Introduction

Denny Roman at twelve: a midwestern girl with a clueless family, a bit part in the school play, a crush on the drama teacher, and concerns about frontal development. Her mother and father, divorced neuroscientists, are raising her with benign neglect. The family is virtually run by an agoraphobe named Maureen, who has a taxi fleet and a superorganized and compassionate method of managing other people’s lives, especially Denny’s.

Denny Roman at twenty-six: jets home from Hollywood for the weekend and lands in the marital minefield of her mother and stepfather’s imminent relocation to New York. She has to pack up her childhood possessions in forty-eight hours before returning to L.A. for a big audition with Robert Altman. She’s supposed to be deciding what to keep, but she’s worried about what to wear. In a deranged moment, she kisses her stepfather. On the lips.

Denny Roman at thirty-six: A playwright on the eve of her first Off-Broadway production and once again living within sparring distance of her mother, she comes home from rehearsal one afternoon and finds a thirteen-year- old boy on her doorstep: Luke, the son of Maureen and a Mauritanian refugee cabdriver. Bewildered by his mother’s recent death, Luke is looking for a place where he might fit. Will Denny keep him in New York? Will she get any help from Sean—an actor whose good looks may be all there is to him? Will she be reconciled with her mother at long last?

What to Keep looks into the lives of Denny Roman, her mother, her father, her stepfather, and her surrogate mother—all practicing variations on the theme “parent” but none of them quite done being children themselves. Bubbling with sly humor and psychological insight, their story holds out a refreshingly flexible and realistic model of what a good family—whether created by nature or chance or both—can consist of.

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Excerpt

Lily wakes up with a cupcake hovering before her eyes. Denny holds it there, has held it

there for a while in fact, waiting for her mother to (1) wake up, (2) make a wish, and (3)

blow out the candle. Not so hard, you would think, but it is for Lily. She stares blankly at

the tiny flame, and Denny, who at twelve and a half is nearly too old for this sort of thing,

is forced to intervene. “Mom,” she says, dropping the word into a second, disappointed

syllable as Lily's eyes blink, again. “Mom, make a wish. Happy birthday.”

Ordinarily, Lily would be the one waking Denny up, so Denny is surprised to find her

mother as hard to retrieve from sleep as she is. But that's just how it is. Since her parents'

split two years ago, Denny has been in charge of their domestic reality-the here and now

of social perception: what other kids' parents are worrying about, what's worth watching

on TV (Little House), whether or not there is lipstick on Lily's teeth, and when it's safe to

turn left on Broad Street. In return, Lily makes money, buys groceries (by proxy, but

more on that later), drives the car, and tells Denny whe n to turn off the TV.

Lily and Denny Roman live in Bexley, an amiable suburb of Columbus. Unlike the way

most suburbs relate to their cities, Columbus has grown around Bexley in concentric

rings of shopping centers, parks, hospitals, universities, institutes, and bedroom

communities. Every ten years or so, the latest ring seems to degrade into slum. Bexley

itself is only a mile or so from the old, original downtown (and state capitol), but it

somehow retains its beauty and its property values. Its houses are large, its schools are

excellent, and its trees are immense, forming a canopy over the broad streets. Some of the

streets are so wide they have their own grassy median. It's a very old suburb but it has a

faint theme: the street names have a Brittanic sound, and many of the houses are

distinctly manorial. The Romans' house at 2424 Sherwood Road-just two blocks from

Main Street- lacks cupolas and sleeping porches and isn't as large as many in the

neighborhood, but it isn't small, either. It is built of gray clapboard with white trim, black

shutters, and one little dormer window, on the third floor, looking out at the vast Ohio

buckeye tree in the front yard. It is a fine house, built in 1907, and has never needed

major repairs.

As Lily rubs her eyes and fumbles for her glasses, Denny nibbles at the pink-frosted

cupcake. It's a Hostess Sno Ball, a coconut-flecked demi-globe of pink marshmallow that

surrounds a wad of chocolate cake. Inside the cake is a tiny inner bolus of something

called “creme.” In short, it's a food that would give pause to almost anyone over the age

of sixteen.

“Perhaps a Sno Ball is not the perfect breakfast food?” asks Lily.

Denny shrugs but halts her attempt to tear off a flag of marshmallow flesh. She stares at

the cupcake, replacing it on the plate with its twin as Lily blunders into the bathroom,

now awake to the day.

“They're like tits,” says Denny, though Lily can't hear her with the shower running. It's

not a remark likely to reach Lily's sense of humor, anyway. Denny picks up the two

cupcakes and holds them, breastwise, up to her own largely featureless chest. She steps to

the mirror as Lily sticks her head out of the bathroom to ask something that she instantly

forgets at the sight of Denny's pantomime.

“Look, I developed!” says her daughter, slyly.

“I see that,” Lily replies with a nod. The doorbell rings.

Denny raises her eyebrows.

“I have no idea,” says Lily.

Denny goes to the bedroom window and looks down. “It's Dad.” She's still holding her

cupcakes at the ready.

“Go offer him a Sno Ball,” says Lily. “And, for God's sake, don't tell him where it's

been.” This cracks Denny up. Lily returns to the bathroom, not sure she was making a

joke. She looks at herself in the steaming mirror and remembers that she has a nine a.m.

haircut appointment at Lazarus, downtown. For most of her life, Lily has studiously

ignored her appearance-she was pretty enough in her teenage years to take it for granted

that she didn't have to fuss. However, since turning forty she finds herself taking a more

careful look: She is far too pale, and verging on bony; her wispy blond hair is neither

long nor short, and the layered cut that- if properly blown dry-was supposed to look like a

less trashy version of Farrah Fawcett's has never been, and will never be, properly blown

dry. Moreover, her eyeglasses have worn a pair of purple indentations into the sides of

her nose and a formerly inoffensive beauty mark on her cheek has become, decisively

and seemingly overnight, a mole.

Denny opens the front door for her father, who looms in the doorway. Charles is tall and

slender and mostly bald, prematurely so. His eyes are light brown and crinkly but so far

above Denny most of the time that she feels like she never sees them. He wears wirerimmed

glasses but not the John Lennon kind. His are rectangular. Usually he wears

turtlenecks under his tweeds, but today he is wearing a shirt and tie. Denny knows he was

once physically close to her, she even vaguely remembers it. Now he looks down at her

and forgets to smile.

“Mom's in the shower,” says Denny. “Want a Sno Ball?”

“Isn't she going to Chicago today?” asks her father.

What Denny doesn't know, and Lily doesn't remember, is that Lily is supposed to go to

Chicago today, on her birthday, because it's also the annual meeting of the AAN

(American Academy of Neurology) and Maureen paid Lily's $500 deposit long ago. The

whole point of having someone else manage this type of thing for you is so that you don't

forget, even if it is your forty- first birthday and you are feeling strangely petulant and

vulnerable. Unfortunately, sometimes even Maureen's systems break down.

Maureen is Lily's gateway to the world. In some respects, Maureen is Denny's erstwhile

Dad-the second opinion that makes being a single mother bearable for Lily. Maureen is a

small business that began four years ago as an answering service and grew with the times.

Mostly, she works for doctors (her father was an endocrinologist). Now she not only

fields calls but acts as a travel agent, bookkeeper, personal shopper, UPS drop and pickup

site, contract post office, appointment secretary, and dispatcher of taxis, ambulances, and

messengers. Maureen does not do pet care. Maureen and Lily sometimes speak several

times a day, as do Maureen and Denny, as do Maureen and Charles (another client). No

one really grasps the full extent of Maureen's involvement in this stubby little former

family, except Maureen and, maybe, Denny.

“No one else in my class has a Maureen. Why not?” Denny asked, when she was eight.

“Well, there is no one else like Maureen, Denny. Just like there's no one else like you. Put

your shoes on.”

“You're not answering my question. Does it have something to do with religion?”

“No. What do you mean?”

“I don't know. Sometimes that's why people's families are different.”

“Well, we're not that different. Come on, let me tie that. Lots of the other people in the

neighborhood use Maureen.”

Denny retrieved her sneakered foot from her mother's busy hands, wanting to tie her own

damn shoe, though that is not what she said. She simply performed the task, somewhat

laboriously, while formulating her response to her mother's statement, which was:

“We don't 'use' Maureen. We 'have' Maureen. That's what you always say. I think it's

different.”

Lily didn't know what to say to that observation, and anyway, it was time for school.

And it is time for school, again.

Charles stands awkwardly in the kitchen that used to be his, waiting for Lily to finish her

shower and for his suddenly alarmingly chic-looking daughter to go upstairs and get

dressed. Denny is a little bit short for her age and has enormous black-brown eyes. When

she flips her long blondish hair back from a fully bent-over position, it transforms her

into a sex goddess for about forty seconds. Then the hair flattens back down and she is a

small girl with big eyes, weird coloring, and a defensive stance. The sight of her in her

nightgown (a worn black J.Geils Band T-shirt that clearly never belonged to either of her

parents) reminds him that Dolores Haze-a.k.a. Lolita-was also about twelve.

Coincidentally, on the way over, he had just been thinking with relief that his daughter

was finally old enough to be left alone in the house for one night, adequately provisioned

with foodstuffs and phone numbers. Now he is thinking she might also be too old for any

such thing.

“How's work?” asks Denny, swirling her orange juice.

“Fine,” says Charles. “How's school?”

“Fine, too. We're doing dissection this year in biology.”

“What are you dissecting?”

“Well, first we did a clam. I think next we get an earthworm.”

“Not much to see in a clam.”

“No kidding.”

“Do they give you a cat eventually?”

“Dad!”

“Some kind of mammal?”

“Is a pig a mammal?”

“Of course. You know that.”

“At the end of the year we get a fetal pig.”

“That's good. Pigs are much closer to humans than you might think.”

Denny's not sure that closer to human is good, in her book, but that's how things are

talking to Charles. “Yeah, I guess so.” She washes her orange juice glass and puts it in

the drainer. “I better get ready for school.”

Denny's room still harbors most of the toys, games, and books of her early childhood, a

condition that she is on the verge of doing something about. Returning to this domain

after that typically unsatisfying excha nge with her father, she sees it anew as the room of

a child. Even the collection of clippings from the Dispatch that are taped to the wall over

her desk, which only recently seemed to her to lend that corner a serious, newsroom

quality, now seem to broadcast the childishness of their subject matter: the fate of the

Columbus Zoo's orphan polar bear, Otto. Today, the headline can otto survive

adolescence alone? sounds as dopey to her as before it had sounded antic and clever.

Denny can't yet deep-six Otto, but, possessed of a ruthless new attitude toward childish

things, she instead collects the row of trolls that are lined up on her windowsill and drops

them individually into the bottom drawer of her desk (“Good-bye, Lolly; sorry, Skeezix;

see you later, Lance”). She scans the room for more victims, but can't figure out what to

do with all those picture books about talking animals beside her bed. Among those books,

however, is the white leatherette diary that Maureen gave Denny on her last birthday.

Denny takes the diary from the shelf and opens it, using the little brass key that is tied to

the lock with a matching white grosgrain ribbon. The pages are blank. When Denny

received this gift, she had more or less ignored it, but suddenly it has appeal. The idea of

the lock is particularly compelling, although she doesn't know from whose eyes she'd be

locking it, really. She selects a purple Flair pen from the collection of markers in a mug

on her desk and sits down on her bed to write.

She rejects the convention of beginning “Dear Diary”; diary sounds too much like diaper.

Her book will be more like an official record, like the Captain's Log on Star Trek. She

writes the date at the top of the page, then:

Today is Mom's birthday but I'm not sure she cares. I care, though. I got cupcakes but she

didn't eat them. Then Dad came over. He was dressed up for something. We talked about

dissecting mammals. Yuck.

Lily comes downstairs and finds Charles standing in the middle of the kitchen doing

absolutely nothing.

“Do you want some tea? We have Earl Grey.”

“Oh-”

“Oh?”

She measures two spoonfuls of loose tea into the pot without waiting for his answer.

Charles doesn't usually stop by at this hour, but when he does stop by it is always without

prior warning-there are still some joint investments that need her signature or a book

that's his but still on her, formerly their, shelves.

“I thought I could read your paper on the way to Chicago.”

Lily's brain swims to the surface: paper, airport, Chicago! She feels as though she's been

kicked-and, in a way, Charles looks like he has kicked her.

“It's at the lab.”

“Aren't you coming on the same plane?”

“No.”

“Isn't your talk at three?”

She turns off the soon-to-scream kettle and empties it into the teapot. She thinks, He has

no idea it's my birthday and that I've suddenly gotten old- he can't know how humiliated I

feel to have forgotten this conference. As though she believes that “forget? is what she

did.

Charles does know it's Lily's birthday, but that's not what's on his mind. Someone he

knows reviewed Lily's paper and told someone else he knows that she was on to

something interesting, possibly even big. Her research is about the events that finally

differentiate brain cells from other cells as they develop in the embryo; it's long been

established that neurons are the only cells the body never makes more of and Charles

assumes Lily's analysis will help explain why.

Lily did not completely forget the conference or the paper, she just ignored them so

furiously that it had almost the same effect. She doesn't want to stand in front of all those

smug, bespectacled men and feel her face turning red with the effort of not weeping.

Though she has spent the past two years fantasizing about how one day she would

triumphantly present this research, her calm certainty has now deserted her. Lily suspects

this is because she's pregnant. She didn't expect to be, she's not sure she wants to be, but

she is.

Charles has been watching her think, an old habit.

“So?” he now asks.

“Excuse me?”

“So what's in your paper?”

“It moves,” she says.

The fetus is not old enough to move. This is a reference to Galileo's supposed last words

about the earth relative to the sun. Back then, the idea that the earth could move was

heresy. Charles resists the reference because he, himself, is too mired in the current

orthodoxy of no new brain cells, ever.

“What moves?”

“Nothing.”

“I hope you're not talking about neuronal reproduction.”

“Don't you have a plane to catch?”

“Because that would be career suicide, Lily.”

If Charles wasn't so substantial visually (he's not just tall, he's dark and handsome), you

might have to call him an enigma. Lily, of course, knows Charles intimately, but she's not

convinced that that ever did her any good. Most of the time, the part of her brain that

deals with Charles supplies the message Oh, that's just Charles to any and all behavior the

man enacts and that's the end of it.

“No, trying to be a neurosurgeon and a mother at the same time-that was suicide. This is

just research.”

Excerpted from What to Keep by Rachel Cline Copyright© 2004 by Rachel Cline.

Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights

reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in

writing from the publisher.

©2004 Rachel Cline view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the Author:

1) Lily set out to be a pediatric neurosurgeon but shifted her focus to research when Denny was
young, in part because the schedule was more flexible. Later, Lily has an impressive career in scientific
research. Is Lily a good scientist? Does it matter that research wasn't her first choice of career? Did her
change of careers make her a better mother? Might her life have been more satisfying if she'd stayed with
surgery? What about if she'd stayed married to Charles?

2) When we first meet Maureen she is suffering from severe agoraphobia—she's afraid to go outside.
She isn't married or apparently close to her own family, nor does she have children of her own. Why does
Denny get along so much better with Maureen than she does with Lily?

3) Is Maureen crazy at first or just depressed? What's the difference? Did her sexual encounter with
Jamie (the guy from the record store) cause her agoraphobia or did her emotional problems make her
particularly susceptible to the type of experience she had with Jamie?

4) Lily has a car accident that leaves her with a mild concussion and temporary amnesia. What, if
anything, does Lily learn from her accident and its aftermath? In the long run, does it matter that she misses
Denny's performance in Damn Yankees?

5) In Book Two, Lily calls Denny home to help her pack up their house in Bexley—the house where
Denny grew up and where she lived with her mother and father before the divorce. Lily expects Denny to
stay for a week, and to make an effort to get to know her new stepfather; Phil. Why is Denny so impatient
with her mother in this section of the book? Does Lily deserve it? How could Denny be doing a better job
of living her own life?

6) At the end of Book Two, after Lily and Phil have been fighting and Denny has been reunited with
Maureen, Denny and Phil go out for ice cream and wind up kissing each other, briefly. Phil is actually
closer to Denny in age than he is to Lily. How do you feel about Phil and Denny's kiss? Is it wrong? Should
one of them have stopped it? Who? What do you think was really going on, there?

7) In Book Three, Lily and Phil are living together in New York City and trying to imagine what it
will be like to retire. Why does Lily and Phil's relationship last? What's in it for each of them?

8) The director of Denny's play is an extremely handsome former film actor named Sean. He's a
divorced father and comes from what sounds like a privileged background. Initially, Denny mistrusts him
and it seems as if her reason for this is simply because he's so good looking. Are her instincts right or
wrong? Where do you think those instincts come from?

9) At the end of the book, thirteen-year old Luke has come to stay with Denny in New York. Will
Denny be a good parent for Luke? Does it make sense for Luke to stay in New York? What will Denny
have to change about her life that she hasn't foreseen?

10) This book is full of families of various kinds—some makeshift, some formal, some functional,
some less so. Who are the best parents in this story and why? Discuss some of the minor characters who
sometimes act like parents—people like Denny's drama teacher and her school principal in the early part of
the story, and later, her agent, Luke's grandmother, Sean, and even Simon (the guy at the library). What are
some of the qualities that do and don't make a good parent, in this story?

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