Very Cold People - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor Sarah Manguso Klappentext The masterly debut novel from "an exquisitely astute writer" (The Boston Globe), about... Leseprobe 1 My parents didn’t belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway. My mother answered the first knock at the door of the new house, expecting a casserole. We’d painted the house Evening Fog, she told me, but the woman from across the street wanted to know why we’d painted it purple like Italians. Some people wore their difference honestly, but my parents were liars, illegitimate Waitsfielders, their off-­whiteness discovered only after the paint had dried. By the time I was born, the house had faded to the color of dirty snow. The oldest houses in Waitsfield were older than the town and bore plaques to mark their age. Generations of families had been born and died in them, and the town’s six graveyards were populated mostly by children. Over the centuries the slate stones had eroded and sunk in the dirt, and they looked like gray, crooked teeth inscribed with little lambs and angels. On the way to school I walked past a three-­hundred-­year-­old mustard-­yellow saltbox that my mother admired for its leaded glass windows and historically correct paint color. It probably had all the right antique fixtures inside, big sooty hearths and Indian shutters, visible proof of connection to the first, best people. My mother referred to western Massachusetts as out west, and I was mostly ignorant of the geography beyond our neighborhood. Three-­quarters of the town stayed unknown to me, and that mystery drummed up a sense of scale. To this day I couldn’t tell you how to get to the Lodge School, where the rich kids went. It was just there, somewhere, in those ten square miles, not for me to find. I often asked my mother to drive us down to the part of town where every house had a plaque. It looked like a movie set. I knew a girl whose house had been used in a television ad for a clothing store. The ad was shot in the spring, and the crew had sprayed the lawn and the windowsills with sticky fake snow. At home, my mother cut out wedding announcements from the Courier, the only paper in town. Maybe the groom was a Cabot, and the bride was an Emerson, and they sat on the boards of libraries and museums. My mother didn’t know these people, but she liked the way they looked on our refrigerator. She also liked to study an old typeset record of the town’s census, turning the well-­handled pages as one would a beloved picture book, but there were no pictures, just lists of names and addresses. She cross-­referenced the addresses with real estate listings in the Courier each week. Sometimes she took me to look at the big old houses. I never saw any people, just the houses, big Georgian colonials with widow’s walks and little gabled windows like third eyes opening. I liked the estates, too, especially on Pond Road, which my mother told me was the most expensive street in town. Pond was a dead end, so it took some persuading to get my mother to drive the length of it and turn the car around, but when I reminded her that we’d never seen another soul walking or even driving around there, she could be tempted. Those houses weren’t old. They were just enormous and ornate, with statuary and foreign-­made cars. A couple of them were always under construction and hidden under blue tarps. I recognized the difference between the houses that were the oldest and those that were merely the most expensive. I liked the old houses, and I swooned over the girls and boys at school with names like Verity and Cornelius. I knew that I could never build the kind of relationship with money that the people in those stately, drafty, oldest houses enjoyed. I didn’t even bother trying to infiltrate them. I worshipped them from a distance.   In our house the old paint on the windowsill h...

Über den Autor / die Autorin

Sarah Manguso

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Sarah Manguso
• Verlag: Hogarth US
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 03.01.2023
• EAN: 9780593241240
• ISBN: 978-0-593-24124-0
• Seiten: 208
• Abmessung: 132 mm x 201 mm x 13 mm
• Thema: Belletristik > Erzählende Literatur