-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the Book | Readalikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Book Reviewed by:
"I bowl," said Bertha Truitt. Then she touched him behind his ear, beneath the brim of his hat.
Mrs. Mood
Everyone talked about what a merry person Truitt was, but LuEtta Mood could see that the merriment was trained on a trellis of sorrow. It was a companionable sorrow, the sort you might never have to discuss. It drew LuEtta Mood in. Sorrow had interested her since childhood, long before she had any sorrows of her own. Then she met her own unhappiness and wondered where the earlier interest had come from, ignorant as it was.
Her husband, Moses Mood, was known almost reverently as the homeliest man in town. As a child he'd been shot in the ear by his brother, and the resulting scar made him look not blown apart by violence, but as though something deep in his head had tunneled its way out and, famished, lapped and then gnawed at the basin of his ear. When he'd woken up after the injury, age eight, his father said into his good ear, "Well, Mo, this will be the making of you," and Moses Mood decided it wouldn't. He would not be kinder than he might have been, but neither would he be ruined. The scar would mean nothing to him. So it didn't, except for this: he was like a snake-bit man who concluded he must learn to dominate snakes, so it might never happen again. He loved guns. The snake charmer always dies of snakes eventually.
The scar was not the source of Moses Mood's homeliness: he would have been a bullet-eyed dogtoothed man no matter what, with dark eyebrows worn away at the edges. He grew from injured child into a slow-moving self-satisfied fellow whose lower teeth bulldoggishly revealed themselves when he laughed. He laughed indiscriminately. He seemed to ladle his laughter out like a philanthropist feeding the poor. All would benefit from his laughter; all should receive it. Beautiful LuEtta Mood (the former LuEtta Pickersgill) was used to getting more of everything. She was so young and so lovely she had never questioned why that was. Not till she married did she notice that the bolt of affection she received from her husband was not wider, nor longer, nor made from better stuff than what he gave to everyone. So she resolved to love him for that.
Then her own sorrow arrived.
The sorrow's name was Edith; the sorrow had been born sick and lived sixteen months. It wasn't the sickliness that killed her: she had been scalded by a cup of coffee while visiting her grandmother Mood, had wandered into the kitchen to find it on the table. LuEtta hadn't known you could die of scalding. "Our Edith was not made for this world," said Moses Mood. He meant to comfort his wife, forgive his mother, comfort and forgive by diminishing, and LuEtta Mood rejected the comfort and diminishment both. Forgiveness was his own affair. She had a locket with a lock of the baby's hair inside, so fine and short it was like dust, it could not be kept together in any way. Red, from a certain angle. It had gone with Edith's blue eyes.
What was LuEtta's duty, according to everyone else? To go mad with grief. To soldier on. To exist the rest of her life as a paradox, a human woman who suffered what everyone said was the worst thing and yet continued to live. Sometimes Hazel Forest, who after all had learned about death at the Salford Hospital, tried to talk about Edith, and that was the worst, to listen to a woman talk as though she understood when clearly she did not. Though of course all those years when LuEtta herself had been interested in the sorrows of other people that was just what she'd done. She'd offered up her sympathy as a way to keep herself safe.
Also her duty: to have more children.
It had been two years and she hadn't had another child and she could see the pity and impatience people felt for her across their mouths like a handkerchief held up to filter out disease—what was she doing, walking around outside, when she should be quarantined in her marital bed? If another baby had followed, people would have forgotten about Edith; or she might've been talked about from time to time with a weak happiness. LuEtta didn't want people to forget about Edith; she didn't want them to remember, either. She wanted Edith to exist the way any child did.
Excerpted from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken. Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth McCracken. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
 (1).gif)
Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
