{"product_id":"black-tickets-isbn-9780375727351","title":"Black Tickets","description":"\u003cb\u003eFrom the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of \u003ci\u003eNight Watch\u003c\/i\u003e: the reputation-making debut short story collection that paved the way for a new generation of writers. • “Brilliant … Phillips is a virtuoso.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Chicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJayne Anne Phillips's reputation-making debut collection paved the way for a new   generation of writers. Raved about by reviewers and embraced by the likes of Raymond   Carver, Frank Conroy, Annie Dillard, and Nadine Gordimer, \u003cb\u003eBlack Tickets\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003enow stands   as a classic.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e With an uncanny ability to depict the lives of men and women who rarely   register in our literature, Phillips writes stories that lay bare their suffering   and joy. Here are the abused and the abandoned, the violent and the passive, the   impoverished and the disenfranchised who populate the small towns and rural byways   of the country. A patron of the arts reserves his fondest feeling for the one man   who wants it least. A stripper, the daughter of a witch, escapes from poverty into   another kind of violence. A young girl during the Depression is caught between the   love of her crazy father and the no less powerful love of her sorrowful mother. These   are great American stories that have earned a privileged place in our literature.\"Brilliant ... Phillips is a virtuoso.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Chicago Tribune Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Extraordinary...   Phillips shines brightly... This is a sweetheart of a book.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New   York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\"[Phillips] knows how to write about the way dreams live   with us... Genius is the word for her.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003eJAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS is the author of \u003ci\u003eBlack Tickets, Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter, MotherKind, Lark and Termite, Quiet Dell, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eNight Watch\u003c\/i\u003e. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Bunting Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Winner of an Arts and Letters Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2018. A National Book Award finalist, and twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, she lives in New York and Boston.Wedding Picture\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy mother's ankles curve from the hem of a white suit as if the bones were water. Under the cloth her body in its olive skin unfolds. The black hair, the porcelain neck, the red mouth that barely shows its teeth. My mother's eyes are round and wide as a light behind her skin burns them to coals. Her heart makes a sound that no one hears. The sound says each fetus floats, an island in the womb.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy father stands beside her in his brown suit and two-tone shoes. He stands also by the plane in New Guinea in 1944. On its side there is a girl on a swing wearing spike heels and short shorts. Her breasts balloon; the sky opens inside them. Yellow hair smooth as a cat's, she is swinging out to him. He glimmers, blinded by the light. Now his big fingers curl inward. He is trying to hold something.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn her hands the snowy Bible hums, nuns swarming a honeyed cell. The husband is an afterthought. Five years since the high school lover crumpled on the bathroom floor, his sweet heart raw. She's twenty-three, her mother's sick, it's time. My father's heart pounds, a bell in a wrestler's chest. He is almost forty and the lilies are trumpeting. Rising from his shoulders, the cross grows pale and loses its arms in their heads.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHome\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI'm afraid Walter Cronkite has had it, says Mom. Roger Mudd always does the news now--how would you like to have a name like that? Walter used to do the conventions and a football game now and then. I mean he would sort of appear, on the sidelines. Didn't he? But you never see him anymore. Lord. Something is going on.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMom, I say. Maybe he's just resting. He must have made a lot of money by now. Maybe he's tired of talking about elections and mine disasters and the collapse of the franc. Maybe he's in love with a young girl.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe's not the type, says my mother. You can tell that much. No, she says, I'm afraid it's cancer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy mother has her suspicions. She ponders. I have been home with her for two months. I ran out of money and I wasn't in love, so I have come home to my mother. She is an educational administrator. All winter long after work she watches television and knits afghans.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCome home, she said. Save money.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI can't possibly do it, I said. Jesus, I'm twenty-three years old.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDon't be silly, she said. And don't use profanity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe arranged a job for me in the school system. All day, I tutor children in remedial reading. Sometimes I am so discouraged that I lie on the couch all evening and watch television with her. The shows are all alike. Their laugh tracks are conspicuously similar; I think I recognize a repetition of certain professional laughters. This laughter marks off the half hours.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFinally I make a rule: I won't watch television at night. I will watch only the news, which ends at 7:30. Then I will go to my room and do God knows what. But I feel sad that she sits there alone, knitting by the lamp. She seldom looks up.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhy don't you ever read anything? I ask.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI do, she says. I read books in my field. I read all day at work, writing those damn proposals. When I come home I want to relax.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen let's go to the movies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI don't want to go to the movies. Why should I pay money to be upset or frightened?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut feeling something can teach you. Don't you want to learn anything?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI'm learning all the time, she says.