Introduction

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Excerpt

Excerpt #1: He drove us. No one else could. He's little behind the rim of the wheel, only five-foot-six. It's the head that dominates, the fixity of his gaze. The muscle popping in his jaw, the monoxide of the lecture. His neck hunkers down inside his raincoat, the gray needles of his hair where it's grown too long pricking the collar. He's had to cancel the barber again, had to sacrifice his own needs to ours--again.

"I told you to make a list. Why do you never remember? If you expect me to organize your day properly, you have to make a list."

In the passenger seat, Mother keeps her eyes forward.

The windshield wipers land heavy blows, like the sounds of cutlery falling on the silence at the dinner table. They make a part in the wall of water so the plastic bubble of the family can move through. Gray soak, pigeon splat, wet brown leaves. We're sealed against all weather. The world slides off the windshield and fractures in his glasses. No sound can reach the outside.

"What did you say? Did you say something, Lillian? You're mumbling. You do that deliberately to annoy me don't you. Speak up if you're going to interrupt. You know I can't concentrate on the driving and listen to your jabbering at the same time. It's giving me a splitting headache."

He has a headache. He has a stiff neck from driving--no one will rub it for him, she never even offers.

"Watch out!" She grabs the arm rest beside her. Her right foot grinds into the rubber floor mat, her body pulling back against the strain of operating the imaginary brake.

He stomps on the real brake, the wheel jerks under his hands and the whole company of passengers swerves to the left. A dark shape like our own, a hull, looms out of the weather across the occluded screen of our vision.

"Why did you do that! Why did you yell at me? I've told you never to yell at the person behind the wheel! Do you want to get yourself killed?"

"I thought you didn't see him."

"I saw him, what's the matter with you? I've been driving for over fifty years, have I ever endangered your life--any of you? Well, have I?"

"No, of course not."

"Then why are you gripping the door handle like a maniac?"

"I'm not gripping it, I'm just resting my hand there."

"You don't have any faith in me, do you, any of you. As a driver or anything else."

"Of course we do. None of us would ever think of criticizing your driving. That man should have slowed down when he saw you pulling out."

"What do you know about it? Are you the expert here?"

We lived inside the car. It was like another room of the house, the one that moved with us wherever we moved, that took us through life.

There were two great passages, the trip to Europe, when Clare and I were in high school and Margaret stayed home to start college, and the one almost a decade earlier, in 1955, when Daddy moved the family to North Carolina. He took a summer off for that, driving east and south across the map from Iowa with many stopovers, as if to emphasize the divide in our lives, making a sight-seeing tour of it as well.

Excerpt #2:

We lived inside the car. It was like another room of the house, the one that moved with us wherever we moved, that took us through life.

There were two great passages, the trip to Europe, when Clare and I were in high school and Margaret stayed home to start college, and the one almost a decade earlier, in 1955, when Daddy moved the family to North Carolina. He took a summer off for that, driving east and south across the map from Iowa with many stopovers, as if to emphasize the divide in our lives, making a sight-seeing tour of it as well.

It was educational, all trips were. Mother alert at her post calling off the roadside markers--battlefield sites, birthplaces of former presidents, quaint Episcopal churches where it could take up to half an hour to decipher the inscriptions on the old stones on the graveyards. When we stopped in St. Louis to see Mama, Daddy's mother, at the nursing home, it was too hot for words. She could only signal by blinking her eyes at us--once, twice, twice--where we stood looking in through the bars of her crib. Then it was on through the blue grass of Kentucky to "My Old Kentucky Home" where Daddy paid for a photograph of the three of us with an old man strumming the banjo, a Negro. Mother wanted it for our first family Christmas card from the South.

Each girl had her place in the back seat--me on the right behind my mother, Clare at the left window with the view of the back of Daddy's head, Margaret between us. We made a game of debating which way Daddy's hair was going, black or gray? Salt or pepper? But mostly we kept quiet. The car was another place to behave, not to move while being moved. We counted cows and license plates like any normal family. Sometimes Mother asked me to sing--I had a high sweet voice, like a boy soprano. "Tammy," "If I Loved You," "When You Walk Through A Storm" were some of her favorites. She swung her head with the tune and hummed along, chin lifted, eyes closed so it was as dark for her as it was in the song and she too could have been mounting some hill and walking bravely toward whatever might come.

When we switched places for naps, Margaret moved to the front seat and Clare and I curled up in back, one of us in Mother's lap. When I stuck my thumb in my mouth, she shook her head and pulled it back out, then, at my pleading look, checked my father's sight line in the rearview mirror and relented.

From the Skyline Drive at Gaitlinburg, Tennessee we took the Parkway down the vaporing Smoky Mountains, Mother sucking in her breath at the hairpin curves while Daddy recited Stonewall Jackson's last words--"Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees"--as he drove us deeper and deeper into the orange clay of North Carolina, the matted kudzu and tangled roots. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1) Do you think the emotional dynamics of this family are specific to families of a certain era--the 1950's through the 1970's--or do they still ring true today?



2) What are the different approaches to family memories that the people in this household appear to have?



3) Is it important to you whether the words attributed to the people in this memoir were spoken exactly as written? Why or why not?



4) Do you feel any sympathy for the father during the course of the narrative?



5) What is the difference between the sound of the mother's voice and the sound of the father's?



6) What is the effect of the events of her childhood on the narrator's [Salinger's] adulthood?



7) Do the events of family life have the same effect on the narrator's two sisters as they do on her?



8) How important did the political events of this era seem in the life of the family?



9) Does it make any difference to this story that the narrator grows up to be a writer?



10) Why is the memoir called "Listen"?



11) Would the events of the narrator's childhood have been as devastating without the element of incest? Why or why not?

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