My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro
608
My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro
608Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview
My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead is a literary masterpiece of amorous tales selected by Pulitzer Prize–winner Jeffrey Eugenides. From classics such as Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Lapdog” to such modern fare as Richard Ford’s “Fireworks,” these outstanding works capture the desire, obsession, power, and spirit of the emotion that drives and transforms our lives. Writers featured include:
William Faulkner • James Joyce • Alice Munro • Milan Kundera • Grace Paley • Lorrie Moore • Eudora Welty • Denis Johnson • Vladimir Nabokov • Miranda July • Raymond Carver • George Saunders • Annie Proulx • And many, many more.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780061240386 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 01/06/2009 |
| Series: | P.S. |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 608 |
| Sales rank: | 893,637 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.38(w) x 7.94(h) x 0.97(d) |
About the Author
Hometown:
Princeton, NJDate of Birth:
March 8, 1960Place of Birth:
Detroit, MichiganEducation:
B.A. in English, Brown University, 1983; M.A. in creative writing/English, Stanford University, 1986Read an Excerpt
My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead
Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro
Chapter One
First love and other sorrows
Harold Brodkey
Toward the end of March, in St. Louis, slush fills the gutters, and dirty snow lies heaped alongside porch steps, and everything seems to be suffocating in the embrace of a season that lasts too long. Radiators hiss mournfully, no one manages to be patient, the wind draws tears from your eyes, the clouds are filled with sadness. Women with scarves around their heads and their feet encased in fur-lined boots pick their way carefully over patches of melting ice. It seems that winter will last forever, that this is the decision of nature and nothing can be done about it.
At the age when I was always being warned by my mother not to get overheated, spring began on that evening when I was first allowed to go outside after dinner and play kick-the-can. The ground would be moist, I'd manage to get muddy in spite of what seemed to me extreme precautions, my mother would call me home in the darkness, and when she saw me she would ask, "What have you done to yourself?" "Nothing," I'd say hopefully. But by the time I was sixteen, the moment when the year passed into spring, like so many other things, was less clear. In March and early April, track began, but indoors; mid-term exams came and went; the buds appeared on the maples, staining all their branches red; but it was still winter, and I found myself having feelings in class that were like long petitions for spring and all its works. And then one evening I was sitting at my desk doing my trigonometry and I heard my sister coming home from heroffice; I heard her high heels tapping on the sidewalk, and realized that, for the first time since fall, all the windows in the house were open. My sister was coming up the front walk. I looked down through a web of budding tree branches and called out to her that it was spring, by God. She shrugged—she was very handsome and she didn't approve of me—and then she started up the front steps and vanished under the roof of the porch.
I ran downstairs. "The bus was crowded tonight," my sister said, hanging up her coat. "I could hardly breathe. This is such a warm dress."
"You need a new spring dress," my mother said, her face lighting up. She was sitting in the living room with the evening paper on her lap.
She and my sister spread the newspaper on the dining-room table to look at the ads.
"We'll just have to settle for sandwiches tonight," my mother said to me. My father was dead, and my mother pretended that now all the cooking was done for my masculine benefit. "Look! That suit's awfully smart!" she cried, peering at the paper. "Montaldo's always has such nice suits." She sighed and went out to the kitchen, leaving the swinging door open so she could talk to my sister. "Ninety dollars isn't too much for a good suit, do you think?"
"No," my sister said. "I don't think it's too much. But I don't really want a suit this spring. I'd much rather have a sort of sky-blue dress—with a round neck that shows my shoulders a little bit. I don't look good in suits. I'm not old enough." She was twenty-two. "My face is too round," she added, in a low voice.
My mother said, "You're not too young for a suit." She also meant my sister was not too young to get married.
My sister looked at me and said, "Mother, do you think he shaves often enough? How often do you shave?"
"Every three days," I said, flushing up my neck and cheeks.
"Well, try it every other day."
"Yes, try to be neater," my mother said. "I'm sure girls don't like boys with fuzz on their chin."
"I think he's too proud of his beard to shave it," my sister said, and giggled.
"I feel sorry for the man who marries you," I said. "Because everybody thinks you're sweet and you're not."
She smiled pityingly at me, and then she looked down over the newspaper again.
Until I was four, we lived in a large white frame house overlooking the Mississippi River, south of St. Louis. This house had, among other riches, a porte-cochere, an iron deer on the lawn, and a pond with goldfish swimming in it. Once, I asked my mother why we had left that earlier house, and she said, "We lost our money—that's why. Your father was a very trusting man," she said. "He was always getting swindled."
She was not a mercenary woman, nor was she mean about money—except in spells that didn't come often—but she believed that what we lost with the money was much of our dignity and much of our happiness. She did not want to see life in a grain of sand; she wanted to see it from the shores of the Riviera, wearing a white sharkskin dress.
I will never forget her astonishment when she took us—she was dressed in her best furs, as a gesture, I suppose—to see the house that was to be our home from then on and I told her I liked it. It had nine rooms, a stained-glass window in the hall, and neighbors all up and down the block. She detested that house.
As she grew older, she changed, she grew less imperious. She put her hair into a roll, wore dark-colored clothes, said often, "I'm not a young woman any more," and began to take pride in being practical. But she remained determined; she had seen a world we didn't remember too clearly, and she wanted us to make our way back to it. "I had it all," she said once to my sister. "I was good-looking. We were rich. You have no idea what it was like. If I had died when I was thirty, I would have died completely happy. . . ."
My Mistress's Sparrow Is DeadGreat Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro. Copyright © by Jeffrey Eugenides. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. <%END%>