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe keeps knitting. She folds yarn the color of cream, the color of snow. She works it with her long blue needles, piercing, returning, winding. Yarn cascades from her hands in long panels. A pattern appears and disappears. She stops and counts; so many stitches across, so many down. Yes, she is on the right track.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOccasionally I offer to buy my mother a subscription to something mildly informative: Ms., Rolling Stone, Scientific American.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI don't want to read that stuff, she says. Just save your money. Did you hear Cronkite last night? Everyone's going to need all they can get.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOften, I need to look at my mother's old photographs. I see her sitting in knee-high grass with a white gardenia in her hair. I see her dressed up as the groom in a mock wedding at a sorority party, her black hair pulled back tight. I see her formally posed in her cadet nurse's uniform. The photographer has painted her lashes too lushly, too long; but her deep red mouth is correct.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe war ended too soon. She didn't finish her training. She came home to nurse only her mother and to meet my father at a dance. She married him in two weeks. It took twenty years to divorce him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen we traveled to a neighboring town to buy my high school clothes, my mother and I would pass a certain road that turned off the highway and wound to a place I never saw.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere it is, my mother would say. The road to Wonder Bar. That's where I met my Waterloo. I walked in and he said, 'There she is. I'm going to marry that girl.' Ha. He sure saw me coming.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWell, I asked, Why did you marry him?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe was older, she said. He had a job and a car. And Mother was so sick.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy mother doesn't forget her mother.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNever one bedsore, she says. I turned her every fifteen minutes. I kept her skin soft and kept her clean, even to the end.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI imagine my mother at twenty-three; her black hair, her dark eyes, her olive skin and that red lipstick. She is growing lines of tension in her mouth. Her teeth press into her lower lip as she lifts the woman in the bed. The woman weighs no more than a child. She has a smell. My mother fights it continually; bathing her, changing her sheets, carrying her to the bathroom so the smell can be contained and flushed away. My mother will try to protect them both. At night she sleeps in the room on a cot. She struggles awake feeling something press down on her and suck her breath: the smell. When my grandmother can no longer move, my mother fights it alone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI did all I could, she sighs. And I was glad to do it. I'm glad I don't have to feel guilty.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo one has to feel guilty, I tell her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd why not? says my mother. There's nothing wrong with guilt. If you are guilty, you should feel guilty.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy mother has often told me that I will be sorry when she is gone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI think. And read alone at night in my room. I read those books I never read, the old classics, and detective stories. I can get them in the library here. There is only one bookstore; it sells mostly newspapers and True Confessions oracles. At Kroger's by the checkout counter I buy a few paperbacks, bestsellers, but they are usually bad.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe television drones on downstairs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI wonder about Walter Cronkite.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen was the last time I saw him? It's true his face was pouchy, his hair thinning. Perhaps he is only cutting it shorter. But he had that look about the eyes--\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe was there when they stepped on the moon. He forgot he was on the air and he shouted, 'There . . . there . . . now--We have Contact!' Contact. For those who tuned in late, for the periodic watchers, he repeated: 'One small step . . .'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was in high school and he was there with the body count. But he said it in such a way that you knew he wanted the war to end. He looked directly at you and said the numbers quietly. Shame, yes, but sorrowful patience, as if all things had passed before his eyes. And he understood that here at home, as well as in starving India, we would pass our next lives as meager cows.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy mother gets Reader's Digest. I come home from work, have a cup of coffee, and read it. I keep it beside my bed. I read it when I am too tired to read anything else. I read about Joe's kidney and Humor in Uniform. Always, there are human interest stories in which someone survives an ordeal of primal terror. Tonight it is Grizzly! Two teen-agers camping in the mountains are attacked by a bear. Sharon is dragged over a mile, unconscious. She is a good student loved by her parents, an honest girl loved by her boyfriend. Perhaps she is not a virgin; but in her heart, she is virginal. And she lies now in the furred arms of a beast. The grizzly drags her quietly, quietly. He will care for her all the days of his life . . . Sharon, his rose.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut alas. Already, rescuers have organized. Mercifully, her boyfriend is not among them. He is sleeping en route to the nearest hospital; his broken legs have excused him. In a few days, Sharon will bring him his food on a tray. She is spared. She is not demure. He gazes on her face, untouched but for a long thin scar near her mouth. Sharon says she remembers nothing of the bear. She only knows the tent was ripped open, that its heavy canvas fell across her face.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI turn out my light when I know my mother is sleeping. By then my eyes hurt and the streets of the town are deserted.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy father comes to me in a dream. He kneels beside me, touches my mouth. He turns my face gently toward him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLet me see, he says. Let me see it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe is looking for a scar, a sign. He wears only a towel around his waist. He presses himself against my thigh, pretending solicitude. But I know what he is doing; I turn my head in repulsion and stiffen. He smells of a sour musk and his forearms are black with hair. I think to myself, It's been years since he's had an erection--\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFinally he stands. Cover yourself, I tell him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI can't, he says, I'm hard.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn Saturdays I go to the Veterans of Foreign Wars rummage sales. They are held in the drafty basement of a church, rows of collapsible tables piled with objects. Sometimes I think I recognize the possessions of old friends: a class ring, yearbooks, football sweaters with our high school insignia. Would this one have fit Jason?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe used to spread it on the seat of the car on winter nights when we parked by country churches and graveyards. There seemed to be no ground, just water, a rolling, turning, building to a dull pain between my legs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat's wrong? he said, What is it?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJason, I can't . . . This pain--\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt's only because you're afraid. If you'd let me go ahead--\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI'm not afraid of you, I'd do anything for you. But Jason, why does it hurt like this?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe would try. But I couldn't. We made love with our hands. Our bodies were white. Out the window of the car, snow rose up in mounds across the fields. Afterward, he looked at me peacefully, sadly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI held him and whispered, Soon, soon . . . we'll go away to school.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis sweater. He wore it that night we drove back from the football awards banquet. Jason made All-State but he hated football.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI hate it, he said. So what? he said, that I'm out there puking in the heat? Screaming 'Kill' at a sandbag?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI held his award in my lap, a gold man frozen in midleap. Don't play in college, I said. Refuse the money.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe was driving very slowly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI can't see, he said, I can't see the edges of the road . . . Tell me if I start to fall off.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJason, what do you mean?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe insisted I roll down the window and watch the edge. The banks of the road were gradual, sloping off into brush and trees on either side. White lines at the edge glowed up in dips and turns.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe're going to crash, he said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo, Jason. You've driven this road before. We won't crash.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe're crashing, I know it, he said. Tell me, tell me I'm OK--\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere on the rummage sale table, there are three football sweaters. I see they are all too small to have belonged to Jason. So I buy an old soundtrack, The Sound of Music. Air, Austrian mountains. And an old robe to wear in the mornings. It upsets my mother to see me naked; she looks at me so curiously, as though she didn't recognize my body.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI pay for my purchases at the cash register. Behind the desk I glimpse stacks of Reader's Digests. The Ladies Auxiliary turns them inside out, stiffens and shellacs them. They make wastebaskets out of them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI give my mother the record. She is pleased. She hugs me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOh, she says, I used to love the musicals. They made me happy. Then she stops and looks at me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDidn't you do this? she says. Didn't you do this in high school?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDo what?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYour class, she says. You did The Sound of Music.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYes, I guess we did.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat a joke. I was the beautiful countess meant to marry Captain von Trapp before innocent Maria stole his heart. Jason was a threatening Nazi colonel with a bit part. He should have sung the lead but sports practices interfered with rehearsals. Tall, blond, aged in makeup under the lights, he encouraged sympathy for the bad guys and overshadowed the star. He appeared just often enough to make the play ridiculous.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy mother sits in the blue chair my father used for years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCome quick, she says. Look--\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe points to the television. Flickerings of Senate chambers, men in conservative suits. A commentator drones on about tax rebates.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere, says my mother. Hubert Humphrey. Look at him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt's true. Humphrey is different, changed from his former toady self to a desiccated old man, not unlike the discarded shell of a locust. Now he rasps into the microphone about the people of these great states.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOld Hubert's had it, says my mother. He's a death mask.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat's what he gets for sucking blood for thirty years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo, she says. No, he's got it too. Look at him! Cancer. Oh.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor God's sake, will you think of something else for once?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI don't know what you mean, she says. She goes on knitting.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAll Hubert needs, I tell her, is a good roll in the hay.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou think that's what everyone needs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEveryone does need it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey do not. People aren't dogs. I seem to manage perfectly well without it, don't I?Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305103315173,"sku":"NP9780375727351","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375727351.jpg?v=1767722721","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/black-tickets-isbn-9780375727351","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}