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eBook details

• Title: How Great It's Going to be (Short Story)
• Author : Northwest Review
• Release Date : January 22, 2008
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 84 KB

Description

He admits it, okay? What Janey's been through--walking in on her dad while he was going at it with the nurse, while her mother, dying of cancer, was out cold in a coma in the next bed--that's bad. That's very bad. That's so much worse than anything Adam could ever come up with that he wouldn't, he couldn't, even try. What could Adam, or for that matter anyone, possibly come up with to compare to that? The time his father washed his mouth out with soap when he called his kid brother a dick-head? The time he walked in on his mom when she was sitting on the toilet and saw that patch of red hair, that scramble of turquoise-blue veins leading to it? He admits it, duh, there's no contest. Nobody in Adam's family is even dead, let alone dead from some terrible disease. There aren't even any of those hard-scrabble immigrant stories that everyone else in the world has--no Yettas or Eleazars working their fingers to the bone in the new country, only to die of TB working twelve-hour shifts on the fifth-floor of a Lower East Side sweatshop. No indeed, because Adam's family had come over in style, petit-bourgeoises even before they'd landed at the port of Baltimore, where they quickly learned the joys of investment capitalism, and started acquiring stuff: a hat factory here, a stake in a gold mine there, and, while they were at it, a little downtown real estate, until eventually they'd spawned a family of lawyers and doctors and college professors, with an occasional architect or writerly-type thrown in for variety. They were so wholesome it was obnoxious, all those gracefully aging tennis-playing German Jews, all natural wrinkles on their rosy faces, working their vegetable gardens or walking on the beach in Nantucket like people in an insurance ad. But not Janey's family. There was, for starters, Janey's mother, dead from uterine cancer when Janey was sixteen. But wait: it gets worse, because the minute the mom started getting real sick, so sick that she couldn't so much as get out of bed, Janey was shipped off to prep school. And then, one weekend when Janey had taken the train down from Connecticut to visit her dying mother--thinking about how she'd sit by her bed, holding her hand--it happened. Janey didn't knock. Instead, she walked right into the master bedroom--the same room in which, as a child, she'd leaned against her mother's shoulder as her mother read Winnie the Pooh and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory--only to discover her daddy in the next bed, porking the day nurse. This, in turn, sent Janey into such a panic of misery and angst and fury and horror that she herself ended up, if only briefly, in the loony bin at Mt. Sinai, but not until after her mother had finally gone to her reward and Janey's father had insisted on informing her that, for years, Janey's mother had had a little problem with prescription drugs. Then there was Janey's brother, also dead, having plowed his high-school-graduation Cabriolet into a semi on I-95 just south of New Haven late one night in October when he was heading home from a party where he had smoked one, count them, one, joint. Not to mention Janey herself, who had been asleep in the backseat of her brother's Cabriolet when he ran under the wheels of a Mayflower Movers truck, and subsequently woke up at Yale/New Haven relieved of a good chunk of her left arm. No indeed, Adam can't compete with that.

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