Set in the summer of 1979, when America was running out of gas, The Lines tells the story of a family of four—the mother, the father, the girl, and the boy—in the first months of a marital separation. Through alternating perspectives, we follow the family as they explore new territory, new living arrangements, and new complications. The mother returns to school. The father moves into an apartment. The girl squares off with her mother, while the boy struggles to make sense of the world. The Lines explores the way we are all tied to one another, and how all experience offers the possibility of love and connection as much as loss and change.
Set in the summer of 1979, when America was running out of gas, The Lines tells the story of a family of four—the mother, the father, the girl, and the boy—in the first months of a marital separation. Through alternating perspectives, we follow the family as they explore new territory, new living arrangements, and new complications. The mother returns to school. The father moves into an apartment. The girl squares off with her mother, while the boy struggles to make sense of the world. The Lines explores the way we are all tied to one another, and how all experience offers the possibility of love and connection as much as loss and change.
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Overview
Set in the summer of 1979, when America was running out of gas, The Lines tells the story of a family of four—the mother, the father, the girl, and the boy—in the first months of a marital separation. Through alternating perspectives, we follow the family as they explore new territory, new living arrangements, and new complications. The mother returns to school. The father moves into an apartment. The girl squares off with her mother, while the boy struggles to make sense of the world. The Lines explores the way we are all tied to one another, and how all experience offers the possibility of love and connection as much as loss and change.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609386665 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 230 |
| File size: | 286 KB |
About the Author
Anthony Varallo is the author of four short story collections, most recently Everyone Was There. He is professor of English at the College of Charleston, where he teaches creative writing. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE PARENTS TELL the children to come upstairs. They have something to tell them, they say. The children are in the basement, where they have been playing Smash Up Derby, a game of their own invention, a game they have twice already been cautioned not to play. In Smash Up Derby, one child sits at one end of the basement while the other child — there are two of them, brother and sister, the boy and the girl — sits at the other end, cross-legged, clutching a toy car. "Ready?" the girl asks, and the boy responds, "Ready." They count to three and send the cars careening into one another, a head-on collision. "Smash Up Derby!" the boy shouts, even though the girl has told him not to do that. The boy is seven years old and has no idea about anything. The girl turns ten next month and has some things figured out.
When the parents call for them, the children give each other a look. They know what is about to happen: they will be summoned upstairs and given a lecture about playing Smash Up Derby. They will be in trouble. They will be instructed to clean up their cars and head straight to their rooms. They will be punished. The children ascend the stairs, the certainty of what is to follow so real, so obvious, so beyond debate that, for years afterward, it is the thing the boy remembers more than anything else about this evening, the feeling of climbing the basement stairs, his sister ahead of him, the basement door open wide, his parents waiting for them, a punishment on the way, in this house where his mother and father preside, watchful, alert, and wise to everything the children do.
Upstairs, the children find their parents sitting on the family room sofa. Apart. Their father is leaning forward, rubbing his hands together, his tie still hanging loosely from his neck. Their mother sits at the opposite end of the sofa, her face strangely red, raw looking. The children thought their parents were watching TV, but the TV is off. Why is the TV off? The girl has been wording her apology the entire way up the basement stairs, but before she can speak, the mother says, "Your father has something to tell you two." And then she bursts into tears. Big, wracking sobs that signal the two of them are really in trouble this time.
But when the father speaks, he begins to cry too, and his words fail to match the words the boy expects the father to use. Instead of saying, "We have told you time and time again not to play that game," the father says, "Your mother and I have decided to separate," and instead of saying, "And yet you continue to play that game," the father says, "I've rented an apartment nearby," and when his father should be saying, "We're taking away your toys for the next week," he instead says, "I know how hard this is for you to understand," and in place of "You may now go to your rooms," comes "But your mother and I have decided that this is the best thing for us," while "We're both very disappointed in you" has been commandeered by his father putting his head in his hands.
It is a miracle, the boy thinks. They will not be punished after all. How often do the things we fear never come to pass. So true! The boy feels giddy, alive, afloat with this new knowledge, and turns to his sister to see if she's caught on to it as well, but she only throws her arms around her father and says, "Daddy, oh Daddy, no."
