The Spectacular
Page 29
I got into the pool and we did what we always did best without question. And when I got back to the city, I cried for weeks and weeks. And of course, because I had pulled away from him, he showed up at my door unannounced, and we reunited over and over. I read books about attachment theory and tried to solve our patterns over and over. But as soon as I was present and loving, he left, over and over. And finally I’d had enough of trying. I called Tom and said, “So, do you want to be an uncle?”
Epilogue
on my fortieth birthday, I manoeuvred around my party with difficulty, and eventually just sat in the cushy golden armchair Agatha had nicknamed the birthday/birthing throne. Finch placed a plate of birthday cake on my sizable belly, put a ridiculous tiara on my head, and took a photo. There’s another photo from that day, with Tom, and when I look at it now, I see in his eyes he was absent. He’d descended into a sadness I couldn’t help him with. The photo sits on the dresser Andy refinished for me as a baby shower offering, beside my nursing chair, where I sit most nights with Hazel, staring at her face and feeling the rotating thrill of about a dozen conflicting emotions.
My father came to the baby shower and brought the letter Granny wrote to me before she died. He said, “I was never going to give this to you, but I think it’s the right time.”
Missy,
I’m writing this to you in the hopes that you are now well on your way to motherhood. And since I can’t be there, I want to share some wisdom. I didn’t plan to parent on my own, but that’s the way it mostly happened. There are things you think are certain before giving birth but afterwards, very little is predictable. You will make mistakes. Everyone does. Your mother did, of course. And while I have a hard time with Carola as a person, I do remember how hard she tried when you were little to be the best mother she could be. I’m not sure what happened that made her leave, but I did see how it affected you. I want you to know that you won’t make the same choices she did, you’re stronger than all of us, with your adventures and your career. You are a determined young woman. And you can do this.
Love, Granny
It was what I needed to hear at the time. Most of the time pregnancy made me feel like a superhero, like I could do anything. But in the third trimester, my fear became as unwieldy as my body. What if I couldn’t do it? I thought that a million times a day. And I’d never felt more alone. I read and reread her letter until I believed her words.
Now I watch Hazel in Agatha’s arms, as Emily delights in being the older kid, and I’m thrilled, I’m ecstatic, unwavering. At four in the morning, I’m crying with frustration, stressed out, covered in poop and disoriented and I feel regret, but a regret that can’t be reversed, and thus it’s meaningless and momentary. I wake up and do it again. I don’t know how I’m ever going to get through the day. And then I do. I get through several months of days that mostly look the same, but at the same time, she changes so quickly. I can’t believe how much, from week to week. These are things all mothers say, but that doesn’t make them feel less specific or profound to me, or true.
She squirmed in my arms at Tom’s funeral, after he unexpectedly took his own life, crying out the way I wished I could, the guilt of not having known how much pain he was in consuming me. Still consumes me. It shook up my sense of myself, as someone who cares for her friends, her family, who is reliable. I was so obsessed with getting pregnant, with my breakup with Andy, that I hadn’t been there for him. But I see him inside Hazel. She has the same smile, the same eyes. She pulled at Billy’s long beard at the wake, as we talked about the old days, and I noticed every line in his face, wondering if everyone could see mine when I still felt thirty-two. She sat sleeping while Agatha cried over her split with Finch, and I gave her the same divorce speech Tom had given me.
I am single now, by definition, I guess. There won’t be a wedding, at least not with Andy. After a few months of separation, he came back around and I reminded him that he couldn’t offer me things and then keep taking them back. I had to look at myself and admit that the relationship with Andy didn’t feel like a relationship. It felt like being addicted to the love he would give me, then take away. The high I got when he would come back around, there was nothing like it.
But now Agatha and I have a little single-moms club. We go to the park and watch Emily run around, while Hazel sits in her jumpy seat, wide-eyed and beautiful. She loves the bigger children, and Emily is her favourite. Agatha will be with me when she takes her first steps. They will meet me at the hospital when Hazel gets a bad fever. Agatha says It gets easier when I need to hear that. We all go from day to day, and our future is undefined. But isn’t it always?
I go on dates sometimes. Sometimes with Angus, who will hold Hazel in their arms wearing oversized sound-blocking headphones, as they both grin wildly while Agatha and I thrash around onstage. Later, teenagers flank the signing tables and proffer our vinyl reissues. And when they sing along to all the old songs, I never feel annoyed like I used to, because I know it’s something to be thankful for.
Every mother will tell you, baby in arms, that it was the right decision, and not only that, it was the best one she ever made. I often feel that way. I look at Hazel’s tiny fingers and I’m in awe, and it’s a new kind of awe I’d never experienced before. In other moments, I’m terrified. Some days I hold her, looking out the window of my house, watching the world go by, and I’m a type of bored that is too bored to fit the definition, and sad, lonely, and at odds with my skin and the outside world, more alone than I’ve ever felt before. Lonely enough to call my mother and beg her to visit. And she does. We sit like two old women in awe of the energy Hazel has all day long. And then Hazel throws up, and even that is funny. And when she learns to walk-stumble, the three of us go to the ocean and I take a photo of my mom holding Hazel up in the air against the light of a setting sun, a photo that Hazel will look at so much she will swear that she remembers the moment my mother let go and for a second she was flying.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my agent, Samantha Haywood, for her unwavering support since day one, and to Andra Miller and Iris Tupholme for their patient editorial guidance.
