and Lyle. Why did Lyle initially lie about having met Wylie (p. 67)? Do you think he had Holly's best interests in mind, or his own? What about his decision to switch car keys with Holly at the end of chapter 3 (p. 77) and take the blame when the police arrive? Was this an act of chivalry, or of self-interest?
4. In chapter 2 (Wylie 1971), we learn about the tragedy that befell Gladys and Lester's new baby, Nat. How do Gladys and Lester act as foils for Maddy and Wylie? Could what happened to baby Nat ever have happened to baby Holly? What evidence can you find that Wylie and Lester are different kinds of fathers? What suggests they are similar?
5. Did you view Wylie's decision to leave Holly with Cal as a selfish, or selfless, act? Is he fit for single parenthood? How do you think Holly's life would have been different if Wylie had raised her? How would she be different?
6. Lyle works in construction, and there are long, detailed passages about the projects he undertakes. How do these descriptions act as metaphors for his relationships in the book? As he is renovating Cal's home (p. 8), how is this reflected in his relationship with Holly? What about in his relationship with Cal? When he is reinforcing the foundation of the statehouse (p. 112), does the foundation of his relationship with Holly undergo any simultaneous renovation?
7. The walls of Cal's bedroom are made of pecky cypress, a desirable kind of wood that was once considered trash. "What makes pecky hard to find...is that you can't tell if a cypress is infected until you chop down the tree and cut it open (p. 6)." How is the pecky cypress like the Alzheimer's that runs in Cal's family? Why is it meaningful that Cal got the pecky cypress from the scrap pile at his father's sawmill?
8. Is it significant for you that Wylie and Maddy's relationship began while each of them was dating somebody else? How did learning about Dale and Sheila affect how you felt about Wylie and Maddy? Do you think they were really committed to one another?
9. Many of the characters in the novel battle addictions. What are some of the addictions the characters struggle with? Did any characters succeed in overcoming their addictions? How did the addictive personalities of the characters affect their relationships?
10. An interest in car racing seems to be almost genetic in the novel. How do the characters use their mutual interest in racing to remain close to one another? How does it pull them apart? What did you see as Maddy's primary obstacles? Did she really have to stop racing when she had Holly? How did the sexism she endured affect her relationship to the sport? Do you think racing will play a role in Claire's future, and, if so, will she have to face the same issues her grandmother faced?
11. When Holly and Wylie are finally reunited in chapter 8 (Holly 2007), Wylie's short-term memory has been jeopardized as the result of a seizure caused by a lifetime of drinking. He is convinced that he tried to contact Holly in recent years but got no response. Holly realizes that without the benefit of short-term memory, he is simply believing what he would like to be true. In this circumstance, is it the thought that counts? Do you believe that Wylie does in fact wish he had contacted Holly sooner?
12. How does car racing act as a metaphor for the relationships in the story? Which ones are going around in endless circles? Who is leading the race in different chapters? Who is trailing behind? Which relationships are more like Wylie's figure-8 races, characters just dodging a head-on collision?
13. Why did Holly steal Wylie's videotapes of his visit with her and Claire (p. 208)? Was this a final act of vengeance against the father that left her? Or did she want the tapes for herself and Claire? Will Wylie even remember?
14. At the end of What You Have Left, what do the characters have left? Is Wylie's memory loss a curse, or a blessing in disguise? Do Lyle and Holly have each other? Does Claire have everything she needs? Are you hopeful for the future of this family?
Enhancing Your Book Club
1. Holly and Lyle come to own an antique mall. Check out some antique auctions online at www.TIAS.com and www.Collectics.com. Or visit an antique fair or flea market in your hometown. For a full list: http://www.fleamarketguide.com/.
2. Cal, Holly, and Lyle met weekly for Bloody Marys. Why not mix up a pitcher for your book club?
1 quart tomato juice
1 cup vodka
1 tbsp lime juice
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon Tabasco
lime slices
celery
Mix tomato, vodka, lime juice, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco in a pitcher. Stir and pour into cocktail glasses with ice. Garnish with lime slices and a stalk of celery.
3. After Wylie's accident, he practices CR — calorie restriction — to increase his longevity. Learn about calorie restriction at www.calorierestriction.org or www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction.
4. Learn more about Will Allison at www.willallison.com.
Introduction
Reading Group Guide
Discussion Questions
1. This book doesn't start at the beginning of the story. Why do you think the author sometimes showed you the results of a character's actions before revealing his or her personal history? How might it have changed your ideas about Wylie if we read his side of the story first? How were your feelings about Cal affected by this structure?
