Excerpt
Chapter One
The Guide
At seventeen, Jack Snyder’s daughter is slender- faced and long of limb and still able to startle her father with her seeming certainty about everything she thinks. They’re driving along roads he doesn’t yet know, on their way to meet her first seeing-eye dog, and she is wearing polka-dotted sunglasses, a long jean skirt, and a shirt with the words: “If you can read this T-shirt, maybe YOU can tell ME what it says.” A kid from her school ordered them, in the dozens, and Lila bought three in different shades. “You’re sure they aren’t identical?” she questioned her mother at the time. “I don’t want my teachers thinking I never change my clothes.”
“Believe me, Lila,” Ann Snyder said. “I don’t want your teachers thinking you never change your clothes either.”
As Jack scans the road for signs, Lila is proclaiming to him in those certain tones of hers that if it weren’t for being quite so blind and having to have one, she’d definitely never get a dog. Never. Never ever. And her father is trying to follow her, trying to respond appropriately; but thoughts of Miranda Hamilton compete with the girl’s words. Miranda Hamilton unbuttoning her jeans the night before, sliding them down her thighs, stepping panty-clad from the denim pooled at her feet. Miranda Hamilton unbuttoning his suit pants, leaving them bound around his legs until he kicked them off. Miranda’s cropped blond hair fading into soft, colorless down along the back of her neck. Miranda laughing as she filled her mouth with bourbon from Jack’s glass and held the fluid there, smiling while it drizzled from her lips until he kissed her and swallowed it himself. Miranda whispering to Jack, her mouth still whiskey damp, just to lie back, lie still, while she moved her hips in something close to perfect circles over him. Just lie still. Just lie still. Just lie still.
“Really, Dad, they’re so obsequious,” Lila says, and Jack has to remind himself what they’re talking about. Guide dogs. They’re talking about guide dogs. “The whole alpha-male pack-mentality thing. Cats don’t give a shit about anyone, right?” Her father swerves around a pothole, and senses her sway beside him, unprepared. It’s an early- spring day and they are into the long weeks between the damage done by ice and snow and the repair work to come.
“That’s certainly their reputation,” Jack says. “Cats are undomesticatable. Too wild.”
“I find that infinitely more appealing.”
Jack nods silently, an assent he knows his daughter cannot see.
“Maybe I could have the first ever seeing-eye cat.” Lila crosses her arms. “Some real haughty feline with attitude.”
“You mean like you?”
But his daughter shakes her head. “No.” She turns her face toward the breeze of the open window, lifting her sunglasses. “No,” she repeats. “I’d want a guide cat who really doesn’t give a flying fuck.” She draws an audible breath through her nose. “Manure?”
“We’re in farm country now.” He says it quietly, as he looks around outside. Rolling hills of tilled soil settle dark brown against the clear blue sky. Occasional red barns dot the land, appealing in their melancholic disrepair. The scenery is picture-postcard beautiful, but he keeps that to himself. For now, anyway. Later in the day, maybe after dinner, he’ll call Miranda. And he’ll tell her all about how lovely the landscape looked; and then maybe he’ll tell her once again how painful these moments of unshared beauty can be. Standing in the farthest reaches of his backyard, he’ll hold his cell phone close against his mouth so he won’t have to shout and he’ll close his eyes as he describes to her again how solitary he so often feels with his sightless daughter by his side. How among all the things for which he might feel guilt, there’s always this one mountainous inequity: that he can see and Lila cannot.
“Is it pretty?” Lila asks.
“We’re out in the sticks. It’s okay.” He pictures Miranda pacing her kitchen, phone in hand, running an exasperated hand through her hair. This isn’t your strength, Jack. You have to learn to let go.
“Yeah, I figured as much.” Lila turns her head his way. “Are there cows?”
“A little way back there were. Black Angus, I think. Big and dark.”
“Sounds nice, Dad.” But Jack only murmurs a neutral sound, and Lila turns away, facing forward again. “The thing is,” she says, “I just can’t imagine raising a dog and then giving it away. Even if I don’t much like dogs, it still sounds like an elaborate form of masochism.”
“It’s a . . .” But Jack can’t find the word he wants, and he’s pretty sure he’s just missed their turn. “Dammit, I think we’re lost. No, wait, this must be right. It’s a good deed,” he says. “It’s something these guide dog people want to do. He’s your dog and they know that from day one. So they don’t get attached.”
“Yeah, right, Dad. Do you really believe that? That you can just tell yourself not to get attached? You don’t seem so thrilled about me going to college. Why didn’t you just tell yourself not to get attached?”
“Very funny.” But she’s right, of course. Who is he to assume anyone can tell themselves what to feel? He’s always been unable to tell his heart a goddamned thing. “Very clever, Lila,” he says. “But it’s the system. It’s how this guide dog business works. And since we benefit from the system for once, I’m not going to argue with it. Here we go. Sharp turn left . . .” He gives her the warning and at the edge of his vision sees her brace herself for the curve, hands gripping her seat. “Hang on, babe. This looks bumpy. Dirt road.”
“I think I can handle it. Bumps in the road are my speci-al-i-ty.” Lila has her head turned to the open window again, holding the door, her thick dark curls flying in the breeze. “Maybe there’s something wrong with me,” she says, “but I actually like the smell of manure.”
“No.” Her father draws in a deep breath of the sour, full air, savoring the simple fact that they’re smelling the same thing—a relief from all the sights they never share. “I agree with you, baby. It’s a strangely pleasing smell.”
“And, by the way, so is skunk.”
“Absolutely,” he agrees, remembering the pungent, oddly twisting scent of Miranda’s sweating skin. “Absolutely,” he tells his daughter. “So is skunk.”
Lila was six, playing in the garage of a neighboring family the Snyders didn’t really know, when an aerosol can of orange spray paint blew up in her face; and for a long time after that, many years, Jack was stuck on that one simple fact—on the tenuous, fleeting nature of the acquaintanceship. Almost as though the same accident, with the same result, in the home of a close friend would have somehow made more sense. But none of it made any sense, of course. He knew that. You could turn the thing around, replay it endless times—and you would. You would. And you would. And you would. But none of it made any sense at all. There you are one fine October day, living your life pretty much as you had planned, your lawyer’s shingle hanging up, white and shiny, outside your solo practice downtown; tranquilly married to your wife of eight years, whom you’ve managed still to love, though so many of your friends have clearly, even openly, tired of theirs; doting on your six-year-old daughter whom you adore, with the not so secret sense that she’s a little prettier, a little smarter, and a lot more special than other people’s kids; enjoying your smug, self-congratulatory thoughts about the way fatherhood refocuses priorities. Long gone are the days when you were known as a bit of a skirt chaser, back in the single years; the days when anything held the same appeal as tossing a ball in the backyard with your kid. And then a fucked-up aerosol can of orange paint blows up in your daughter’s face. In the garage of a boy she doesn’t really know.
The first few weeks flew by in waiting rooms filled with cold cups of coffee and shifts of relatives taking turns. Bits and pieces of news were conveyed by strangers who came to him fresh from delving into his child’s face. Some good: the eyes wouldn’t have to come out. There were deep cuts on her jaw, but they would fade over time. She had been knocked unconscious by something that had fallen off the wall—a wheelbarrow, Jack eventually found out. And this was excellent news too, the doctors said. This would limit Lila’s memory of what they called “the event.”
But then in the center of it all, whatever salvage might be found among the wreckage, there was the conversation, the now-inevitable talk Jack began having with his daughter, six years old and emerging so untidily from all the anesthesia, all the painkillers, emerging so he could tell her, not once but many times, that she would never see again. Six years old, he would think as he spoke the words. She doesn’t understand forever. She can’t imagine what “never again” really means. And of course a part of him didn’t want her to, as he sat on the edge of her hospital bed, touching her continually so she’d never feel alone in the dark, caressing her constantly—for himself as much as her. So neither of them would feel alone. While Ann stood just outside the doorway, listening as though she were eavesdropping, retreating even then into the fears that would engulf her as if less frightening than real life turned out to be. And Jack repeated the truth to his girl—because that’s what the psychologists had cautioned him to do. Never lie. Never lose her trust. But have the conversation again, again and again, until the child understands, as no six-year- old should have to do, exactly what forever really means.
“This is it,” he says, pulling into a long, rutted drive.
“Nice place?”
Looking up at the small ranch house, set on stilts, Jack frowns at the empty flowerpots that line the porch rail. An old bicycle leans against the front window. “Not really,” he says. “Not somewhere I’d want to live, anyway, though someone else might find it quaint, I suppose.” He should be used to being her eyes. He shouldn’t even notice doing it by this time. But in the car, as he peers at this nondescript house, he can feel himself resisting her questions, as he does more and more when there’s a matter of taste involved. Is he handsome? Are the flowers pretty? Nice place? Does she understand how often these are matters of opinion and not of fact? Realize how likely it is that if she could judge these things for herself they might disagree? Does she ever guess how very injured and myopic a filter he has become?
“It’s a small place,” he says. “It’s reddish and a little run-down.”
A tall woman steps out onto the porch and waves what looks like a powerful arm. Jack waves back, out his window.
“Come on,” he says to Lila. “It’s showtime. Look’s like she’s here.”
“Giddy-up,” she responds, lowering her glasses again. “As long as we made the trip, let’s do this thing.”
When he told Miranda how much he hated the idea of Lila getting a guide dog, she accused him of balking at letting Lila grow up. She said he was resisting the idea of her transferring her needs and her dependencies onto someone else—even a dog. “Same old, same old, Jack,” she said. “You are way too attached.” Jack was visiting the café where she worked, catching her at odd moments between her customers. “You’re so identified with her. It would be good for you both if Lila could lean on someone else.”
But at home that night over dinner he tried not to think about that, dismissed it as psychobabble, only said something vague about feeling unsure, not having a gut sense that this was the right move to make. Introducing such a huge change into their lives. About it being a long- term commitment—a phrase that caused Ann to stare pointedly his way. Exactly what would you know about keeping commitments, Jack? Lila claimed to hate what she called “the whole geeky blind-girl thing with the dog who snarls at everyone but me.” And Ann eventually confessed to having her own concerns, to a recent fear of large dogs, which caused Jack to throw his own exasperated look at her: Exactly what is it that you aren’t afraid of, Ann?
In the home of a blind child, it turned out, a marriage could easily enough dissolve in unwitnessed pantomime. Ann and he could be giving each other the finger through every meal, for all Lila knew. And at times, they had come pretty close.
“It isn’t the most important consideration, I understand,” Ann said in her quiet, steady tones, so suffused with control that the effort itself was like a second, twining voice. “I probably shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“Poor Mommy.” Lila reached across the kitchen table to pat her hand, and Ann moved it for her to find. “Who said parenthood wasn’t hard?”
The college counselor at school was adamant, though, and ultimately persuasive. “It’s the best way to do college,” she said. “It’s the best way to do adulthood, in fact,” she added, reaching to pet the heavyset creature lying beside her feet on the gray carpet, as Jack watched Ann shift in her chair, away from the dog. “You don’t want her living with her parents for her whole life,” she stated—startling Jack— as though that were clearly true.
She handed Ann a card with two agency names, and Ann then passed it on to Jack, a move he recognized all too well. Everything from phoning for take-out to planning vacations to calling in someone to see if their lacy-leafed maples should be sprayed—all these were increasingly his to do, as his wife retreated ever more steadily into her phobic state.
“Would you like to compare coping mechanisms?” she’d asked him once, when he let fly his rapidly growing anger at her rapidly shrinking world. “Yours versus mine? What’s her name, again? Amanda? Miranda? Would you like to have this conversation? Or should we just keep trying to help each other stumble through for a few more years? For Lila’s good?”
Stumble. It was the obvious answer. They would stumble through, of course.
Jack picked one agency over the other by no more scientific means than the fact that the first one’s phone was busy; and the agency whose phone wasn’t busy put him onto Bess Edwards. “She has her own methods, but they work,”
the agency man said. “She’s a dog woman through-and-through.” Jack repeated the phrase to Lila just to hear her laugh and describe what she thought a through-and-through dog-woman must be like.
Media reviews
“I want to shout about how just when you thought no one could write a story with any tinge of freshness let alone originality about childhood. . . about marriage…about old age, Black has done it. . . . Black delivers real emotion, the kind that gives you pause….Will Robin Black win [the Pen/Hemingway Prize] for this book? If I were a judge, she would.”
—Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune
“Pitch-perfect….so deft, so understated, and so compelling that you have to slow down to savor each vignette….Fans of Mary Gaitskill, Amy Bloom, and Miranda July will feel like they’ve found gold in a river when they discover Robin Black…[A] writer to watch.”
--O, The Oprah Magazine
“Each story reads like a mini-novel…worlds are contained in a single page. And the writing ... oh, the writing….There’s no narrative cohesion, no point. Rather, If I Loved You is a ‘Fantastic Voyage’ into the bloodstream of the human species….Maybe it’s midlife maturity, maybe it’s raw talent, but If I Loved You leaves you longing for more."
--San Francisco Chronicle
“Incisive….peopled with characters so fully imagined you’ll feel they’re in the room.”
--People
"Exquisitely distilled tales of loss and reckoning….[Black] evokes a Sparkian blend of skepticism and grace."
--Vogue.com
“Robin Black stakes out some of the emotional territory occupied by Alice Munro, Amy Bloom and Lorrie Moore….A nuanced portrait of the heart that repays careful reading.”
--Financial Times
“Considered and rewarding….Black writes with grace and simplicity and there is a quiet strength in her sentences.”
--Times Literary Supplement
“Powerful and touching….sparkling with poetic vision….In every story, [Black] creates wonderful little images, sees symbols, double meanings, poetry everywhere.... Black has an enviable ability to create wholly believable characters, people you'd swear you know, and by showing them in passage through life's transitions, she reveals the source of their longings….A fine first collection.”
--Philadelphia Inquirer
“Robin Black's lovely debut collects 10 stories written over eight years, each demonstrating the rewards of a long gestation--contemplative pacing and a polished craft. . . . . Should Alice Munro ever fulfill her threat of retirement, readers can turn to Black for solace. Grade: A."
--Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Nuanced, perfectly pitched and striking….[Black’s stories] swell with feeling….leaving us wanting more as we read each story every more slowly as the finale approaches.”
--The Australian
“Black proves herself to be a keen observer of the human condition as she shows how her characters navigate their inner worlds. . . Sympathetic but never saccharine.”
--The Daily Beast
“Each story...in this collection is a mini work of art….The stories stay with you. They teach life lessons and change the way you view the world.”
--Irish Examiner
“The lives of the people in Black's stories unfold in unexpected ways. Her ability to convey the quiet havoc this causes is what makes her collection so good.”
—Dallas Morning News
“Eight years of writing and revision result in a high-caliber short story collection reminiscent of works by Atwood and Paley….[Black] illustrates the fragmented, disconnected nature of our civic lives with heart-stopping clarity….[Her] stories quietly usher us through worlds of grief in a heartfelt yet dignified fashion….Like fine chocolate or wine, a little Black goes a long way. Savor this collection slowly and reflectively, then share with a friend.”—Library Journal
“A wonderfully rich and rewarding story collection. . . for fans of Alice Munro or Lorrie Moore.”
--Louisville Courier-Journal
“Perceptive and emotional.”
--San Francisco Book Review
“Wise and involving.”
--The Brooklyn Rail
“An auspicious debut.”
--Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
"Poignant. . .well-written explorations of characters and situations sure to appeal to readers of Alice Munro and Mary Gaitskill." --Booklist “Evocative and lyrical.”
--Publishers Weekly
“Robin Black knows people. She knows us, she loves us, she takes pity on us and she offers us back to ourselves in clear-eyed and graceful prose. Her people are alive on these pages in all their glory--heartache and joy, infidelity and loyalty--and stay with us.”
--Amy Bloom, author of Where the God of Love Hangs Out
“This collection of short stories might more accurately be called a collection of short novels, such is their richness of characterization and plot. And the writing! It's the best I've seen in years, literally. I was immediately engaged with and entertained by every story here, without exception, and I was moved and enlightened by them, as well. Robin Black is an old soul who is a new addition to my short list of favorite authors. She is worthy of every bit of the high praise that is sure to come her way.”
-- Elizabeth Berg, author of The Last Time I Saw You
“Robin Black’s men and women have been around the block—in fact, they’ve done laps around the block—and are suffused with a fierce and hard-won knowledge about life, about love and loss. It’s wisdom that fills these characters. Like bulletins from the front, these magnificent stories shine a light on what it means to be human.”
-- Dani Shapiro, author of Black and White
“Robin Black’s stories are beautifully measured and composed in their engagements with emotional crises that are harrowingly intense, if not catastrophic. Few first collections – few collections of any sort -- are as intelligent and as moving about both the durability of love and the implacability of loss, or about the ways in which contingency can undo and remake us; about, finally, the damage done and the repair work to come.”
--Jim Shepard, author of Like You’d Understand, Anyway
“These stories are full of surprises. They start with the familiar, drawing the reader in with the beauty and precision of their prose until, suddenly, in the middle of a suburban family drama, Italian bandits appear. But what makes If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This such an exquisite collection is the way Robin Black brings these same unpredictable elements into the emotional lives of her characters, creating that special kind of literary magic, where a reader experiences everything, right alongside, and it all feels new.”
--Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief
