For Rouenna: A Novel - Softcover

Nunez, Sigrid

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312420633 ISBN 13: 9780312420635

Publisher: Picador, 2002

Synopsis

From the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend, one of the most celebrated novelists of her generation, the story of a woman's experiences in the Vietnam War

"After my first book was published, I received some letters." So begins Sigrid Nunez's haunting novel about the poignant and unusual friendship between a writer and a retired army nurse who seeks her out decades after their childhood in the same housing project. Among the letters the narrator receives is one from a Rouenna Zycinski, recalling their old connection and asking if they can meet.Though fascinated by the stories Rouenna tells about her life as a combat nurse in Vietnam, the narrator flatly declines her request that they collaborate on a memoir. It is only later, in the aftermath of Rouenna's shocking death, that the narrator is drawn to write about her friend--and her friend's war. Writing Rouenna's story becomes all-consuming, at once a necessity and the only consolation.

For Rouenna, an unforgettable novel about truth, memory, and unexpected heroism by one of the most gifted writers of her generation, is also a remarkable and surprising new look at war.

About this title

About the Author

Sigrid Nunez is the New York Times bestselling author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award, and of several other novels, including What Are You Going Through and The Last of Her Kind. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Her work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

Reviews

Does a fat friend from the old neighborhood have a legitimate claim on us? In Nunez's new novel, the narrator, a writer living in Manhattan, receives a fan letter from Rouenna Zycinski, a forgotten acquaintance from the Staten Island projects of her youth. Decades earlier, Rouenna was a combat nurse in Vietnam; now—she disconcertingly announces after several beers in an Indian restaurant—she wants someone to help her write her story. This portrait of a friendship expands into an unnerving examination of individual and national shame as Nunez itemizes our ties to all we try to deny or ignore: the disabled vet; the demented downstairs neighbor; the half-dressed father chasing his naked daughter through the playground; the mountains of garbage silently rising across the river.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

For Rouenna

By Sigrid Nunez

Picador USA

Copyright © 2002 Sigrid Nunez
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312420635

Chapter One

After my first book was published, I received some letters. Mostof them were from strangers, people who had read the book andwho wanted me to know what they thought of it. They werefriendly letters for the most part, though a few were critical. ("Ihope you won't mind my saying that I did not like the ending atall," and so on.) I also heard from people I had known in thepast. Near strangers: people I had not been in touch with fortwenty, thirty years and whom I rarely if ever still thought about.Almost every one of these letters began with an expression ofdoubt that I would remember the sender, and my letters in replyalways began with an assurance that I did remember, which wasthe truth. Even before I opened one of these letters, I wouldrecognize the name written above the return address on theenvelope. (Sometimes I recognized the handwriting.) Almostalways unfamiliar, though, was the return address itself. Theseold acquaintances of mine, these ghosts from my past, had movedaway from the places where I had known them, some very far.One of the few letters from the state of New York had beenmailed from a men's penitentiary. Sometimes the writer wrotePERSONAL On the envelope, or PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL. "Ihope you will remember my sorry ass," the letter from the inmatebegan, "now that it has landed in jail."

    Unlike the ones I received from strangers, these letters werenot usually about my book. In fact, often the writer had not readthe book but had only heard of it, from a review, say, and hadbeen moved to get in touch "after all these years." These letterstended to be long?three or four pages?and filled with autobiographicaldetail. They took me back?to college, to high school,and even further. I heard from three women who had been mybest friends in seventh grade. (Most of the people I heard fromwere women.) Rarely was I surprised to learn what had becomeof people. They had married. They had had children. The jobsthey were in were the jobs I might have predicted for them. Itwas their wanting to tell me all this that surprised me and that Ifound poignant.

    I answered every letter. And usually that was the end of it. Iwould not hear from the person again, or if I did it was just oncemore. A much shorter letter might come; a postcard. One of thefriends from seventh grade dug up and sent an old photograph,me at thirteen, along with a copy of a poem in my own juvenilehand, which I threw away, unread, remembering only too wellthe kind of poem I wrote at thirteen.

    Time passed. A year, another year, enough time for me to finishanother book---a long period when no such letters came. Andthen one day there came one more. ("I don't know if you rememberme.") From Brooklyn this time. And this time I did notremember.

    I did not remember a Rouenna Zycinski. I was sure I hadnever known her. But many years ago, according to her letter, wehad been neighbors in the same public housing project, onStaten Island. She was older than I, this woman, the same age asmy elder sister, and she remembered her, and my other sister, andmy mother and father. She gave everyone's name and the numberof the building we had lived in and the apartment number?shegave all this information in her letter, and it was all accurate. Thatworld?the world of the projects?I had written about in myfirst book, which she had just read. The book had brought thatworld back to her, had brought back many memories, and thatwas all she wanted to say.

    I answered the letter right away, thanking her for writing,and then I forgot about her, until a few weeks later, she wroteagain. We were, she said (hardly accurately this time, in my opinion),neighbors once more. Brooklyn, Manhattan. Two stops onthe L train. A matter of minutes. Could we meet?

    I did not want to. I had no desire to meet this woman. Shewas a stranger, and I am wary of strangers. Ours was only the slenderestconnection. