We left her on the street in front of the building. I didn't know if I should wait for a bus or take the subway. Finally, I decided to walk. I wrapped my arms around Ann as we passed through all the neighborhoods. Cobble Hill. Boerum Hill. Gowanus. And then our own, Park Slope. Real places. With real people. I had never felt a part of them, until now. I was hugging her fiercely.
“You'd better be worth it,” I whispered.
• • •
The next day, Ann and I checked out the playground. It was surprisingly warm in the sun. I settled down on the other side, where the older mothers sat. About a half hour later, Alison showed up. She parked next to us.
“I saw you here and just had to come over. God, Dominic woke me up before he left and I am just dripping with him.”
“Which Dominic?”
“Very funny.”
She was—I couldn't say back to normal, I didn't know what normal was for Alison—but less high-strung than that last time in front of the hardware store. She acted like nothing had happened. Both our kids crawled up to a patch of icy snow. The sun was strong. Without any leaves on the trees, everything was revealed, caught in a flash of lightning that wouldn't go away.
“So what are you doing today?”
“We can only stay for a minute. We're on our way to Movement Class.”
“What's that?”
“It's this indoor thing. Dominic crawls through all these tunnels and then he does tumbling to music.”
“Sounds like a nightmare.”
“Not really. You have to follow them around the course, so it's exercise for you too.”
I looked at her, trying not to laugh.
“I know, it's a little ridiculous. I signed up for it when I was on these pills. He likes it, though.”
“What pills?”
“Oh, they make you happy. But I stopped taking them after a while. I decided happiness wasn't all it's cracked up to be. They did lift me out of this rut I was in. But they also killed my sex drive, which was a problem. And I found myself collecting all these gardening implements, for some reason.” She yawned. “Sorry I'm talking so much. I quit smoking.”
“Again?”
“Still! It's been a year.”
“Wow.”
“Anyway, I'm here,” she finished, as if this was this logical endpoint she'd been driving at, careening toward, the whole time.
We sat and watched. Ann and Dominic were cautiously touching the ice. Their knees and palms were black from the rubber play surface.
“What about you?”
“I'm well,” I pronounced carefully.
“You look like you've lost weight.”
“I was sick.”
She nodded.
Other mothers came. There was this general thaw. As soon as you moved into the shade it was still freezing, though. I smiled and closed my eyes. A breeze rushed past my ears.
“Dominic!”
“What?” I asked, jerked awake.
She was gathering her things.
“Time to go!”
I squinted down at the ground.
“Look at your fingers, Eve. Don't you have gloves?”
“I had … some mittens. Ages ago. But I lost them, I don't remember where.”
She took off her pair, which were really furry, put her hands on mine, and squeezed to warm them up. She was wearing that Tibetan hat again. Its woolen balls tickled my face.
“A year without smoking.” I swallowed. Was it possible she was wearing perfume? The memory of the kiss came back. “That's a long time. Congratulations.”
“Still don't know what to do with my mouth” she said, and shot me a look.
• • •
“Now that woman is trouble,” I told Ann. We watched them leave. Alison wasn't dressed like she was on her way to a charity fund-raiser anymore. Instead, she was wearing incredibly tight jeans. “But she could be a friend, I guess.”
A cloud passed in front of the sun. I shivered and rubbed my hands together, trying to keep some of her warmth.
“You make do with what's available. It's like you're tossed on a beach and have to build a whole new life out of what you've been shipwrecked with.”
Ann looked up.
I saw, or imagined I saw, an actual expression, although I couldn't say an expression of what. More a contortion of the face. Except it reminded me of someone. It reminded me of her. Was that possible, that she was beginning to be a person?
“I guess it's just you and me now.”
I waited for her to answer and, when she didn't, went on.
“There are things I have to tell you. But you can't understand yet. And even after you can understand, you won't really get what I'm saying until you run into the same situation in your own life. And by then I won't be around. Or I'll be this stick figure you can't share your troubles with. This person you're in flight from. That's what makes the whole idea of talk so meaningless.”
To prove my point, she had crawled away in the middle of what I was saying.
“Still, I guess it's what I'll be doing, for the next fifty years or so. There has to be more, though. Doesn't there? A way to leave you a message.”
“This isn't Kyle, is it?”
“It sure is.”
“He's gotten so big! Look at you, Kyle!”
“Hello, Allegra. I just love your scarf.”
I reached down into the bag, groping for something to do. Maybe I felt more comfortable here, but I wasn't ready to have one of those playground conversations.
“Did your shoe come off? Are you walking around without a shoe? Poor little thing!”
