分节阅读 Table of contents

• 1.The life of middle-class family

  • Our story today starts with a weird anecdote between a mother and a daughter: Maya and Ellie. This is the prologue of the whole story, which traces back to the childhood memories of our protagonists. When Ellie was 8 years old, her mother Maya took her to a Florida beach for vacation. Ellie wanted to swim just one more time before they left Florida. Maya wanted to go with her but Ellie assured her that she’d be fine. Then a wave came, crashing down to Ellie, which so frightened Maya and caused her to dive into the water immediately. Maya held her breath and swam towards Ellie, afraid that she’d be drowned. Eventually Maya grabbed hold of Ellie in her arms, and she thought she ‘would not let go of her for the next hundred years’.
    
    This prologue will be echoed in our following story. Now let’s draw the curtain and turn to the summer of 2011. Ellie is at an age when she should have been enrolled in some college as other kids, yet she has been a troubled kid – she indulged herself in drugs, men, and other dissolute habits. She failed to get into a college and ended up working in a coffee shop. And one day, while she’s working in the shop, her ex-boyfriend Dylan suddenly stops by. As he appears in front of her, Ellie recollects their past intimacies, when Dylan was only fifteen. Their relationship was ended by Maya’s objection.
    
    Dylan is asking Ellie if she still misses him. Right at this point, Maya’s mother rushes into the shop and is astonished to find Ellie with Dylan. She considers it a breach on Ellie’s part to their agreement. The agreement asks Ellie to make efforts toward figuring out her life and not have any contact with Dylan, otherwise she has to leave or go to rehab. But Maya knows it is Stephen and herself, the vaunted successful Columbia professors, who are more scared of the idea of rehab much more than Ellie.

• 2.Ellie on her way to Florida

  • After Maya and Dylan left the shop, Ellie hangs out with her colleague, Joseph. Walking around a yard, Ellie tells Joseph about her ‘history’, including her drug addiction, her affair with Dylan, and her issues with her ‘fancy ivy-covered parents’. Ellie does not take any action, but when Joseph leans towards her, she does not bother to back away. That night Ellie sleeps with Joseph instead of going home. That night Maya has been crazy looking for her the whole night, and when Ellie gets back home in the morning Maya has been waiting for her on the stoop, wearing running clothes ‘as if she meant to sprint around all of Brooklyn and Manhattan till she could scoop her up and bring her home’.
    
    Maya considers that Ellie has broken the agreement again. This event makes her determined that Ellie has to leave. She has to send her to somewhere far and safe before everything is too late. That decided, Maya announces that Ellie is going to Annie’s place in Florida to help looking after Annie’s 5-year-old son.
    
    Ellie is scared – she’s aware that putting her in charge of someone else’s kid is definitely a terrible idea. Still, she has to say good-bye to Stephen and Benny, her dad and her dear younger brother, the two persons in the family with whom she has slightly better relationships.
    
    Maya, on the other hand, wants to say good-bye to her on her last day in New York. Maya wants to hold her again as if she’s just born. She smiles and tells Ellie how it feels to hold her: ‘Just your skin and my skin and that tiny diaper. I thought everything good in the whole world had something to do with what it felt like to hold you like that.’ The idea of being away from Ellie, of not feeling her breathing every night, it scared Maya so much that she grabs hold of Ellie’s arm as firmly as she could.

• 3.Getting along with a new family

  • Annie is happy to see Ellie again after so many years. The last time they met was Annie’s wedding ceremony 10 years ago, when Ellie was but 11 years old. For a long time, Annie has been struggling to have a child, and finally did it in vitro.
    
    On welcoming Ellie to their home, Annie’s husband, Jeffrey, shows up with Jack, the little child. They get along in a rather cordial manner, part of which, as Ellie thinks to herself, owes to that they have no idea what a troubled kid Ellie has become.
    
    Ellie watches the playful closeness between Annie and Jeffrey and feels a little envious. But she’s more surprised when Annie tells that Maya has been her only friend since high school, when Maya was her instructor and herself a depressed teenager, and that Maya was the only person who listened to her and helped her out. Contrarily, Ellie feels that she’s incapable of taking care of Annie’s child, let alone befriending him.
    
    It is true that Jack is indifferent and wayward when he’s with her, and Ellie even thinks the kid hates her. ‘He’s a little spoiled brat’, Ellie calls her brother and complaints, although to this Benny replies that in spite of that, she should still call their mom and tell her ‘everything is wonderful’, just to let her think that Ellie is okay, that Ellie is trying to figure things out as she desperately expects.
    
    Indeed, Ellie finds it necessary to be a good ‘parent’ to Jack, even just trying. At this point, an anecdote similar to the swimming scene in the prologue occurs to them. They go boating together, but when they are on the boat the wind fills the sail, the water crashes to the side of the boat, causing it to dip hard and suddenly go underwater. And Ellie watches, too afraid to move, as Jack tips out of the boat. She dives in after him; she opens her eyes wide though they sting greatly; and she finally scoops Jack into her arms, keeping hold of him, just as Maya grabbed hold of her a long time ago – their last day in Florida.
    
    Jack appears to be closer to Ellie after the accident. But while things begin to run smooth, Ellie makes acquaintance with a young man, Cooper, who offers to get her high if she’s in need. Ellie says nothing, but her body is somehow making signals. She could not resist the temptation, no matter how much she tries to pull herself together to say ‘No’.

• 4.An affair and an accidental death

  • Besides her acquaintance with Cooper, Ellie’s relationship with Jeffrey seems to advance in a more dangerous direction. On a stormy day, Jeffrey takes Jack and Ellie to dinner -- only the three of them. At the restaurant, Ellie feels that something weird is taking place between Jeffrey and herself. The waitress mistakes her as the mistress of the family, and the presence of Jack makes this weird uneasiness even stronger. It disturbs her and keeps reminding her of Annie who’s absent here. It reminds her of overhearing Annie describing her to her mom as ‘a good sweet girl’ over the phone, and Jeffrey caught her crying, standing there, and holding the receiver. He watched her in silence; he appeared to her to be so understanding, careful, and kind.
    
    Then it becomes too late when Ellie realizes that she’s having an affair with Jeffrey, husband and father. It seems to happen all of a sudden, but both of them know that they have been more or less anticipating its happening. They have been hanging out more and more often, and Jeffrey has been talking to her like he knows her perfectly, ‘like he knows exactly what she’s always been’.
    
    When it happens Ellie is staying with Jack in the house. Annie’s away from home. The television plays on low and Jeffrey, who’s sitting beside her, gradually leans in towards her. He then carries his son out of the room and smiles at her, upon which she knows she should leave for that intimate smile. She doesn’t leave, though. She’s ‘too young to walk to her room and close the door behind her’, and she’s ‘too desperate to be touched’, ‘too hungry for the looks he gives her – the looks that have become more and more frequent, have begun lasting longer, that she thinks about when she can’t sleep at night – to be made manifest across her skin.’
    
    A fatal catastrophe comes immediately after their adultery. On a fine day, Ellie goes swimming with Jack near the beach – it is a cheerful September. Although there’s a sign up on the lifeguard that says NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY, Ellie does not think about the risk of swimming close to the beach, and with such fine and calm weather. So she races with Jack, dives underwater and chases him. The waves roll in and her mind suddenly clears up. She stops thinking and just lets the water rush all through her. When she comes up she sees the clouds are thin strips and she calls to Jack to look. But now there is no answer.
    
    There had been a riptide, though the water was deceptively calm. Ellie swam in the opposite direction and hadn’t seen or heard Jack. By the time she’d gotten to him, his brain had been too long without air.

• 5.The Taylor family after the event

  • The story shifts to Maya’s side. As mentioned before, Maya’s a gifted English professor, a specialist in Virginia Woolf, also a frantic lover of Woolf. The intense character in her brings her friends like Annie and Laura. Annie’s her student, and Laura her colleague, professor in French literature. But Laura’s character is even more intense and crazier than Maya’s. Maya has always been more depressed and reserved. Just as Laura would curse the hackneyed life of literature professor and the hackneyed things her students say in class, while Maya always holds a more positive opinion – she seldom complaints.
    
    The craziness of Laura sometimes reminds her of the craziness of Ellie. Benny once had a quarrel with her after Jack’s death, for she didn’t tell Annie the real situation of Ellie and how messy and crazy she has been. It’s been 2 years after the catastrophe, Ellie has been held in rehab, and Annie hasn’t brought any charges yet. On the other hand, Benny has his problems too: he’s tried to be a soccer coach and got into a college in Ohio to keep practicing, but one day he announces that he ‘hates it’, that he hates everyone at school and wants to come back to New York. Ellie knows he took LSD too.
    
    So are Maya and Stephen faced with their two messed-up kids? Except this, along with the worries about Ellie, the desire to have her back and close to her, Maya’s life is all routines. If there’s anything that excites her, it would be her student Charles, the guy whom Laura once claimed to be in love with her. Maya thinks this a crazy idea and tries to laugh it off, but indeed there have been moments in the past year when she’s worried Charles looks a bit too long at her, listens too intently. She wants to fight this idea off, for after all Charles is only twenty-something. But Laura assures her, firmly, that ‘it’s exactly what you need’.

• 6.Culpability lies in the past

  • Both Maya and Stephen feel it urgent now to figure out what they could do with their kids.
    
    ‘We must have made them so’, says Stephen. He reminds Maya of the way she treated them when Benny was 2 and Ellie was 4: back then Maya would take care of them to such an extreme then suddenly disappeared; she’d flown down to Florida for 3 weeks, just to be quiet and alone for a while. Maya wanted them to feel love the way she didn’t. She wanted to right all the regrets she had with her father, though at times she’s also afraid of her own kids and wants to get rid of them. It might have something to do with Maya’s father: Maya grew up without a mother and the way her father parented her was of a hysteric nature -- he seldom touched her, for she made him nervous; but he would go in her room drunk, would hold her and cry to her that he’d lost all of his money, all of which had made her terrified each time she saw him.
    She can’t make it up, however, for Annie’s loss of Jack. Annie has been calling Maya for some consolation – after all, Maya is still her only friend. ‘I called you,’ says Annie, ‘because I don’t want the weight of this sadness any longer. Because I know you have to take it if I can just figure out how to pass it off to you.’ Maya is all nerves while she listens to Annie. Back in school, when Maya was the AP language and composition instructor at a two-thousand-person high school and Annie a young, bright though extremely depressed student, she’s also the only person who could listen to Annie’s depression, sympathize with her, and comfort her, while Annie’s parents only kept sending her to the therapist’s and asking her to take lithium.
    
    Now, when Annie tells Maya that she’s not going to pursue charges because she doesn’t want Ellie to be locked up her whole life, Maya chokes back a sob. ‘We’re all culpable, Maya,’ says Annie, ‘you and me much more than her.’

• 7.A student-teacher romance

  • In the meantime, Maya has been paying attention to Charles since Laura mentioned his secret love for her. In fact, it feels like that they have been groping in the dark, trying timidly to approach each other. The moment occurs when Charles finishes his first class as a TA, after which Maya encourages him, and kisses him gently. Both of them are flurried and keep apologizing for this unexpected kiss, and Maya feels guilty when she thinks of Stephen, who’s now sitting in her office waiting to talk about how they could help Ellie out.
    
    A few days later one of her former grad students, Caitlin, comes to see her. She’s one of the most brilliant students Maya ever had, fresh and full of life. She invites Maya to her place for a dinner party.
    
    At the party Maya tells Caitlin everything about Ellie and ends up crying, when the door opens and she hears a familiar but unexpected voice: it is Charles. Charles catches her eyes and she feels her face gets warm. She learns in the following conversation that Caitlin was in love with him awhile. When she leaves Caitlin’s house Charles walks her to a bar. Charles tells her about his story with Caitlin – who’s now a mother already. At last Charles ventures to ask Maya what she thinks of him, to which she replies quietly, echoing Laura’s comment, ‘Exactly what I need.’
    
    They meet up again in a coffee shop a few days later. After some hesitation Maya agrees to walk with him back his home. She’s nervous, and tries not to think. She stays in his apartment and keeps talking with him, but notices that his eyes are full of too much expectation. What happens next is that he turns towards her, his hands reaching around her waist.

• 8.The reconciliation

  • Maya gets back home before sunshine, and finds Stephen has been looking for her the whole night. It is not the first time: recently Maya has been hanging out with Laura to the bars, giving vent to all her frustrations, grievances, and anxieties about her life via the dance floor. She has been returning home late, drunk, dizzy, and almost unconscious.
    
    Stephen tells her the long-looked-for news: they are going to get Ellie back from Florida. He pulls Maya close to him, takes her hands and assures her that they’ll be okay, that tomorrow they’ll go with Benny to Florida to have Ellie released, and have their family rebuilt.
    
    They finally come to a full reconciliation. When Maya sees Ellie the next day, ‘she looks young to Maya’, and ‘Maya grabs tight to her daughter, Ellie stands very still and breathes in the scent of Mom . . . Maya grabs her hand. She loops an arm around her daughter’s waist and pulls her to her. She brings her back against her chest and holds her still.’

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