Liabilities of Love

Page 27 July–August 2009 Liabilities of Love Allison Block Serpent in the Garden of Dreams Robin Messing The Permanent Press http://www.thepermanentpress.com 168 pages; paper, $16.00 “Breaking up is hard to do,” goes the popular Neil Sedaka song. For Tildy Glick, it’s downright impossible, but the aftermath is even worse. When her live-in lover Ray splits with her without good reason, she goes into a tailspin, wallowing in sadness and obsessively keeping an oral diary that documents their time together. In Messing’s moving, if somewhat predictable, debut novel, the author serves up alternating narratives, juxtaposing the adult, heartbroken Tildy with her thirteen-year-old self, as she copes with an often-lecherous older brother and a mother who takes a married lover and kicks her husband out of the house. Young Tildy worshipped her mother, who was full of passion and verve; she was a magical, mysterious presence in her daughter’s life. Tildy saw her mother’s bedside table as a kind of altar, “like the treasures left for the afterlife in the tomb of an Egyptian queen—scotch in a squat glass straight up, piles of books…perfumes in crystal bottles…floating feathers from a white boa, hat pins with pearl heads…scraps of paper lined with handwritten notes from poems.” Mr. Glick, by contrast, was unpleasant in both appearance and demeanor, trudging home from work every day, world-weary and stinking of cigarettes and the odors of Manhattan. “Rivulets of sweat lined his face and thick neck,” writes Messing, “his white shirt yellowed and damp, sleeves rolled unevenly up to his elbows. He bent down to unlace his stiff shoes, and the dandruffed, pasty white of his scalp was visible at the top of his head where his hair was thinning .” As evening progressed, Mr. Glick sprawled out on the couch, watching television and falling into a deep slumber punctuated by powerful snores. He would awaken when Tildy shut off the set, only to grumble at her for doing it. Even at a young age, Tildy could sense she was but a bit player on her mother’s life, forever on the verge of being pre-empted. “Sometimes at night, when her mother was asleep, Tildy worried that her mother would never wake up, that she’d fall in love with sleeping as if it were a lover in a more beautiful world than this (her mother loved beautiful things), where the love of a daughter was unnecessary.” As an adult, Tildy’s desperate search for love and acceptance plays out in her romantic relationships. Of her first dates with Ray, she writes, “We walked down the bumpy road hand in hand. It was still new and unnatural—the hand that was on its own for so long, clutching my coat, lifting and sorting books, slipping under my cheek when I slept.” Her thoughts about their courtship soon turn darker and more existential: “I thought this [romance] was happening to me because of a cosmic accounting, payoff for years of misery. So I leaned into it like a non-reinforced balcony railing that I convinced myself would keep me from the fourteen-floor drop.” Robin Messing writes lyrical prose that elevates this offering above the ordinary. As Tildy’s relationship falls apart, so does she. “When you lose even one person, the sadness of the world flies at you as if you’ve been magnetized for misery,” she laments after her break-up. Tildy is convinced that her angst-ridden state is as much physical as emotional. “I’ve developed an immune deficiency which prevents me from fighting my own unhappiness ,” she says. “It is eating all the cheery blood cells, and I try to knock it down with intellectual schemes.” For Tildy, these heady distractions only last so long, before she’s back to bemoaning her fate. She clings to the past by documenting it: “He filled each hollow of every cell and then spread out past them. This is what made me buoyant. Without him, I felt I would deflate, zip through the air wildly like a vinyl balloon expressing someone’s breath.”And then: “Each day from...