HIS LAST FEW weeks in the house, the father sleeps in the guest bedroom. The bedroom is the one the children's grandmother uses when she visits from Florida, injecting the house with crossword puzzles, cigarettes, and late-night television — she can only fall asleep to Johnny Carson. Now, the guest room TV stares blankly at the boy as he sits on the bed next to his father. It is morning, and the boy must get to school, three tedious weeks left until summer vacation, but the father has asked him to come sit next to him while he gets ready for work. So the boy complies. Downstairs, his sister tarries in the bathroom, brushing her never-long-enough hair into infinity.
"Big day at school today?" the father asks.
"Nah," the boy says.
"What's on the agenda?"
The boy shrugs, says he doesn't know.
"Tests?"
"No."
"Quizzes?"
The boy shakes his head.
"Show and tell?"
"Nah."
"Field trip?"
The boy gives his father a look that says, I know you are just kidding about the field trip, and the father returns one that wishes to say, Yes, but kidding around is what I do best, right? The boy thinks the father is about to make another joke, but lately the world keeps wishing the boy to know he has little idea about anything at all. His father pulls him close, leaving just enough room for the boy to glimpse their reflection in the TV screen, dull as a pigeon's eye.
THE CHILDREN'S grandmother calls them on the phone. Gumma, the children call her, to distinguish her from their other grandmother, Grandmom, who lives nearby and who does not drink margaritas late into the evening, as Gumma does. Gumma lives in Florida in a house a mile from the beach, the house fitted out with a refrigerator that can be accessed from the outside (an outside refrigerator! thrilling to the boy, the one time they vacationed there, reaching in and grabbing another cold Dr. Pepper on the sly). Gumma owns a golf cart she once permitted the girl to drive, the children laughing, saying, Floor it! as Gumma sat beside them, sipping a margarita from a plastic tumbler. One time, she tried to teach the children how to make margaritas for her, but the parents said no. When the parents were out of earshot, Gumma whispered, "Next time."
But Gumma rarely calls the children on the phone. Why is Gumma calling them on the phone? Gumma's voice sounds strange, off, her mouth harboring ice, which makes faint crunching noises when she says, "I'm calling to check up on you two."
"Oh," the girl says.
"Two sweet little children without their daddy in the house."
"Well," the girl says.
"Let's have some girl talk just between us," Gumma says. "The fact is men will be after you now. They'll sense your father is gone." The girl can hear Gumma crunching a prodigious ice cube. "But like I said, that's just between us, OK?"
"OK," the girl says, and listens as Gumma describes some other things she needs to be aware of, things the girl would rather not be aware of, thank you very much, so she hands the phone to her brother, who says "Gumma?" three times before Gumma realizes it's him.
"You, young man, you've got to protect your sister and mother," she tells him. "Leave some of your father's old stuff around the house. Clothes. Shoes. Boots are good. Make strangers think he's still around."
After the call, the children brush their teeth without speaking to one another.
THE CHILDREN attend the same school. Each morning they wait at the end of their neighborhood, backpacks tossed into the dewy grass, until a bus appears and swallows them whole. The ride to school: a filmstrip of fields, neighborhoods, and wooded rural roads framed by double-hung windows that eventually yields to the highway, where other buses show other children staring back at them. Leaving the bus, a minor thrill, the bus stairs higher than the curb, requiring a jump the boy always imagines as crossing from one rooftop to another. At the school entrance, the children part ways, off to different classrooms.
The morning announcements arrive courtesy of speakers mounted above the chalkboard, where an American flag flies. The first bell sends the girl from her homeroom to the art room, her still life incomplete, its first brushstrokes, the girl realizes, completed when her parents were still together. Should she leave the painting unfinished? The art room sink shelters a dozen plastic cups crammed with paintbrushes, their bristles wetly caked with paint. The girl washes her brushes and adds them to the others. She knows her still life is terrible, despite her teacher's enthusiasm. The grapes look like marbles. A halved apple rests flatly on a rotting banana, each fruit stranded in a warring perspective. For the rest of the day, the girl's hands exude the smell of paint.
The boy spends his morning in homeroom. Today, the class has reading time, during which they must read an assigned book, a sop to those students who, unlike the boy, never do the assigned reading at home. So the boy reads ahead of the assigned chapters, but without quite paying attention. He can do that sometimes, read without really reading, even though his eyes move across the page, and he's aware of one sentence yielding to the next. Especially with sentences that have talking in them, like when Frank says to Joe, "Look out!" and Joe says, "There he goes! Quick, let's get him!" Reading those sentences is like reading nothing at all.
SOMETIMES THE girl can't stand her brother. She really can't. Like the way he's always picking his nose and then acting like he wasn't picking his nose, when he was very clearly and beyond any reasonable doubt picking his nose.
"That's disgusting," the girl says.
"What?" the boy says.
"Picking your nose."
"I wasn't," the boy says, even though he's still doing it. Doesn't even know how to cover his tracks.
"Don't wipe your hands on the sofa."
"I'm not," the boy says. But he is.
"That's so disgusting," the girl says.
The boy shrugs. He doesn't know the littlest thing. Doesn't know how foolish he looks when he hops around the house with some dumb idea asserting itself inside his head, his arms wild, loose. The way everyone can see him doing that, his mother, father, and sister, all aware of what he's doing, while he's oblivious.
The poor slob, the girl thinks. What will become of him now?
HERE'S A surprise for the children: spring weather continues to be spring weather, despite everything. Despite everything, the mother keeps the children's bedroom windows open at night, the air so cool the girl must keep the afghan her aunt knitted for her — that's the word they use for it, afghan, which, the girl thinks, must mean a blanket that is more holes than yarn — at the foot of her bed. Mornings, the afghan has fallen to the floor; the girl reaches for it and finds sleep again.
Afternoons, the sun sends long rectangles of light across the lunchroom floor. Recess wants them to know one thing and one thing only: it is hot outside. Even the slim column of shade beneath the sliding board offers little comfort. Cut grass sticks to shoes.
Spring showers are a respite, a relief. Trees turn their leaves up, showing their pale undersides, as tender as the boy's underarms, which will not redden until summer, when his father takes the children swimming at his apartment complex's pool, shaped like a kidney and rimmed with women reclining on lounge chairs, their sunglasses making it impossible to tell whether they're sleeping or watching you ride your father's shoulders for the third time that afternoon.
The day after it rains, worms appear on the driveway.
"Leave them alone," the boy's sister tells him, when he's about to prod one with a stick. "What did they ever do to you?"
Yet another question the boy has no answer for.
THE WORLD IS running out of gas, it's true. Everybody knows. America is a nation on empty. Even the president has no idea what to do. When the boy accompanies his mother to the gas station near their neighborhood, the one at the intersection, the one where, in great barrels topped with glass lids, fat pickles float in liquid the color of grass and defy the boy's attempts to grab them with tongs, he sees cars waiting in lines that stretch out onto the highway. His mother sighs. Doesn't want to wait but can't afford not to wait either. So wait in line they must, windows down, on this oppressive afternoon with the air redolent of exhaust. In every car, as far as the boy can see, drivers and passengers and children with their arms slung loosely outside open windows, waiting for a breeze that never comes.
A sign at the station's weedy entrance: MAKE A BIG SPLASH TRY CARPOOLING NEXT TIME.
ON SUNDAYS, the children attend mass with their mother. There is nothing more boring than mass. It is incredible how boring mass is, and still they keep going, the three of them, always late, always having to say, Sorry, excuse us, as they find an open seat in the middle of a pew. The girl looks for cute boys while pretending to read the hymnal. Sometimes the girl senses boys looking at her in church, curious, appraising, especially during communion, when she must walk reverently to the communion rail, kneel, receive the host — she cannot bear the sight of the priest's wristwatch, up close, visible just beneath his sleeve — and return to her seat again. The girl feels the boys' eyes on her. There's a power in not looking back at them, the girl realizes; you can win as easily by not doing something as doing something. She's catching on to things like that now. The girl swallows the host.
The boy has recently been forbidden to bring his action figures to church and now must suffer through the prayers of intercession without Spiderman and Batman to suffer along with him, their faces determinedly set on fighting crime, indifferent to the congregation's Lord, hear our prayer. The boy prays for peace, for health, for the repose of the soul of … all without recognition. He kneels when it is time to kneel. Rises when everyone else rises. Incense, shaken from burners attached to short chains, seems the fragrance of boredom itself.
