The Time of Her Life

by Robb Forman Dew

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Now restored to print -- the acclaimed second novel by the National Book Award-winning author of Dale Loves Sophie to Death and The Evidence Against Her. Claudia and Avery Parks, lovers since high school, are now in their thirties. Intelligent, charming, sympathetic, they seem to be the ideal couple, the perfect dinner-party guests, almost everything people should be -- except responsible. They are causally yet cruelly oblivious to the ways in which their words and actions affect other people, most particularly their talented 11-year-old daughter, who suffers the misfortune of being treated by her parents not as a child but as an equal. An engrossing domestic tale by a novelist of the first rank -- an ideal selection for reading groups. Robb Forman Dew's first novel, Dale Loves Sophie to Death, received the National Book Award in 1982.

Release date: May 15, 2003

Publisher: Back Bay Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

“The Time of Her Life examines the fragility of family ties, the ease with which they can be broken, the carelessness of what passes for ‘love,’
and the terrible, lasting damage that can result…. Everything about this novel is right: the characters, the interplay of
plot and theme, the wonderful prose, and the depiction of the world of children—a world Dew seems to know better, and to convey
with greater understanding, than any American writer since Carson McCullers. The Time of Her Life is the work of that rarest of people, a real writer, and it will knock your socks off.”


—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

“A sensitively drawn but far from sentimental portrait of a little girl without a childhood…. With The Time of Her Life, Dew establishes herself as a master of exploring family love, with all its pain, joy, and intimate distances.”


—Anita Creamer, Dallas Times-Herald

“A writer of great sensitivity to the intricacies and ambiguities of family love…. Dew’s skill as a writer has permitted her
to convey all the ambiguity and pain of a family dynamic without the least resort to reductiveness.”


—Julie Rolston, Los Angeles Herald Examiner

“Dew has powers of observation akin to an Updike or Cheever.”

—Bob Moyer, Grand Rapids Press

“Dew puts her sensitive ear to a family’s heart…. She comes up with a beautiful, personal language with which to describe
its pulse.”


—Lisa Schwarzbaum, Detroit News


“Intensely focused, elegantly written fiction…. With extraordinary depth and emotional detail, Dew dramatizes a family in
crisis.”


—Janet Wiehe, Library Journal

“Dew tangles with potent themes…. She is also capable of turning a simple phrase in a way a poet might envy.”

—Alida Becker, St. Petersburg Times

“An accomplished, chilling, and memorable book, one that establishes Dew as a novelist of the first rank.”

—Publishers Weekly

“The quality of Dew’s writing is exceptional. She is able to take an introspective subject and create the kind of excitement
that makes it almost impossible to put the book down, a rare achievement for a novel that depends on character development
rather than action for its impetus…. Robb Forman Dew writes from within the innermost souls of the people in her story. She
makes her readers think as they think and feel as they feel, and the experience is as gripping as any daring adventure novel.”


—Anne Price, Sun Magazine

“Engrossing…. Dew already has made a good start in delineating a territory all her own, a part of American life that is as
ineffable as the emotions she is able to make substantive and meaningful.”


—Vincent Leo, Columbus Dispatch

“Content, structure, and the moral and emotional clarity of its author make The Time of Her Life a powerful and complex book…. Dew’s own development [as a writer] is as subtle and important as the plots of her books.”


—Myra Goldberg, Village Voice

“Astonishment is the rule in Robb Forman Dew’s fiction. And it is our response to her remarkable literary talent.”

—Dan Cryer, Newsday





Once every summer a mass of humid air settled over Lunsbury, Missouri. For perhaps ten days in July or August a muggy silence
predominated, and everyone became short-tempered and uneasy in the still heat. Otherwise during the year there was a pervasive
susurration of wind that rustled through the streets and down the alleys, across the golf course and between the houses, moving
the light objects—Frisbees, aluminum lawn chairs, a scarf—from one place to another in any backyard where they had been left
behind. An open door would soon slam shut. Papers on a desk near an open window would drift away and lie in trembling, shifting
disarray across the floor. There was always something afoot, afloat, in motion. Sometimes the weather was severe, but from
day to day it was more often tame. Since Lunsbury was a settlement of sixty thousand people, with many good-sized buildings
and sycamore trees planted strategically in long rows of windbreaks, the force of the air that shifted from the Pacific coast
across the plains was divided and channeled through the maze of the community.



The movement of the trees was whispery in this season. It was autumn, and the dried leaves stirred in the full-blown heads
of the old trees or rolled and spun across the grass in turmoil. In the summer, when the leaves were full of sap, there was
a tender, fleshy chafing. When winter came, there would be the creaking of the bare, abrasive branches, and then again, with
spring, the softer sigh of young leaves and the tall, spurred grasses that grew in the meadows, in the ditches, and untended
patches of real estate.


All of the residents enclosed within their own quiet rooms had more than an ordinary sense of security. When they shut their
windows and went to bed they had an unusual knowledge of being protected from the elements. And those prevailing westerly
winds were some part of the reason that—against all odds on this Saturday morning—Claudia Parks came out of sleep in her closed
and silent house in a state of optimism. She awoke as though she had been out running; her body was loose and warm, and she
was carried along into the day on an early surge of animation that led her mildly to consider good will, good luck, new chances.
Her turn of mind so early-on had the same frail and opalescent quality as the crescent moon that hung late in the first light.


Before she went down to fix breakfast, she brushed her short hair until it was full of static electricity and stood out around
her head like a cloud. It had no sheen, and her hair didn’t curl so much as curve in soft brown puffs against her cheeks.
It bobbed as she moved around the kitchen but then settled around her head once more when she came to rest. Electrified wisps
and tendrils
frizzled outward against the backlighting of morning windows, softening the outline of her image in the white kitchen.


Claudia had drawn her eyes all the way around with dark pencil that was artfully smudged, and she had exaggerated the pale
wedge of her face by blending a little pink color beneath her cheekbones so that they bore the strength of her looks in a
wide, gleaming winglike span above her fox-pointed chin. But she had left off there and wandered into the kitchen, and in
the fluorescent light the triangle of her face was shadowed into a pinched and haggard look by her uncolored mouth and darkened
eyes that seemed huge and hollow-socketed beneath her indistinct and unpenciled brows.


Claudia had on her scarlet robe that billowed and undulated around her ankles with each step. It was a finely made robe that
descended in long tucks to the waist, where its fullness was released, and the sleeves were also pleated from the shoulder
and then let loose in exorbitant width to be caught up again in more banded pleats and a pearl button at the wrist. Her movements
as she broke eggs into a blue bowl and took dishes from the shelves were as red and startling as the flight of a male cardinal
in the snow. However, that robe was three years old, and it was by the force of her own complicated vision that she didn’t
notice that the elbows were worn thin as gauze. She almost never remembered to run the robe through the lingerie cycle of
the wash, and the cuffs were darkly edged and fraying slightly. All down the front were strewn tiny scattered holes where
ashes from her cigarettes had flown and caught as she swung her arm in an expansive gesture.
“Oh, well. Don’t worry,” she would say as she brushed at the tiny flickers where the cinders smoldered, “ashes keep the moths
out.”


Her daughter, Jane, sat at the table and paid sullen attention while her mother fixed breakfast and talked to her. Claudia
transferred the milk to a pitcher and the jam to a crystal dish, and she put the silver down on woven mats with matching cloth
napkins. But she put the mats down on a table gritty with scattered sugar that had spilled during some other meal. She stood
at the counter staring out the window as she waited for the toast to pop up, and she put her cigarette on the windowsill as
she poured out orange juice. She forgot it there, and later in the day she would be surprised to find the dark burn it had
left on the white paint. The sunlight fell across her face and bright red robe with a shaft of light that caught her in its
narrow beam and enhanced the peculiar tension that was Claudia’s alone; she had a waveringly suppressed and dramatic energy
that was with her rain or shine.


“I don’t know if I should do it or not,” she said to Jane, about a class she might take. “Maggie wants me to, but I don’t
know…. You know how she wears you down. They don’t teach it here. I’d have to commute to Kansas City, and I don’t have any
sense of direction. And in the winter…” She told Jane all about her plans, new things that had occurred to her. She talked
and chatted while she moved dreamlike around the room, stepping over their dog, Nellie, without seeing her, reaching automatically
for the things she needed, without alacrity, just a lazy uncurling of her sleepy muscles when she reached or stirred. It was
the urgency of her new ideas that made Claudia appear languorous
as she moved around the counters. It was dazzling to her, the things that were possible, and in the morning her musings were
entirely visionary and hopeful. She gave Jane some toast and juice and settled at the table across from her daughter with
her own breakfast, but then she elbowed her plate slightly to one side and lit another cigarette, idly breaking her toast
into pieces with her other hand.


“And this is the last pack, Jane. I swear it! It really is,” she turned to her daughter to say, gesturing with the cigarette
she was smoking. Claudia’s gestures were fluid and poignant with earnestness, and she was impressed, herself, with her own
sincerity.


Jane was looking out the window in the direction of the Tunbridges’ house which could be glimpsed through the trees far away
down the hill, and her mute nod of acknowledgment was so peremptory, so casual, when Claudia meant never—never—to buy another pack of cigarettes, that Claudia slowly took in the presence of her daughter with a tinge of resentment that
colored her early ebullience. It was the first bruise on what she had chosen to see as the perfect apple of her day. Claudia
looked down the hill, too, at Maggie’s house, and was agitated all at once by the things in this day that she meant to get
done. She was disturbed by the idea of order and efficiency that always eluded her at the last minute. She almost got things
right. She just missed by a hair.


“Jane, you’ve got to get your things ready to go to Diana’s tonight.” This was a command, but in her sudden uneasiness Claudia’s
voice was faintly tentative. She was offering a small bit of instruction, a slight complaint. These days she had constantly
to remind Jane
of the obligations of Jane’s own social life, but all at once this year Jane’s face had elongated and become narrow and stern,
so that compelling her to do this thing or that was a risky business.


“I might not be going,” Jane said.

“Well, Jane. Please remember to tell me these things. Would that be too much trouble?” Her tone was light with injury. “I
thought it was all planned. When I talked to Maggie yesterday, she said Diana was counting on it. I thought you were going
over this morning and staying overnight.”


“I’m not sure I want to go, though,” Jane said.

Claudia sipped her coffee and let the conversation become vague in her mind. “I don’t want you to hurt Diana’s feelings,”
she said, but her wishes dispersed into the warm, scented kitchen air.


Jane finished her toast but still sat at the table, moving her juice glass in tight circles that blurred the ring of condensation
beneath it. “Did Dad come home?” she asked.


Claudia made a dismissive gesture with her hand and gave her daughter a nod, but in spite of herself a sudden weight of accountability
plummeted through her in that instant, making her lethargic, her arms and legs heavy with despair. Thirty-two years and the
responsibility for them. Claudia had never thought that life would demand any effort on her part; she had assumed it had its
own momentum. She had never even thought she would be thirty-two. The whole business had taken her by surprise.


“He’s still asleep,” she said to Jane. That’s where she had meant to leave Avery for the moment—stuporously asleep in their
bed—and she was irritated at Jane,
because here he was now, in the forefront of her mind. She wasn’t pleased to disturb herself this morning, in her favorite,
mellow hour.


Claudia and Avery had gone to a party at the Tunbridges’ the night before, and now Claudia lost all track of her thoughts
about the class she might take. The idea of herself in her blue car driving along I-70, sure of her destination, crisp in
nice clothes, passing by the idling traffic while she drove straight on to Kansas City to be on time—that soothing image—became
a kind of low hum of a thought to fall back on. It was a bit of theater, really; she enjoyed watching the idea work itself
out, but she would never have taken the action. She was irritated, though, because she didn’t want to think about the night
before, not any part of it at all, and here it was, surfacing in her mind.


At the party Maggie had been explaining how disappointed she had been after meeting and entertaining the convocation speaker,
a writer whose books she had reviewed several times. “It’s ruined his writing for me. He’s a whiner,” she had said, drawing
one foot up on the couch and clasping her arms around her knee. It had gotten late, and only eight or nine people were still
ranged around the room in various stages of party fatigue. Eight or so acquaintances who lingered on. “He’s insinuating. In
a sneaky way,” Maggie went on, “he’s really trying too hard to convince you how humble and amusing he is.”


“You were not impressed,” said Vince, who had been sitting in a chair across from his wife. He summed this up. It was only
a statement, but Avery waved his hand impatiently at this comment.


“Oh, Maggie. You were impressed. I know you. I
know you were impressed. Think of what that man has achieved!” There was a nasty note to Avery’s voice; there was a challenge
in his tone, and the whole group turned to him, surprised. He had said very little for some time.


This was a group of people—the ones who remained in the long living room—of some note. They had a little fame one way or another
or, like Claudia, were married to persons of some limited renown. But they were not necessarily fond of each other; they simply
tended to congregate because they had that much in common, and they were all there was.


Vince watched Avery for a moment. “Well, all right, Avery. What about you? Who would impress you? Living or dead?” Avery’s
face lost its sardonic expression and became momentarily reflective, so Vince pressed on. “Any single person. Who would you
like to meet? And why?” Vince added. “Why would you like to meet whoever you’d like to meet?”


Avery had become quite solemn, and he took some time thinking about this. “I would be”—Avery spoke slowly and raised one hand
to emphasize his words—“I believe I would be impressed by Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln.”


There was a small collective sigh of disappointment, and Avery raised his hand a little higher to retain their attention,
but he kept gazing morosely ahead of himself. His solemnity had become a kind of maudlin petulance. “No,” he said. “No. I
mean it. The language. He had the language…. He could write. But his terrible melancholy…” Avery was sinking into a slow-witted
and boozy sentimentality.


Vince moved right along, turning away from him.
“Okay. Maggie? We’re stuck with early American. Who would you want to meet?”


Maggie had finally come up with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an early feminist, and Evan Price, a young architect, had gone with
Thomas Jefferson. Vince himself had chosen Stephen A. Douglas. Then he had turned to Claudia.


“Oh, I’ll pass,” she said. “This isn’t my kind of game.”

Avery sat up straight and leaned toward her in irritation. All at once he was disconcertingly alert. “You can’t think of anyone?” he asked her much too loudly. “Not a single human being who ever lived?” He made a great show of incredulity.


“I don’t want to play this game,” Claudia had said very mildly. She didn’t seem to notice Avery’s immense irritation, but
he wouldn’t let the subject drop.


“Okay. Okay. What about Aaron Burr? Aaron Burr. Now he would interest you. Wouldn’t he? You really would like to meet Aaron
Burr, wouldn’t you?” Avery was becoming increasingly unpleasant, but Claudia looked across at him with no expression or response
at all.


“Oh, come on. Make Avery happy, Claudia,” said Vince. “You can come up with someone.”

At the same moment Avery had risen with difficulty from the deep wing chair in which he had been sitting. He had risen laboriously
and storklike, waving an arm to quiet Vince.


“No, no, no, Vince. No, there is nobody,” Avery said, “nobody at all who could ever possibly impress my wife. Not a single,
solitary person who ever existed. And it’s because what she really is… what Claudia really is
is a nihilist. A real one. The real thing,” he said ponderously, and he drank down more of his drink. “And ultimately… ultimately that’s just boring. Tedious! Tedious!”


No one said anything at all. No one had realized how drunk Avery had become. But Claudia was calm and irritated. “For God’s
sake, Avery, don’t be such a fool. I’d never describe myself as a nihilist.”


“But it’s exactly what you are! God damn it! That’s what you are.” The whole group tried hard to pretend that there was no
menace in Avery’s voice, but Claudia was not in the least intimidated. Instead she was unwisely cross. She disliked being
spoken for and having herself categorized in this sophomoric conversation.


“For Christ’s sake, Avery! Will you drop it? I certainly don’t believe in nothing.” She paused for a moment, and then she
smiled slightly so that all the force of her tremendous and ingenuous charm came across her face. “It’s just that there’s
nothing much that I believe in.” And the whole gathering broke into mild and relieved laughter. All, of course, but Avery.


Avery was still standing above them, and he looked around the room. “What you don’t understand…” Then he stopped in the center
of the room, resting the hand of his uplifted arm on the top of his head. He stood alone, looking angular and puzzled as if
he had forgotten what it was that he did understand. But the room remained attentive, and he continued. “What you don’t know, and you don’t know, and you don’t know,” he said, turning in a slow arc and lowering his raised arm at one person and then another in accusation and
inebriated slow motion. “What no one seems to see is that what Claudia thinks of all of you is that you’re just
a dot! That’s it! Just a dot…” He was too drunk to get the right tone; it fell short of sarcasm into a furious slurring. “A dot
on the great big blackboard of life!” He had meant this as a little witticism, but there was only silence in the room, and
this time Claudia had frowned. She hadn’t replied. After a moment he dropped his arm and smiled in huge pleasure at having
transmitted this message, and he wandered out of the room, not choosing to elaborate.


Claudia heard him leave through the front door, and when conversation started up again, she went and got their coats without
saying anything to anyone at all. Maggie came over to her, though, moving among her guests discreetly so as not to interrupt
them, and with a slight tipping back of her head, a conspiratorial downglance, had said to her, “Call me if you want. Later.
Or tomorrow.” She had spoken so softly that Claudia wondered afterward if she had actually said the words or mouthed them
in a silent pantomime of solidarity. Claudia had gone outside and found Avery sitting in the passenger seat of their car,
looking smug. He was pleased and quiet, and Claudia drove home.


By the time they were home, however, Avery had so much to talk about, and he was insistent that someone listen to him. He
put the dog out, coaxing her because she didn’t like the dark. “Go on, now, Nellie! You cowardly hound. Go out, now, go on out!” While he waited to let her back in he roamed around the living
room studying his own bookshelves, the pictures on his walls, as though there were something there of which he was suspicious,
something out of kilter, put there behind his back. At last he said, “I’ll go check on Jane,” while he was still on the move
around the room, and he was away
in a flash. He was quick, and he was sly; Claudia had been heading in the other direction to hang up their coats.


“Damn it! Avery, don’t wake her up! It’s almost one o’clock.” By then, though, Avery was leaning against Jane’s doorframe,
talking to her. Talking and talking. Asking her opinion. Wheedling and cajoling. What fools people were, weren’t they? he
said. Her teachers… “There is no one more intelligent than you are, Janie. That’s the thing. Now, knowledge. They might have
you there. But, still, if you always know that you’ve got one up on them”—and he tapped the side of his head with his forefinger
in a pretense of jest—“then you can be sure of a lot of things. Not happy all the time. That’s not the point. But you can always be absolutely sure that you know what you know.” And he rambled on
in a sweet muttering. The pleasure of his own voice was there, full in his throat, as he lifted the sound persuasively up
and down the scale, alternatingly soft and firm in tone. A joy in the night. He emitted a sound so charming it would lure
the birds right out of the trees. For a little while it always mesmerized Claudia. That’s how he could be when he chose. But
he grew tired there in the doorway and followed Claudia to the kitchen, where he fixed himself another drink. He always came
home late from long conversations and then had more to say. He could not finish talking, and his voice altered and became a deep, insistent whine. He was distressed all at once.


“Your real talent, Claudia, is that you suffer fools graciously! Christ! Fools. God, they’re fools. All the people we see.
How can you stand it? Why do you make these plans? How can I live with a woman who laughs
at Evan Price’s jokes? He’s mentally five years old! How can I live with a woman who laughs at bathroom humor? Did you know that? He’s five years old!” With the last two sentences he had pounded
the wall each time for emphasis, shouting now at Claudia, while she moved around the kitchen clearing up the dishes Jane had
left and emptying the ashtrays. When he had thought she wasn’t paying attention, he had put his drink down and gone slowly
toward her and taken hold of her lower arms between the wrist and elbow so that she had to stand in one place and watch him.
“How can I live with someone w. . .