Some of the facts from Ruth and Frank’s experiences in 1922 in Turkey came from family diaries and letters, though their personal stories are fabricated. Thank you to my father, Keith Whittall, for gathering that information for me, and for showing me Bornova and Llija in person. Thanks to my mother for details about farm life and feminism in the 1970s.
Thanks to Gavin and Lisa for careful readings of the final text. To Matt and Alison for all of the pre-pandemic work dates. To Will, Angie, Paul, Dean, Courtney, Chase, Marcilyn, and Andrea, for friendship. JAWLZ forever. Thank you, Torrey Peters, Ashley Audrain, Kristen Arnett, Iain Reid, Jen Sookfong Lee, David Bergen, Robin Wasserman, Ilana Masad, Alissa Nutting, and Jordy Rosenberg for their endorsements.
About the Author
ZOE WHITTALL is the author of three novels and three volumes of poetry. Her third novel, The Best Kind of People, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and is being adapted as a limited series by director Sarah Polley. Her second novel, Holding Still for as Long as Possible, won a Lambda Literary Award, and her debut novel, Bottle Rocket Hearts, won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize. She has written for the Emmy Award–winning comedy Schitt’s Creek and the Baroness von Sketch Show, for which she won a Canadian Screen Award. She lives in Toronto.
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Praise for The Spectacular
“Zoe Whittall has this incredible ability to go straight at the honest emotional heart of a story, and yet even with that ferocity, her writing is always graceful, a total joy to read. It makes it so easy to love her characters. In the best books characters feel like my friends, but with the mothers of The Spectacular, they came to feel like my family.”
—TORREY PETERS, author of Detransition, Baby
“Zoe Whittall’s engrossing and epic novel pain
ts an indelible portrait of three women, each of them navigating the complex constraints of their bodies, their families, their obligations, and their desires. A daring and beautiful examination of motherhood, The Spectacular left me breathless.”
—ROBIN WASSERMAN, author of Mother Daughter Widow Wife
“Zoe Whittall’s The Spectacular is such a fun read. It sizzles with women’s desire—for success, fulfillment, distraction, drugs, sex, love, care. The worlds Whittall’s characters inhabit—a former ashram, a commune, the indie rock scene of the 1990s—are alive with meaning. Witnessing the women in this novel connect, miss each other, and try to figure one another out is a joyful and tender experience. The Spectacular is . . . what can I say, spectacular!”
—ILANA MASAD, All My Mother’s Lovers
“The Spectacular is a lush, sweeping novel that excavates the maternal layers of a family’s genealogy to breathtaking, surprising ends. This book will leave you with a brilliant roar inside your chest—Whittall’s prose is afire with the most complex and daring forms of empathy.”
—ALISSA NUTTING, author of Made for Love
“[A] totally absorbing contemporary epic with characters and social worlds that are Edith Wharton–level dimensional, but as relatable as your own uncannily recognizable self. . . . The Spectacular lets us fully inhabit the historical moment of the ’90s by drawing exquisite threads forward and back in time, creating a broad, deep landscape—a matriarchal counter-history. As with all her works, Zoe Whittall is, yet again and even more spectacularly, a consummate, generous novelist whose immensely assured prose is a gift to her readers.”
—JORDY ROSENBERG, author of Confessions of the Fox
“What an honour and privilege to read a book that so fiercely wants to be read. Zoe Whittall’s The Spectacular is rangy and deft, weaving three character threads together in a dexterous series of twists that left me excited for more. I found myself deeply attached to the women of this book and their relationships with one another. Whittall addresses motherhood and autonomy in ways I’ve never seen done before. A fascinating stunner of a novel, The Spectacular is exactly that: spectacular!”
—KRISTEN ARNETT, author of With Teeth
“Fearless, challenging, epic. . . . Ruth, Carola, and especially Missy crackle off the pages, sometimes prickly, often uncertain, but always searching for a happiness that is bound by the expectations of becoming a mother and the resentments that follow. Fiction often teaches us truths, and The Spectacular does just that, laying bare the ways in which women are defined and the ways in which women can define themselves.”
—JEN SOOKFONG LEE, author of The Conjoined
Also by Zoe Whittall
FICTION
The Best Kind of People
The Middle Ground
Holding Still for as Long as Possible
Bottle Rocket Hearts
POETRY
Precordial Thump
The Emily Valentine Poems
The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life
Copyright
The Spectacular
Copyright © 2021 by Zoe Whittall.
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Published by Harper Avenue, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
COVER IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK
FIRST EDITION
Sarah Manguso, excerpt from 300 Arguments: Essays. Copyright © 2017 by Sarah Manguso. Excerpt from Ongoingness: The End of A Diary. Copyright © 2015 by Sarah Manguso. Both reprinted with the permission of the Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, graywolfpress.org.
Epub Edition AUGUST 2021 Epub ISBN: 978-1-4434-5525-1
Version 06192021
Print ISBN: 978-1-4434-5524-4
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The spectacular / Zoe Whittall.
Names: Whittall, Zoe, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210224509 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210224541 ISBN 9781443455244 (softcover) | ISBN 9781443455237 (hardcover) ISBN 9781443455251 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS8595.H4975 S84 2021 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
LSC/C 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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