This morning, their mother drives them to the early mass, all older women in hats and grandfather-types extending baskets on long poles. It is the girl's job to drop a dollar bill into the basket, but today the mother has forgotten her money, so the girl lets the basket pass, her face warm with embarrassment. After mass, they drive home without stopping to get donuts and a newspaper at the gas station, the way they usually do. They cruise past the intersection as if the gas station isn't even there. Has their mother forgotten how much they all like powdered donuts and the newspaper, the mother with her entertainment section and weekly ads, the children dividing the comics in two, arguing, sometimes, over who will get Peanuts first?
Home, the mother says she's going to take a short nap. She lies down on the family room sofa and instructs the children to wake her in fifteen minutes. "Set the oven timer," she says, and the girl sets the oven timer. But fifteen minutes later, when the timer sounds, their mother does not rise. Instead, she turns from her position on the sofa and finds another position, her eyes closed. The children watch, afraid to wake her. What should they do?
After a while, the girl says, "Mom? Do you want to wake up?" She's still wearing her church clothes, wrinkled now, most likely.
"Mom?"
Their mother opens her eyes. Sits up, startled, and says, "We're late for mass!"
The children say, "No, Mom. We already went to mass, remember?"
The mother looks at them, disbelievingly. "We did?"
"Yeah," the girl says.
"Oh," the mother says. She regards her clothes now, straightens the hem of her skirt. How pretty she still is, the girl thinks. "I don't remember," the mother says, and then smiles, experimentally. "Isn't that funny?"
"Yeah," the children say. Is it funny? The children are not sure.
"What happened at mass?"
"Not much," the boy says.
"The same old," the girl says.
"The same old," the mother says.
The girl says, "We forgot our dollar."
"Oh," the mother says. "For the collection." But then she lies back down on the sofa and eventually falls asleep again.
ONE AFTERNOON, the father says to the children, "Come upstairs." The children are watching TV while their father packs things into boxes. Their mother is wherever their mother is: she has gotten good at disappearing whenever their father is back in the house — but then again, everything is disappearing in this house. See the corner where the father's dresser used to stand, how bright the carpet beneath it, how clean, untouched, and preserved. How little unhappiness it was ever called to witness.
"This is my old savings bank," the father says, once the children have arrived in the guest room. The bank is shaped like a cash register, with a coin slot, a lever, a deposit display, and a door that opens at the bottom. "I got this when I was six years old," the father says. "It's probably my oldest material possession." The children nod, say wow, how cool, but they know the father is mostly talking to himself. Plus, they've also heard this story before and have played with the bank a dozen times, a disappointing toy. Drop a coin inside and the bank keeps it. A cruel trick. But they must listen to their father, for whom this bank means something. Parents, the children think; it's all a matter of giving them a little encouragement.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Lines"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Anthony Varallo.
Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Beginning of Text
What People are Saying About This
"The Lines is one of those rare books where I’m still thinking fondly (and a little worriedly) about the characters weeks after reading it. Anthony Varallo is one of the best fiction writers anywhere: he has an almost miraculous comic eye, and his stories have enormous heart. I’ve read every book he’s published so far, and will keep reading them as long as he is willing to write them."
“I was dizzy when I put down this book, having been transported so convincingly to the kind of life we lived before the internet, before cell phones—a time when lovers and family members floated outside our immediate grasp, when we sometimes fumbled to reach them. And yet there is something timeless here, too. The territory this family navigates—loneliness, broken hearts, the shifting allegiances between siblings and parents, all of it set against the backdrop of an unsettled political era—resonates powerfully with our own.”—Christie Hodgen, author, Elegies for the Brokenhearted
“Varallo’s attention to the music in the spare, lyrical voices of his characters is enough to put this novel on your must-read list. What he manages to create in the story of divorce in an ordinary family is a tale about grief, alienation, and ultimately compassion itself. Riveting.”—Stephanie Powell Watts, author, No One is Coming to Save Us
“In The Lines, a family reckons with divorce against the backdrop of the fuel crisis of the 1970s. Anthony Varallo renders this story vividly and tenderly and with great nuance. The Lines is moving and elegiac—a delight to read.”—Nathan Englander, author, kaddish.com
“With charming language, familiar circumstances, and a taut narrative, this book evokes that point in time when every child suddenly realizes the adults around them don’t really know what they’re doing. That is the world we inherit, the world Varallo permits us to turn over in our hands, landmarked with curious relics of Americana wholly worth the gaze.”—Venita Blackburn, author, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes