Suicide's Girlfriend: A Novella and Short Stories by Elizabeth Evans

From the Publisher

Elizabeth Evans traces the complex and often painful threads of human relationships in Suicide's Girlfriend, her most inspired work to date. In these richly textured stories, you'll meet:

Oyekan, a confused young Nigerian student who wrestles with feelings his U.S. friends cannot understand.

Marie, an adolescent who makes a carefully philosophized, end-of-the-rope stab at salvation for herself and her seven abused siblings.

Jenny and Heather, two girls whose friendship has suffered from the distractions of adolescence and the cruelty of one moving on while the other must sit idly by and watch.

A group of college boys, whose discovery of a dead body on the side of the road leaves one of them changed in ways he never thought possible.

Elegant, acute, and engaging, Suicide's Girlfriend will introduce you to these characters and more, their stories, and an incredible new voice in fiction.

About the Author
Elizabeth Evans has received many grants and fellowships for her writing, including an NEA Fellowship, the James Michener Fellowship, and fellowships at Yaddo and MacDowell. She is the author of The Blue Hour and lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Publishers Weekly

Nine edgy stories and the sweetly languid title novella, featuring angst-ridden Midwestern kids and mixed-up adults, make up Evans's impressive latest work. In the strongest story, "Ransom," teenage Marie cares for five younger siblings including a baby, Krystal, who is just the same age as Marie's own child who was given up for adoption by her sodden father, under pressure from her vindictive stepmother. Fleeing the latest blowup at their house with the children, Marie prays for "forgiveness and forbearance," Christian words she hardly understands, while the passel stuff themselves with a diner breakfast they can't pay for, and Marie contemplates running away with the baby and a trucker. Many of Evans's characters are captured at a turning point, such as the college student Todd in "A New Life," whose reluctance to stop at a car accident on a snowy road and his eventual return to aid the victim drag him into a sour recognition of adulthood. "Thieves" delineates the awkward, disastrous mating ritual of teenagers: thoughtful 14-year-old Clare and her older anorexic sister suffer (and submit to) the gross indignities of lecherous young men. Similarly, in the closing novella, Evans succinctly portrays the compromises women make for the men they love. Painter Candace Cleeve is married to Carson, an older professor of geology in Tucson who successfully wooed Candace and left his wife and kids back in Iowa. The tension implicit in this rotten history reveals itself following the news of a student's suicide, when Carson is away visiting his former home and Candace's pet cockatiel escapes. Careful storytelling and artfully disjointed prose distinguish these quiet, deceptively simple fictions. (Aug. 9) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Three-time novelist Evans (Carter Clay, 1999, etc.) returns with an admirable debut collection of tales, mostly about modern midwestern life. "A story may lie and lie," says Oyekan, the Nigerian central figure of "Americans," who lays bare midwestern values as he inadvertently takes the place of a host couple's dead son, "but all its lies must tell the truth in the end." So it is with the variety we receive here, in stories drawn from greatly divergent experiences all bent, as it were, to similar end-truths. In "Ransom," a young girl tries to build a stable platform of emotion and spirituality as she's prematurely put in the role of caregiver to needy siblings; "A Beautiful Land" is a distant, quiet portrait of Iowa life that happily recalls the best of William Trevor; a teacher of conversational English in "English as a Second Language" witnesses his students rob a convenience store and worries that he has enabled them to rob through teaching the imperative; and a lesbian couple in "Home Ec" encounter the complex stresses of parenthood with devastating result. In other pieces, a man's frightening worldview finds expression in the traffic death of a young girl, caused in part by the narrator ( "Blood and Gore"); a college student finds that he can't remain an unserious person after he attempts to resuscitate a dying man, but can't become entirely serious, either ("A New Life"); two more college students contemplate the possibility of witchdom and their litanies of boyfriends ("Voodoo Girls on Ice"). In the title novella, a moving but convoluted account of a woman's relationship with desperation, Candace, a painter, is jolted from a position of relative emotional security by two acts ofabandonment: a student of her husband's wakes his girlfriend so she can witness his suicide by shotgun, and Candace's bird, a beloved cockatiel, flies away. Candace wonders "Which was better, to be the one who goes or the one who stays behind?" Varied and accomplished.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0641728506
  
• ISBN-13: 9780641728501
• Format: Paperback, 192pp
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Pub. Date: August 2002
• Edition Description: Bargain
• Sales Rank: 18,867

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Ransom

"There Dad comes," Mickey whispered.

"Wait," I said, "wait." Because it was still far off, the car looked small and dark, but it grew lighter, a dusty blue. Dad. Slipping off the road and into the wide ditch along the highway, then rolling back up again, so slow that from where we kids stood the motion looked almost peaceful, like an ocean wave.

I tucked little Krystal higher up on my shoulder and prayed she'd go on sleeping. "Knock that off now," I told the rest. Except for Mickey, they'd all started throwing gravel from the shoulder as soon as we left the truck stop. Their cheeks were red with the cold, but they still laughed, they tumbled into the ditch on purpose. They didn't know what was what.

A big truck went by, fast enough that it sucked at our clothes and made things even colder. When the trucker got close to dangerous Dad's car, he leaned on the horn.

"Wow," Mickey said. He squinted down the road. "Dad's driving doesn't look so hot."

"When's it ever?" I asked. The rate Dad came on, we'd still be standing on the side of the highway when spring arrived; by the time he got there, maybe the climate would have changed entirely, Nebraska would be under the sea again and the kids and I would all have flippers.

"What sort of mood do you figure he's in now?" Mickey asked.

"Ha," I said. I knew Mickey wanted to blame me for us being out here, but it had been Mickey that Dad was burned at yesterday, so mad he punched a hole in the bathroom. Dad hadn't even yet fixed the hole he kicked between the living room and the hall last summer. That particular hole. The littleones liked to look at each other through that hole. Sammy's idea of a good time: pull a diaper box out in the hall and sit there watching TV through the hole. Personally, the hole made me sick: always plaster dust on the floor from the little kids picking, and the wall smudged with finger marks.

I cried at the new hole, but when Dad said, "Stop your blubbering," I did. I wanted to be strong. I wanted to provide the children with a lifelong model of Christian tolerance -- which, if I didn't have, I didn't have a thing. Except maybe the children. Maybe Krystal, now shifting in my arms on that cold and dirty road that her father traveled down slow as a camel, slower.

I blew into the yellow down of Krystal's hair, made a star. If Krystal looked like anybody on earth, I was it. No one alive would have guessed such a perfect child came from Dad and my stepmother, Anndean. But that's always the way with children, isn't it? When my real mom brought home my brothers and sisters from the hospital, they smelled sweet as bread. They might have cried out for relief of earthly suffering, but they never did a truly bad or cruel thing to anybody.

"Whoa!" Mickey threw his hands up before him like somebody opening a sheet onto a bed. I looked. Dad's car climbed the median, it headed straight for a big pole.

The children screamed. They didn't even know what had happened. They screamed because I did, and they were hooked to me that way, like those Christmas tree lights where if one goes out they all do. Still, Dad missed the pole. He stuck his head out the window, like he'd just found the right address, any moment someone would call out, "Come on in for a beer, Gary!"

Mickey started toward Dad, but I said, "Wait. We wait til he comes for us. He can do that at least."

"But I'm cold, Marie."

"Of course you're cold," I told him. "It's cold out here. If you weren't cold, something would be wrong with you, so I guess you're all right."

Mickey smiled. I could always make him smile. I smiled back to help him along, but I didn't feel like smiling. I wished we were in the truck-stop diner still. Krystal would wake soon, and then what? I'd used the last diapers and bottles over two hours ago; the three littlest kids were sure to be wet by now, and pretty soon they'd notice, start to holler.

I breathed on Krystal's face to warm it. The most wonderful baby in the world -- like all babies -- she remained as yet unspoiled by contact with us, but I imagined her in our company, simmering like a poor little pot roast until she, too, cooked clear through.

Dad started to work on backing up off the median. I asked Mickey, "If Dad died right now, do you think he'd go to heaven?"

"Don't start," Mickey said, "that's how we got here in the first place, Marie."

I sniffed. The sound frightened me. I looked around for Anndean. Then I did it again: sniff!

"Did you hear that, Mickey?" I said. "Did you hear me sniff?"

"Don't change the subject," Mickey said. "It is your fault, Marie."

"I've been infected with Anndean's gruesome habit!" I cried. "She's infected me, Mickey!"

Mickey didn't smile. Because of this morning. Anndean had wanted her coffee, but it still perked, so since I couldn't bring her a cup yet, I just sat down with her and the children at the breakfast table. Anndean turned away from the TV to give me a dose of her fishy stare. That's what got me started. And the sniff. As always, she sniffed: sniff, like she understood things through her nose, or else I stunk. Anndean wasn't that much older than me, and I was smarter, but marriage to Dad gave her the advantage, say, a sledgehammer has over something like a microscope or a fancy computer: whatever I could do, she could put an end to it, quick.