Read Online Jeremy Thrane by Kate Christensen - Free Book Online

Julia Child’s. “We have a wonderful treat for our opening reading today: Emma Pepper just won this year’s Atlantic Poetry Award and also recentlycompleted her fourth residency at the MacDowell Colony. Her work, which has been widely published, acclaimed, and anthologized, is known for its passion, lyricism, and metaphysical insight. We’re very pleased indeed that she’s agreed to read for us today. Please join me in welcoming Ms. Pepper.”
    My slender, somewhat fey mother might have appeared fragile to those who didn’t know her, but these characteristics were in fact the source of her strength: Whenever she felt dissatisfied with the life she found herself in, she had always had the ability to generate a new persona for herself that seemed to have neither scars nor regrets but which contained the familiar hallmarks of her personality, and then to transplant this fresh self into more fertile ground. Where more rigid souls might have broken or soberer ones imploded, she changed her skin and slipped away like an inmate walking unnoticed through a prison gate in borrowed street clothes.
    She had begun writing poetry shortly after she’d married Lou Jackson, the stepfather who’d shaken my hand and congratulated me when I’d made my big announcement. The oppressive heat, air-conditioned silence, and dead boredom of our Phoenix neighborhood had caused her mind to go into creative hyperdrive. She’d turned from free spirit into mad housewife almost overnight. Finding herself home alone all day, she exploded into fierce monomaniacal activity. Often we came home from school to find her at the dining room table surrounded by scribbled-on papers, a wineglass and half-empty bottle of white wine, cigarette burning in an ashtray. As we burst en masse through the door, yapping about our days at school, she waved us frantically away, commanded us to go help ourselves to cookies, candy, whatever the hell we wanted, just please leave her alone for ten more minutes.
    She went off to writers’ workshops during the summers, began submitting her work to literary magazines. She gave readings, won a small prize or two, kept writing. When I was in college, she left Lou and moved to New York, where she eventually met and married Leonard Margolis, her current husband, a physicist. She sold a poetry collection to Milkweed Press for a tiny poetry-sized advance, then sold a poem to
The New Yorker
, then another to
Harper’s
. She’d hit the big time, poetry-wise. She was asked to teach at Breadloaf and the New School, went toboth Yaddo and MacDowell, and gave frequent readings wherever she could.
    She was at the forefront of a group of middle-aged poetesses whose intensely melodious free verse had as its common theme the subject of femaleness and its attendant joys and tribulations: coming of age, sex, marriage, giving birth, divorce, aging, loss, hysterectomies, their rage at their mothers, passion for their children, fond bemusement for their husbands and yearning for their lovers, past, present, and imaginary. My mother was beautiful, well spoken, dramatic, and husky-voiced. She was shamelessly crowd-pleasing, hotly exhibitionistic.
    She began today’s reading with a poem made up of disparate images: a raccoon who’d wandered into the garden of her house in Saugerties, memories of playing in her grandmother’s closet as a child, the sound of her husband’s voice calling her name in his sleep. I listened straight-faced, breathing rapidly and shallowly, as if in the grip of mild nausea that threatened to worsen with any sudden movement. I sensed, but didn’t turn to see, Amanda’s rapt expression. She had stopped sniffing.
    Just then I caught sight of my mother’s old friend Irene Rheingold sitting a few rows up with her husband, Richard, and their daughter, Beatrice, a big, strapping, shy girl of twenty-seven I was almost certain was gay, even though she herself may not have realized it yet. In my initial reconnaissance of the