The Book of Dahlia: A Novel - Hardcover

Albert, Elisa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743291298 ISBN 13: 9780743291293

Publisher: Free Press, 2008

Synopsis

Returning to her native L.A. in search of a new start, Dahlia Finger avoids her dysfunctional family and spends her days in a drug-induced stupor in front of the television, until her diagnosis with an inoperable brain tumor forces her to reevaluate her life. By the author of How This Night Is Different. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Elisa Albert is the author of the short story collection How This Night is Different and the novel The Book of Dahlia.  She has taught creative writing at Columbia University and is currently Writer-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Holland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1: Something Wrong

Were there signs, willfully ignored? Did you know, on some level, that something was wrong? Did you avoid knowing? What were the signs? What did you know?

She had been having symptoms. Only recognizable as such in hindsight, but symptoms, nevertheless. A headache. Some sluggishness. Disinclination to do much of anything but hang around her house, take hot showers, slather herself with lavender moisturizer, watch movies on cable, smoke a bowl every few hours, make toaster pastries and consume them methodically, in quarters. Check her email, then check it again. But none of these things much distinguished themselves from Dahlia's normal state, so there had been zero cause for concern.

Well, concern, sure, but not concern. Just that her life was passing her by. That she might be, in point of fact, wasting her time, herself, utterly. That this might not be a phase. That, okay: What the fuck was she doing?

She'd figured she was due for a period. She always got those awful headaches, and/or the distended belly, bloat, and/or the general exhaustion. An impending period could explain away pretty much anything.

There was also the urinary tract infection for which she'd only just the week before completed a course of antibiotics. So there were all these things wrong with her. Not to mention everything, you know, wrong with her.

On the last day of her ignorance Dahlia Finger woke up shortly before noon, and ate a bowl of Cheerios in front of the television. A League of Their Own was on, for the eighteen-zillionth time, and yet again she found the thing totally irresistible, wound up watching all the way from Jon Lovitz's entree up through Tom Hanks's delivery of a tragic military telegram -- pause for bong hit -- and then straight on to the end, the disappearance of the young lovelies and appearance, in their stead, of riotous old ladies. By then it was almost two in the afternoon and Dahlia was weeping openly about the passage of time and the fact that Geena Davis and Hanks -- so clearly meant for each other -- never got it on, and the sun was threatening to go away for yet another day and so she made herself a cup of tea and looked in the magnifying mirror for a while. Then she called Mara, who was busy at work in Boston and, as usual, could not, or would not, talk.

"Do you think the Tom character just died alone and drunk?"

"I don't know, dude. I'm working." Little bit of judgment there, sure. Mara had, as they say, a life. "I'll call you later."

Dahlia's mother, upon meeting Mara fifteen years earlier, had refused to understand why this girl's name was "mar-ah," which translated, in Hebrew, to bitter. "Mar-ah!" Margalit would squawk. "What kind of name is this for a girl?" Dahlia and Mara had come to appreciate this as funny and fitting. Dahlia always pronounced her friend's name with just that Hebraic lilt to it, because she liked to think Mara was just like her: a match, a true, bitter friend to the true, bitter end.

Dahlia had taken the GRE a few weeks earlier and was still resting on that semi-laurel: having (sort of) studied for and completed a standardized test so singularly uninteresting she might even have chalked up the headache to her brain trying to rid itself of useless information. The fucking GRE. Barely touched study guides still lay piled in a corner, under some health insurance forms and credit card offers she occasionally considered considering.

Why the GRE? Possibly social work school. She could consort with drug addicts, or battered women. The broken, the fucked, the totally broken, the irretrievably fucked. This seemed doable. Maybe she had a calling. Maybe she would be happy, self-sufficient, fulfilled, of use to humankind. Make her dad proud. She had just about given up on making Margalit proud, or even holding her attention for too long, come right down to it.

Anyway, the time had come to do something with herself. "What is your battle plan?" Margalit would often demand. As though life were a long fight one had to orchestrate carefully.

Dahlia had also toyed, intermittently, with the idea of rabbinical school. A pulpit would allow her to cast Talmudic judgment on people who pissed her off, and work on herself a bit, too, have an answer for everything. She'd be a cool rabbi, a real human being, a pot-headed, pop-culture-expounding Universalist. Except, goddamn it all to hell: Danny was a rabbi. Her douchebag brother, the rabbi! So the whole notion, over before it could begin, defeated her. Everyone already knew Danny, anyhow. They knew him as "Dan" or "Dan the man" or "Rabbi D," from his lifetime of camp counselor-ing and high school mentoring and University Hillel visiting and youth group shepherding: It was an insular, imbecilic universe, and Rabbi Dan, Dahlia's only sibling, was king of it. King Douchebag, Rabbi Dan.

Fine. So what sort of occupation wouldn't make her want to fucking kill herself every single godforsaken day? Law school sounded like a freaking curse; the words together (LAW-SCHOOL) like some sort of prison sentence handed down in a language she didn't speak, for a crime she didn't commit, by a totalitarian, undemocratic judge in a third world country. Too many rules, too much precision. Laws, for Christ's sake. Thank you, no.

She had no creative talent to speak of, though she had made a mean mix-tape in her day and certainly counted herself a reasonable connoisseur of culture (witness the umpteenth, slightly ironic League of Their Own screening, the bimonthly live music attendance, the requisite, half-read McSweeney's stacked on the floor by the untouched GRE study guides and untouched health insurance forms, indie theater movie stubs littering the bottom of her bag). She had attempted a spec script or two when she'd moved back to L.A. (because how could she not? She of the ecstatic, repeated viewings of every cheesy movie on cable during any given month's cycle), but they were derivative, unimpressive. One was Sex and the City. The other: Scrubs. Which she had never watched. But Dahlia's mean streak amounted to narratively unaccountable jabs everywhere: at materialism, stupidity, douchebag rabbis, dating websites. "Some fun moments, but way too hostile for episodic television!" said the only TV lit agent she could get to read the thing, the son of an old friend of her father's. "Why would Carrie stop wearing Manolos and decry the shallowness of her own fashion obsession? Sex and the City isn't in production anymore, anyway. Also: Scrubs is a hospital comedy, so it'd be advisable to set the show at or around the hospital. Best of luck."

It was a pain in the ass, this figuring out what to do with your life. A matter, as the famous book intoned, of finding the shade of parachute that best complemented you. But really: With no parachute at all you'd hit the pavement so hard it probably wouldn't even hurt, and you'd unleash a whole new color palate -- bone, blood, muscle -- in the process.

So screw the parachute, screw the battle plan. So weed and A League of Their Own. So napping in the breeze. So toaster pastries. So maybe social work school. Or journalism school (though there was the problem of facts with that one, namely a responsibility to them). So the GRE. Whatever. Things would "figure themselves out," as she told her mother. ("Mah zeh, figure themselves out? Nothing figures itself out! What is your battle plan?")

She was living her life isometrically: action with no movement.

This was officially a new start, at any rate. She had what her father called "options"; she had nothing but the time and freedom to explore them. She was twenty-nine years old and dear old Daddy Bruce had wiped the slate clean for her. Life in New York, never sustainable in the first place, had become downright unlivable. Bruce, bless his uncomplicated, wealthy heart, had offered her this out: Come home.

And, indeed, Bruce welcomed his little girl back "home" with a lovely cottage in Venice. He acted like this was Dahlia's right, as expected as hearing her Mirandas or voting. As inevitable as the bearing of arms. Of course she would have a house handed to her, a microscopic mortgage in place for her to pay (but only so she would "learn about money" and be "responsible" for it herself: he had a good deal of cash, but Bruce had "values" as well).

Dahlia adored the house, loved that it was hers (given, sure, but still). It was a haven, her very own airy bungalow box of clean ocean air. The Spanish tile, the stainless steel, the open kitchen, the recessed lighting, the beamed and soaring ceiling. To get to the front door you had to enter through a wooden gate and walk down a short stone path beset by night-blooming jasmine. She was going to go to Morocco and bring back colored lanterns to hang along this path. She was going to find a wind chime. She was going to get a hammock. She was going to paint the door blue. She felt safe, beyond the reach of all the shit that had dogged her in New York, in college, in high school, in childhood, in utero, and possibly even before that. She was anonymous in Venice; she knew almost nobody and almost nobody knew her. At night, in bed, if she strained, she thought she could hear the Pacific. She felt as though she was re-gestating; that for those first months she was rerooting herself via the cable matinees and pot, via late afternoons strolling Abbott-Kinney, stopping on Main Street for a coffee and a book or a People magazine. Watching movies (Titanic, Flirting with Disaster, Mannequin, Thelma and Louise, Rushmore, The Goonies, She's Having a Baby, it mattered very little) was a kind of prayer: She knew the characters as well as she knew herself, as well as she knew anything there was to know, and she could chart and rechart their movements and secrets and misunderstandings endlessly, reflecting in any number of new permutations on all of it, each time. Again and again. They were acq...

About this edition

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0743291298
• ISBN 13: 9780743291293
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288