2. The only two chapters in the novel that are narrated in the first person are chapter 3 (Lyle 1991) and chapter 8 (Holly 2007). Did it feel different to hear the characters speak for themselves in those chapters, rather than hearing their stories from a third-person narrator? How reliable are Holly and Lyle as narrators? Were there any specific passages that stood out to you in these chapters as particularly unreliable?
3. Discuss the relationship between Wylie and Lyle. Why did Lyle initially lie about having met Wylie (p. 67)? Do you think he had Holly's best interests in mind, or his own? What about his decision to switch car keys with Holly at the end of chapter 3 (p. 77) and take the blame when the police arrive? Was this an act of chivalry, or of self-interest?
4. In chapter 2 (Wylie 1971), we learn about the tragedy that befell Gladys and Lester's new baby, Nat. How do Gladys and Lester act as foils for Maddy and Wylie? Could what happened to baby Nat ever have happened to baby Holly? What evidence can you find that Wylie and Lester are different kinds of fathers? What suggests they are similar?
5. Did you view Wylie's decision to leave Holly with Cal as a selfish, or selfless, act? Is he fit for single parenthood? How do you think Holly's life would have been differentif Wylie had raised her? How would she be different?
6. Lyle works in construction, and there are long, detailed passages about the projects he undertakes. How do these descriptions act as metaphors forhis relationships in the book? As he is renovating Cal's home (p. 8), how is this reflected in his relationship with Holly? What about in his relationship with Cal? When he is reinforcing the foundation of the statehouse (p. 112), does the foundation of his relationship with Holly undergo any simultaneous renovation?
7. The walls of Cal's bedroom are made of pecky cypress, a desirable kind of wood that was once considered trash. "What makes pecky hard to find...is that you can't tell if a cypress is infected until you chop down the tree and cut it open (p. 6)." How is the pecky cypress like the Alzheimer's that runs in Cal's family? Why is it meaningful that Cal got the pecky cypress from the scrap pile at his father's sawmill?
8. Is it significant for you that Wylie and Maddy's relationship began while each of them was dating somebody else? How did learning about Dale and Sheila affect how you felt about Wylie and Maddy? Do you think they were really committed to one another?
9. Many of the characters in the novel battle addictions. What are some of the addictions the characters struggle with? Did any characters succeed in overcoming their addictions? How did the addictive personalities of the characters affect their relationships?
10. An interest in car racing seems to be almost genetic in the novel. How do the characters use their mutual interest in racing to remain close to one another? How does it pull them apart? What did you see as Maddy'sprimary obstacles? Did she really have to stop racing when she had Holly? How did the sexism she endured affect her relationship to the sport? Do you think racing will play a role in Claire's future, and, if so, will she have to face the same issues her grandmother faced?
11. When Holly and Wylie are finally reunited in chapter 8 (Holly 2007), Wylie's short-term memory has been jeopardized as the result of a seizure caused by a lifetime of drinking. He is convinced that he tried to contact Holly in recent years but got no response. Holly realizes that without the benefit of short-term memory, he is simply believing what he would like tobe true. In this circumstance, is it the thought that counts? Do youbelieve that Wylie does in fact wish he had contacted Holly sooner?
12. How does car racing act as a metaphor for the relationships in the story? Which ones are going around in endless circles? Who is leading the race in different chapters? Who is trailing behind? Which relationships are more like Wylie's figure-8 races, characters just dodging a head-on collision?
13. Why did Holly steal Wylie's videotapes of his visit with her and Claire (p. 208)? Was this a final act of vengeance against the father that left her? Or did she want the tapes for herself and Claire? Will Wylie even remember?
14. At the end of What You Have Left, what do the characters have left? Is Wylie's memory loss a curse, or a blessing in disguise? Do Lyle and Holly have each other? Does Claire have everything she needs? Are you hopeful for the future of this family?
Enhancing Your Book Club
1. Holly and Lyle come to own an antique mall. Check out some antique auctions online at www.TIAS.com and www.Collectics.com. Or visit an antique fair or flea market in your hometown. For a full list: http://www.fleamarketguide.com/.
2. Cal, Holly, and Lyle met weekly for Bloody Marys. Why not mix up a pitcher for your book club?
1 quart tomato juice
1 cup vodka
1 tbsp lime juice
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon Tabasco
lime slices
celery
Mix tomato, vodka, lime juice, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco in a pitcher. Stir and pour into cocktail glasses with ice. Garnish with lime slices and a stalk of celery.
3. After Wylie's accident, he practices CR — calorie restriction — to increase his longevity. Learn about calorie restriction at www.calorierestriction.org or www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction.
4. Learn more about Will Allison at www.willallison.com.