Elizabeth Divining Venus

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-904130-74-1
Verlag: Waywiser Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 184 Seiten

From blind dates to back seats to a drinking game gone wrong, the short stories in Divining Venus are linked by a series of compelling characters all trying to discern something truthful about that thing called love. In 'Reunion', a divorced empty-nester faces up to the one who got away. In 'Junior Lifesaving' a young woman hides her strengths to keep a relationship going, only to be faced with a terrible choice. In 'Say Goodbye to Hollywood' a newly-minted college graduate must choose between adolescence and adulthood when she finds herself falling for her boyfriend's father. And in the title story, 'Divining Venus', an eleven-year-old turns to a ouija board with questions about love, looking for the answers her classmates, teachers and parents don't have. Mary Elizabeth Pope hails from Michigan, and has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. Her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines across the US, and she was a finalist for the 2012 Autumn House Fiction Prize for Divining Venus. She lives in Boston. This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Elizabeth, Mary

Leseproben

The ouija board in Venus Lockhart’s basement knows lots of things. Such as: Every single boy in our sixth grade class is in love with Venus. And: In six years Venus will be the homecoming queen of our high school. Also: Venus will be Miss Isabella County one day, which isn’t that surprising since she’s practically a celebrity already at Immaculate Heart Elementary School. I mean, it took me years just to get a seat at that girl’s lunch table, but now she lets me sit right next to her whenever I want. I get to eat her extra Twinkie and spot her sit-ups in gym class and walk home from school with her every single day. And only I get to play with Venus’s ouija board. Not Jennie Millgate or Tanya Hanks, who have been in a dead heat with me for Venus’s attention ever since she moved to Michigan in second grade.

Every day after school we put that ouija board between us and touch our fingertips to the indicator, then ask about all the mysteries of the universe, like why Rita Lambert got boobs before all the other girls in our class. When the spirits know the truth they will use our fingers to spell it out, like when Venus asks who will be her next boyfriend and the spirits say H-U-E-Y P-A-R-K-E-R (who she’s liked for weeks).

Sister Gerald Vincent says diviners are witches, but life sure is easier when you can get all the answers, even if some questions I want to ask are against regulations, like when will I die and where is the gold buried, and others just wouldn’t be polite, like why Venus has silky blonde hair and perfect skin and Calvin Klein jeans that fit her just right, but I’m stuck with red frizz and freckles and plain old Wranglers from the Quality Farm and Fleet. Or why Venus has eyes so blue they are almost purple but mine are just a shade my mother calls hazel, meaning they aren’t really any color at all, and which anyway only reminds me of my Aunt Hazel who wears horn-rimmed glasses and eats all the garnishes off the hors d’oeuvre platters at family Christmas parties. Venus’s feet are tiny too – size six – which is probably the thing I am most jealous about since mine are size nine-and-a-half. When my mother took my little sister Janie and me to the Back to School Sales in August, the man at Buster Brown said I looked like a large-breed puppy in my new tennis shoes. He said, “That girl is all feet.”

All feet is not a very cool thing to be in the sixth grade and probably explains why the ouija board never says any boys are in love with me. Which is obvious since Teddy Schwab never asks me to play Spoons anymore, and Willie Montrose moves to another seat when I sit next to him on the bus, and Cletus DeLucca acts like he doesn’t even know who I am ever since we played Mary and Joseph in the Christmas play and he put his arm around me behind the manger, which seemed all wrong for the Blessed Mother. I said, “Cletus, if you do not get your hands off me this instant I will scream” (all while trying to look holy, which was not the easiest thing to do). But Venus says Cletus is cute and wants to go with him, which means I don’t know what because nobody in our class goes anywhere except out to recess.

(The only boy I’d go anywhere with is Kyle Kellerman, who sits next to me in Sister Gerald Vincent’s class. Kyle already knows every single element on the periodic table by heart and also gets 3-2-1 Contact just like I do, which we discuss every month. Sometimes he passes me notes with jokes in them, like What kind of music does Jupiter like? Neptunes and How did the rocket lose his job? He was fired. But Venus says, “Laugh at anymore of those stupid jokes, Sophie Williams, and you will be left out in the cold.” Venus says so much as looking in Kyle Kellerman’s direction could make me unpopular, but I can’t seem to help myself. I just love all that science talk.)

Here is another thing I can’t ask that ouija board: why I can’t have parents just like Venus’s who drive a Volkswagen van and keep pet rabbits in the back yard and named me after the Goddess of Love and Beauty, who is the whole reason Venus’s parents found each other and fell in love. And let me tell you, Venus’s parents are more in love than any people I have ever seen except on television. Venus’s mother walks around in her nightgown and her father has a ponytail and they went to this concert called Woodstock one time, and whenever Venus’s father starts playing his guitar, he will walk all over that house until he finds her mother, who will swing a towel over her head in time to Foxy Lady, or use a hairbrush as a microphone, and I just can’t help but feel a little dizzy every time I get around all that romance. I can’t help worrying that my parents are headed straight for divorce because instead of singing to my mother and playing the guitar, my father reads off the prices of duck decoys from Cabela’s while my mother washes the dishes and says, “Uh-huh.”

When you have parents like Venus’s, you can turn Rick Springfield all the way up and crank call your friends and watch game shows until Phil Donahue comes on, and if you forget to take off your shoes at the door you never have to worry about giving someone a migraine. Plus you never have to go to the doctor, because whenever Venus gets sick her mother just puts a little vodka in her orange juice and lets her stay home from school. My father would call that irresponsible, but parents like Venus’s are just more concerned with the important things which they teach you early so you never say dumb things like I did last week when Venus’s father showed us this chunk of stone he chipped off the building where John Lennon was shot. When I said, “Who’s John Lennon?” Venus turned to her father and said, “Larry, I want to apologize on behalf of my friend. They do not have MTV at her house.”

Venus calls her parents Larry and Charlene instead of Mom and Dad like everybody else I know. They also told me to call them Larry and Charlene and for a while I tried to act like it wasn’t a big deal for me to call adults by their first names. I practiced in front of the mirror: “How’s it going, Charlene?” “See you later, Larry.” I was getting pretty good at it until Venus stayed over at my house one night and called my father John at the dinner table. Well, my father started ranting to my mother about manners plain and simple and his students at the college who don’t take off their ball caps. He said, “I don’t know about you, Mrs. Williams, but I could do without this first-name-basis-what-all.” So now I’m back to calling Venus’s parents Mr. and Mrs. Lockhart, which feels more normal to me anyway and doesn’t bother them a bit. They are just as happy to see me whenever I walk through their door, and never get mad if I drop food on the floor or spill my Coke by accident.

With Venus as my best friend, no one dares make fun of my Tupperware lunchbox or pick me last for kickball, and I never have to eat with Carrie MacIntosh, who wears this big ugly strap that holds her glasses in place and tells all these lies about being related to the Princess of Wales. Everything in sixth grade starts going along just perfect, and I couldn’t be happier.

Then Sister Gerald Vincent says it is Reverence for Life and Family Day for all sixth graders at Immaculate Heart, and sends the boys to the gym so she can talk to us about Becoming a Person. She says, “You will all be young ladies soon. You will need to know the facts of life.” Now The Facts of Life is one of the only television programs I am allowed to watch, but the movie Sister Gerald shows starts off with flowers and bees and birds and eggs, and we all sit around passing notes and rolling our eyes because if we wanted Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom we’d just go home and watch it. Then out of nowhere it switches to these outlines of men and women with a bunch of organs drawn over their crotches, and it gets so quiet that I can hear Carrie MacIntosh sucking on her inhaler all the way across the room. I can hear the clock tick, and the wind outside, and even my own heart, which starts racing like crazy.

And when the lights go up, that whole classroom just goes wild. Mimi Carter wants to know will you have a baby if you use the same toilet as a boy, and Wanda Wiggins asks if it will happen if you sit next to one on the bus, and Little-Miss-Know-It-All Jennie Millgate says her sister had a baby after sitting in the back seat of a car with a boy so why should it be any different on the bus? Sister Gerald says you cannot get pregnant from any of these things directly, but that we must be very careful not to put ourselves on the path to temptation which is why the back seats of cars are a bad idea in general, and while we’re on the subject, the bus seats, too. She says we must always think of the Virgin Mary, our model of chastity, and if that doesn’t work, then those starving children with flies on their faces in the ads with Sally Struthers.

Well, I am so relieved to know that Willie Montrose has only been afraid to sit with me on the bus because he is looking out for my own best interest that I try to smile at him after school to let him know that I’m not mad about it, but he just glares at me and looks the other way. Then Venus starts singing Sophie and Willie sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!

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