Drastic

by CASEY MAUD

• ISBN13: 9780688176969
• ISBN10: 0688176968
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-07-11
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

<p align="left">In this sparkling, daring new work, Maud Casey explores how we survive modem crises of loss and love through the lives of women and men who are emotional and geographic nomads. Each flirts with madness and self-destruction while compulsively, gently, or haphazardly reaching toward life. These simple gestures of optimism and vitality, each gorgeously rendered, make <i>Drastic</i> a captivating read.</p><p align="left">Meet the reckless college graduate working in a whole body donation clinic; a young woman obsessed with Benedictine monks; a middle-aged woman who becomes a stand-in talk-show guest to process her own grief; unlikely friends who meet in a domestic violence shelter; a young girl and the father who stole her away to escape his wife's disturbing mental illness. Absorbing and wide-ranging, <i>Drastic</i> is an unforgettable collection sure to be compared with the best of Ann Beattie, Lorrie Moore, and Mary Gaitskill.</p>

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Seaworthy	p. 1
Trespassing	p. 23
Rules to Live	p. 42
Days at Home	p. 63
Dirt	p. 77
Indulgence	p. 90
Relief	p. 102
Talk Show Lady	p. 122
Genealogy	p. 133
Drastic	p. 143
Aspects of Motherhood	p. 168
The Arrangement of the Night Office in Summer	p. 182
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Trespassing

Lucy fingered the strands of the dead man's hair before she sealed the envelope, sticking the prickly ends up her nose to see what the dead man must have smelled like, but the hair smelled mostly like formaldehyde and shampoo.

The program didn't return the ashes of the donor; the cremains were scattered at sea with the cremains of hundreds of other donors. Lucy was supposed to use this word -- cremains -- whenever she spoke to potential donors or their next of kin. Her boss, Mildred, insisted. Mildred was the sort of woman who was always insisting. So far, in the month Lucy'd been at this job, she'd used the word in conversations with cousins, grandsons, granddaughters, husbands, wives, sons, and brothers. "You do understand that we are unable to return the cremains to the family," Lucy would say as earnestly as she could. She practiced saying it to her reflection in the sleeping computer. Cremains was a word Lucy imagined had been invented by the same clever ad guy who came up with Craisins, the snack food combination of cranberries and raisins.

"Cremains," Lucy whispered as Mildred gathered her purse and coat on her way out of the office to one of her alleged all-day meetings. Mildred turned quickly, hoping to catch Lucy midwhisper, but she never could. This time Lucy played dumb by neatening a stack of Instructions for the Disposition of Remains forms with concentrated intensity.

"Cremains," again, as Mildred put her hand on the doorknob. Mildred spun around, but Lucy coughed and began to hum like a grade school delinquent.

" I'm very sorry for your loss ," Mildred reminded her. Whenever Mildred suspected Lucy of something, she lectured her on etiquette. "You always forget that part when you speak to potential donors. Read it off the cheat sheet if you have to. I know you're a temp, Lucy, but you're a long-term temp, and you really should practice good phone manners."

Lucy wasn't very good at any of the primary duties of her job -- answering the phone, filing, copying forms like the Vital Statistics sheet, delivering papers to the morgue -- but she and Mildred both knew that it would be hard to replace her. There weren't very many people willing to work in such close proximity to the dead, or almost dead. Even Mildred was looking for a transfer. Podiatry or neurosurgery, she'd told Lucy in a rare moment of intimacy that had sliced through the dull hum of the office's fluorescent lights. The way Mildred's face tightened after she revealed this, as if she were willing the confession back into her mouth, Lucy understood not to point out the vagueness of Mildreds desires.

"Got it," Lucy said to Mildred, now waiting at the door for confirmation of her hanging-by-a-thread authority.

"Good," Mildred said. She slammed the door behind her for punctuation. She tried to storm off, but her coat got caught and jerked her back. She opened the door again without looking at Lucy, pulled her coat out, and then stormed off

Alone in the small, windowless basement office of the university's medical center, Lucy pictured piles of ashes, piles like chimney soot, aboard a barge headed out into the Pacific. A barge like a giant ashtray, which reminded her of the tiny piles of ashes all over her apartment. Since arriving in San Francisco a little over a month ago, Lucy had been living in an apartment with two French girls who needed a third to make the rent. The girls never brushed their hair and were nonchalantly, effortlessly beautiful. They ate only bread and chocolate yet remained mysteriously, aggressively svelte in their American designer jeans. They smoked constantly, ashing in or on anything available -- crumb-filled plates, Lucy's potted plant, windowsills. Ash floated constantly in the toilet bowl, unflushed.

Lucy copied Release of Claim forms, sorting them into careful piles. She made copies of the informational packet. There were certain medical conditions that prevented people from donating their bodies to science. Medical students needed to work on "clean" bodies, as Mildred liked to explain over and over again as if it were an incantation, as if by saying this she could ward off hepatitis, HIV, tuberculosis, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, whatever that was. Lucy figured she still had a good fifty, sixty years to go in her own body. She appreciated the muscle in her licking tongue, the smell of her arm, an earthy smell that she had, until just the other day, attributed to her cross-country lover until she realized that it was the smell of her own epidermis (Lucy liked to use medical terms on the job). She imagined small fossils of her life lodged in the sedimentary layers of her epidermis, secretly and forever, tiny gifts to herself

Lucy heard Brenda's mail cart in the hallway. She quickly ducked beneath her desk, fixed her face in the maniacal way she practiced whenever she went to the bathroom, and popped up when Brenda opened the door. Brenda, who hadn't thought this was funny the first five times, barely flinched. Without a word, she threw the mail on the chair beside the door and rolled her cart resignedly away.

Since she'd started working at the whole body donation program, the French girls' tiny piles of ash had started to creep Lucy out. This morning before work, she had asked them to smoke outside the apartment.

"But zese new American laws," the thinner, dirtier, slightly more beautiful one protested, suddenly bursting into English, having barely uttered a non-French word since Lucy met her. "If we cannot smoke een our own houze, where would we zmoke?"

"How about on zee ztoop?" Lucy asked. Neither of them spoke to her for the rest of the morning, though the slightly less beautiful one had cracked a window and angrily puffed her smoke outside. "Ça suffit?" she'd said to her friend, who rolled her eyes.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Drastic by Maud Casey Copyright © 2002 by Maud Casey
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.