Excerpt from I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She looked about forty, but it's hard to tell with those hair-yanked-back, glasses-on-a-chain types. As she leafed through my grandfather's pages, I checked out her breasts (nice ones), the mole on her neck, her gnawed-down cuticles. She shared the office with another grad student; her sloppy desk and his neat one were a study in opposites.

"Some of this is written in standard Italian," she said. "And some of it's . . . it looks like peasant Sicilian. What was he--schizo or something?"

Okay, bitch, thanks anyway. Give it the fuck back to me and I'll be on my way.

"I'm a scholar," she said, looking up. She handed me back the manuscript. "What you're asking me to do is roughly the same as trying to commission a serious artist to paint you something that goes with the sofa and drapes."

"Oh," I said. "Okay." Already, I'd begun backing out of her low-ceilinged office--a glorified closet, really, and not all that glorified.

She sighed. "Let me see it again." I handed it back and she scanned several pages, frowning. "The typed pages are single-spaced," she said. "That's twice as much work."

"Yeah, well . . ."

"The penmanship's legible, at least. . . . I could do the handwritten material for eight dollars a page. I'd have to charge sixteen for the typed ones. More on the ones where explanatory footnotes were necessary."

"How much more?"

"Oh, let's say five dollars per footnote. I mean, fair is fair, right? If I'm actually generating text instead of just translating and interpreting, I should be paid more. Shouldn't I?"

I nodded. Did the math in my head. Somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand bucks without the footnotes. More than I thought it would be, but a lot less than a kitchen renovation. "Are you saying you'll do it then?"

She sighed, kept me waiting for several seconds. "All right," she finally said. "To be perfectly honest, I have no interest in the project, but I need money for my car. Can you believe it? A year and a half old and the tranny's already got problems."

It struck me funny: this Marian the Librarian using gearhead lingo. "Why are you smiling?" she asked.

I shrugged. "No reason, really. What kind of car is it?"

"A Yugo," she said. "I suppose that's funny, too?"

Nedra Frank told me she wanted four hundred dollars up front and estimated the translation would take her a month or two to complete, given her schedule, which she described as "oppressive." Her detachment annoyed me; she had looked twice at her wall clock as I spoke of my grandfather's accomplishments, my mother's lymphoma. I wrote her a check, worrying that she might summarize or skip pages--shortchange me in spite of what she was charging. I left her office feeling vulnerable--subject to her abbreviations and interpretations, her sourpuss way of seeing the world. Still, the project was under way.

I called her several times over the next few weeks, wanting to check her progress or to see if she had any questions. But all I ever got was an unanswered ring.



Whenever my mother underwent her chemotherapy and radiation treatments at Yale-New Haven, Ray drove her down there, kept her company, ate his meals in the cafeteria downstairs, and catnapped in the chair beside her bed. By early evening, he'd get back on the road, driving north on I-95 in time for his shift at Electric Boat. When I suggested that maybe he was taking on too much, he shrugged and asked me what the hell else he was supposed to do.

Did he want to talk about it?

What was there to talk about?

Was there anything I could do for him?

I should worry about my mother, not him. He could take care of himself.

I tried to make it down to New Haven two or three times a week. I brought Thomas with me when I could, usually on Sundays. It was hard to gauge how well or poorly Thomas was handling Ma's dying. As was usually the case with him, the pendulum swung irregularly. Sometimes he seemed resigned and accepting. "It's God's will," he'd sigh, echoing Ma herself. "We have to be strong for each other." Sometimes he'd sob and pound his fists on my dashboard. At other times, he was pumped up with hope. "I know she's going to beat this thing," he told me one afternoon over the phone. "I'm praying every day to Saint Agatha."

© June 1998 , Wally Lamb. Used by permission.