Grace Paley
Grace Paley has died.
More.
Hear her read from her work. And this obituary with this wonderful line: “In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.”
Here are the opening lines from a Paley story called “Friends” that I’m never able to put out of my mind:
To put us at our ease, to quiet our hearts as she lay dying, our dear friend Selena said, Life, after all, has not been an unrelieved horror–you know, I did have many wonderful years with her.
She pointed to a child who leaned out of a portrait on the wall–long brown hair, white pinafore, head and shoulders forward.
Eagerness, said Susan. Ann closed her eyes.
On the same wall three little girls were photographed in a schoolyard. They were in a furious discussion; they were holding hands. Right in the middle of the coffee table, framed in autumn colors, a handsome young woman of eighteen sat on an enormous horse–aloof, disinterested, a rider. One night this young woman, Selena’s child, was found in a rooming house in a distant city, dead. The police called. They said, Do you have a daughter named Abby?
And with him, too, our friend Selena said. We had good times, Max and I. You know that.
There were no photographs of him. He was married to another woman and had a new, stalwart girl of about six, to whom no had would ever come, her mother believed.
Our dear Selena had gotten out of bed. Heavily but with a comic dance, she soft-shoed to the bathroom, singing “Those were the days, my friend…”
Later that evening, Ann, Susan, and I were enduring our five-hour train ride home. After one hour of silence and one hour of coffee and the sandwiches Selena had given us (she actually stood, leaned her big excavated body against the kitchen table to make those sandwiches), Ann said, Well, we’ll never see her again.
Who says? Anyway, listen, said Susan. Think of it. Abby isn’t the only kid who died. What about that great guy, remember Bill Dalrymple–he was a noncooperator or a deserter? And Bob Simon. They were killed in automobile accidents. Matthew, Jeannie, Mike. Remember Al Lurie–he was murdered on Sixth Street–and that little kid Brenda, who O.D.’d on your roof, Ann? The tendency, I suppose, is to forget. You people don’t remember them.
