On the phone Vera sounded both shrill and hoarse, as if she’d just been shouting or crying. She spoke fast, as if she’d practiced, “I am sorry for your loss but I wanted you to know that I think that you are very cold, cold people.” I said I know, but she had already hung up.
Very Cold People hit close to home: I am also from very cold, cold people. As a coming of age story, I recognised the beats; the shame of poverty — material and spiritual; you can be happy without money, but without love and affection, you cannot — and in every way that matters, this felt very much like my own story. I’ll note that author Sarah Manguso has an MFA (from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, no less), and while that tends to recommend against an author for me, Manguso is also a poet — as well as a later in life debut novelist — and I reckon these facts work against her having been shorn of all her unique edges. I love the edges, I was moved by the language and emotional pull, and I believed every bit of this.
In all of my earliest memories I am alone in my crib. I have no memories of being held. But I do remember closing my eyes in absolute pleasure while my mother stroked my head. Did she do it more than once? I asked her to do it again, all the time, and she always said no.
Ruthie is an only child, growing up in the ‘80s in Waitsfield, Massachusetts — class-conscious land of the Cabots and Lowells — and as she has a Jewish mother and an Italian father, Ruthie is as not-quite-white as the house she lives in, recently painted the colour of dirty snow. Ruthie’s family is poor — all of her clothes are factory seconds, their books and knick knacks come from the dump — and it would all be okay if Ruthie’s father wasn’t often absent; if her mother wasn’t mean. As Very Cold People unfolds, Ruthie is recalling her challenging childhood (I like to visit with the exhausted girl who once was me) and her one saving grace seems to be that she always had friends, even if she gives the impression that she had been an outcast at school. With a mother grasping for respectability — and trying to control her daughter while also effectively ignoring her — Ruthie is forced to find her own identity in the world. But as she gets older and watches her better supported friends also fail to thrive, Ruthie begins to see that this world is built on dirty secrets; perhaps even reaching back into the past.
All the Waitsfield girls, in their little rooms, lie down, and wait and breathe. Their scalps sweat into their pillows. Their hearts slow down as they drift off. The girls are walking to school. The sides of their noses itch. They scratch them and collect flakes of dead skin under their nails. They are keeping secrets. They feel special because they have been told they are. Each of them, one in a million.
Ruthie eventually grows to understand her mother a little better, but even when the family’s finances improve (and they move to a dilapidated house that had once belonged to a minor Cabot), she still feels that poverty that’s more closely tied to the spiritual than the material (What's curious to me now is that I didn't know at the time that I was suffering, so deeply involved was I in being saved.) I haven’t wanted to give too much away in this review, and I can acknowledge that I may be rating this higher through emotional identification, but it totally worked for me; beginning to end.
Enjoyed by audiobook while recovering, face down, from retina reattachment eye surgery.
I decided not to go into too much detail on goodreads as to why I identified with this book so hard, but here's an example of cold: As I was recovering, face down, after my retina reattaching surgery, my mother happened to call, and I was glad to be able to casually tell her what was going on in my life (never would I ever expose myself by calling her up to say, "Hey, I'm about to have surgery that I'm really nervous about, but I just wanted you to know...") So I told her that I had had this surgery, that I need to lay face down for four days, and that I wouldn't be able to drive or fly for two months because of a gas bubble in my eye that might EXPLODE. She said, "I never heard of such a thing" and continued on with what she wanted to talk about.
Cold, cold people. And it never ends.
