Single, Carefree, Mellow
The wonderful story collection from the author of Standard Deviation‘Heiny's work does something magical: gives women's interior lives the gravity they so richly deserve and makes you laugh along the way’ Lena Dunham‘Like Cheever mixed with Ephron’ New York Times‘Simply wonderful, I savoured every page’ GuardianMaya’s dog is dying, and she is planning to leave her boyfriend. On the whole she feels worse about the dog.Nina thought it might be difficult to summon the moral fortitude to have an extramarital affair with a Presbyterian minister living above the garbage, but she discovers that almost anything is possible.A teenager finds an affair with her history teacher too sealed off from the rest of her life, like the last slice of cake under a glass dome.These women are best friends, roommates and mistresses. They tipple and titillate, fantasize and fumble, worry and wander. They make poor choices in men and children’s magicians and wise choices in what to wear to meet their lovers’ wives. None of them are single (or carefree or mellow) but all are irresistible and all too familiar.
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Fourth Estate
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First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015
First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC in 2015
Copyright © Katherine Heiny 2015
Katherine Heiny asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: ‘Once Was Love’, music and lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson. Courtesy of Cabin 24 Records © 2009.
Selected stories in this work were previously published in the following: ‘The Dive Bar’ in the Saranac Review; ‘How to Give the Wrong Impression’ in The New Yorker; ‘Single, Carefree, Mellow’ in the Chariton Review; ‘Blue Heron Bridge’ in Narrative; ‘That Dance You Do’ in the Saranac Review; ‘Dark Matter’ in the Greensboro Review; ‘Cranberry Relish’ in the Chicago Quarterly Review; ‘Thoughts of a Bridesmaid’ in the Nebraska Review; ‘The Rhett Butlers’ in The Atlantic; ‘Grendel’s Mother’ in the Alaska Quarterly Review; ‘Andorra’ in Ploughshares.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008105556
Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780008105563
Version: 2015-12-03
And you don’t feel you could love me
But I feel you could.
—Paul Simon
Contents
So picture Sasha innocently sitting alone in her apartment on a hot summer afternoon and the phone rings. She answers and a woman says, “This is Anne.”
“Who?” says Sasha.
“I think you know,” Anne says.
“Well, I don’t.” Sasha is not trying to be difficult. She honestly doesn’t know. She is trying to think of possible Annes whose voices she should recognize. Is it someone she missed an appointment with? Is this the owner of that camera she found in a cab last month and kept—
“I’m Carson’s wife,” Anne says.
Sasha says, “Oh!” And even if she sat around from now until eternity saying Oh! every few seconds, she would never be able to inject it with as many layers of significance and wonder again.
“I was thinking we ought to have a drink,” Anne says. And to paraphrase Dr. Seuss, Sasha does not know quite what to say. Should she meet her for drinks? Now what should she do? Well, what would you do if your married lover’s wife asked you?
After the phone call, Sasha finds she is too agitated to stay in the apartment, so she calls her roommate, Monique, at work. Monique is just leaving, so they decide that Sasha will walk down Broadway from 106th Street and Monique will walk up Broadway from Thirty-sixth, and they will have a drink in whichever establishment they happen to meet in front of.
Because Sasha is anxious, she walks faster than Monique and they end up meeting in front of a Taco Tico on Sixty-fourth Street, but they cheat slightly and go into an Irish bar next door.
“Wow,” says Monique when Sasha tells her about Anne’s phone call. “That must have been so humiliating for her when you didn’t recognize her name.”
Sasha frowns slightly. Isn’t Monique supposed to be on her side about this? Besides, it wasn’t that she’d forgotten Anne’s name, it was that Carson never used it. Always he said my wife.I have to go, my wife is expecting me. Let me call my wife and tell her I’ll be late.
“And how did she know your name?” Monique asks.
“I guess Carson told her that when he told her about me,” Sasha says.
“So when are you meeting her?”
“Next Wednesday.”
Monique looks startled. “That’s a long way away.”
“I think so, too,” says Sasha. “But she was all sort of businesslike and obviously flipping through a calendar, saying, ‘Now let’s see when can I fit you in,’ and next Wednesday was evidently the first opening.”
“Do you think she’s planning to murder you?” Monique asks, finishing the last of her beer.
“No, because we’re meeting at a bar on Amsterdam and Ninety-ninth,” Sasha says. “It’s not like she’s luring me to some remote underpass.”
“Not to change the subject,” Monique says, digging into her bag and pulling out a brochure. “But will you come with me to this singles volunteer thing tomorrow? We’re refurbishing a brownstone for a needy family.”