My fingers closed around a solid edge at the very bottom and fished it out. The journal. I'd been lugging it around this whole time. There was still a pencil stuck between its pages. I flipped back over what little I'd done so far, the letter starting off to no one, the clumsy dress designs, and then, on the very first page, the scratches of a creature who hadn't even been able to form a simple sentence.
“Adrian! Oh, honey, that's not safe. Come back here, please.”
In the sandbox, Ann was exploring.
“Adrian, come down here this instant!”
An airplane was passing overhead. Martin Cooper, I imagined, flying south to Morocco. The sun blinded me, and when I looked back down again everything was different. I was starry-eyed. There was a yellow fuzz on the bushes beyond the fence.
Words appeared.
Not the words I had once waited for on the pregnancy test stick, but words on a page, one after the other. My daughter was pushing sand together, piling it high.
“Pot roast for dinner tonight,” I reminded myself, picking up the pencil.
And got to work.
Parallel Play
Thomas Rayfiel
A Reader's Guide
AN INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS RAYFIEL
Question: As a male writer burrowing into a young mother's head, what kind of research did you undertake? Was the advice of female friends and family members a crucial factor in conceiving the book?
Thomas Rayfiel: My research consisted of caring for two screaming babies (now delightful children). In certain purely technical matters, my wife and other women have corrected me, but I'm a firm believer that we spend too much time focusing on how different men and women are. There are so many “male” and “female” qualities in each of us. To wall them off or suppress them is to deny who we are.
Q: Eve often seems to loathe motherhood and to lack a loving bond with her baby daughter. Is the downside of motherhood a taboo you were keen to address? Are there more resentful, bewildered mothers out there than we'd like to think?
TR: Eve doesn't loathe motherhood or lack a loving bond with Ann. She loathes being expected to feel all these things she isn't ready to admit exist in her, yet. When she finally does, I would argue her love is deep and true and real. It is earned. I do think parents (women, in particular) are given this impossible standard to live up to and that it can cause feelings o
f inadequacy and craziness when their feelings don't match the saccharine cliché that society holds up as being “normal.”
Q: Who are your inspirations? Do you read a lot while you are writing? Do you have any anxieties of influence?
TR: My main inspiration when I sit down to work is the last sentence I wrote the day before, to figure out where it came from and so to see where the next one is going. Of course, getting that very first sentence, the one containing the DNA for all that follows, is the tough part.
Reading is a great part of my life, and yes, I read books while I write. There's probably some dynamic between what I'm reading and what I'm writing, but it's not a conscious one. I don't “bone up” on a subject. As for “anxieties of influence,” do you mean am I afraid of sounding like someone else? No. For better or worse, I'm me.
Q: Beyond wanting to continue Eve's story from the previous two novels (Colony Girl, Eve in the City), was there a particular spark that got this novel going—a specific theme or scene?
TR: Yes, the dawning realization that women have been sold a bill of goods about motherhood, assured they will instantly fall in love with their newborn child and their newfound lot. I noted it not to be so and, speaking to mothers, saw the feeling was widespread: the sharp and funny minds of former lawyers, editors, and artists pretending they were just as content earnestly debating the pros and cons of various brands of disposable diapers or mushed-up carrots. That suggested comic possibilities, the alternative being to blow one's brains out.
Q: Did you set out to investigate the possibilities and illusions of free will with this book? Do you think that parenthood changes one's perceptions of free will?
TR: I do think parenthood makes you realize that many of the so-called choices offered to you are not really choices at all. You can choose, but the “you” doing the choosing is subject to all sorts of social and biological imperatives. Every move you make is either conforming or reacting to some external or internal expectation. As Eve says, at one of her bleakest moments, “It made me feel I was on a sled, going downhill. Sure, I could lean a little from side to side and maybe influence where I went, to the right a few feet or to the left, give it my own personal style, but basically my future was already decided.” The key, as she discovers, is to choose something that isn't offered, to create her own path with her own feet, as she begins to do by the end.
Q: The fact that Eve is known by a single, scripturally resonant name could signal her as an elemental or archetypal woman. Did you intend Eve to be a symbol as well as a fully rounded character?
TR: Honestly? I just liked the name. I also liked the associations of her always being “on the eve” of something, teetering on some brink.
Q: Eve can be selfish and insensitive. Is there a thrill for you in dancing on the thin line between humanizing a deeply flawed character and creating an unlikable heroine?
TR: I don't see Eve as any more selfish or insensitive than other people. What she is, because of her outsider upbringing, is more coldly honest and critical about her own shortcomings. (She's also open to all sorts of mystical currents our mainstream upbringing has numbed us to.) I think we all tend to gloss over certain unpleasant truths about ourselves because, well, otherwise it's tough to get through the day. But Eve is like one of those kids they find in the forest who's been raised by wolves. Her take on things is bracingly honest and, I hope, funny.
Q: Parallel Play is written in a confessional first-person voice and set in a domestic milieu, and thus on a superficial level, it bears comparison to certain “chick-lit” novels and popular memoirs of motherhood, almost all of them written by women. Which of these books, if any, have you read and liked? Do you hope that this book will appeal to a similar audience?
TR: You know, I haven't actually read any of those books, though I'm certainly aware of their existence. Trying to look at this novel objectively, I'd like to think it had something to do with two women who wrote extensively about the “domestic milieu,” Ivy Compton-Burnett and Barbara Pym. Compton-Burnett showed the brute forces that really govern even the most apparently placid home life, and did it with such a deep wit that you feel like you're learning a new language. Pym takes what fiction had previously regarded as uninteresting material—the spinster's lot—and used it to give a beautifully acute and musical view of the paired-off world's romantic delusions.
But those are great writers. I'm not putting myself in their company. I do think looking at ordinary situations in a slightly crazy way—which is what I sense chick-lit novels do as well— can lead to a deeper insight than plodding, earnest, emotional explorations, however well intended. So in that sense our audiences might overlap, yes.
Q: Any chance we will meet Eve again—perhaps as a flourishing fashion designer, or as a frazzled mother of a hellion teenage girl (as she was once herself)?
TR: Eve is going to be a writer. On the last page of Parallel Play she is about to write the first page of her first novel. I would like to think she's a self-contained literary unit now. She's said all she has to say, through me. Besides, it's getting harder and harder to wriggle into this bra and panties.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
What do you think Eve's name (“No last names in the Bible,” as she explains) signifies in the context of Parallel Play?
Eve often seems extremely frustrated with motherhood— she even calls the infant Ann a “little bitch” in public. She can also be selfish and insensitive; her behavior after the death of Harvey's mother is particularly unfortunate. Is Eve a sympathetic character? Does Rayfiel succeed in humanizing Eve despite all her flaws? Would Eve make a good friend? If you disliked Eve, do you feel that her faults detracted from the book's merits?
Eve complains that she is a “useless” person and laments that “all [she] could do was copy” other people's dress designs. How does this observation apply to Eve's life in general? Is she the artist of her own life, or is she merely copying established roles and patterns? By the novel's end, has she regained some creative control over her life?
Though she often seems alone in her little world, many people (Harvey, Mark, Mindy, Alison, Marjorie) reach out to Eve for her help and company, though not always with the best intentions. Is Eve lonely, or just dissatisfied?
How would you characterize the relationship between Eve and Harvey? What qualities that Eve possesses would attract a man of Harvey's personality? Can you imagine Parallel Play writ ten from Harvey's point of view?
At one point in Parallel Play, Eve says of Harvey, “I loved him, by an act of will,” but a few pages later, she says this of wearing clothes that she finds on the street: “It's about getting past the illusion of free will.” But Eve is also exploited by others in ways that she doesn't “will,” as when the film director uses her to manipulate an actress and when Mark grooms her to bear his wife's child. In what ways do marriage and motherhood compromise Eve's free will?
Is Mark a Machiavellian character? Is his behavior toward Eve sincere or coldly calculating?
Can Parallel Play be accurately characterized as “chick lit”? What do you think a male author brings to this novel's domestic, feminine milieu?
If you have read the previous novels in the author's Eve trilogy, Colony Girl and Eve in the City, what kind of profound changes— of behavior, temperament, outlook—do you think Eve shows after the events of three books? In what ways is she still the same person she was as a fifteen-year-old in Iowa?
Why do you think Rayfiel called the book Parallel Play?
THOMAS RAYFIEL is the author of Split-Levels; Colony Girl, a Los Angeles Times Notable Book of the Year; and Eve in the City. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Claire, a potter, and their two children, Leo and Celia.
Parallel Play is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or
persons, l
iving or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Thomas Rayfiel
Reading group guide copyright © 2007 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
READER'S CIRCLE and colophon are trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-54043-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rayfiel, Thomas
Parallel play: a novel / Thomas Rayfiel.
p. cm.
1. Motherhood—Drama. I. Title.
PS3568.A9257P37 2007
813'.54—dc22
2006049392
www.thereadercircle.com
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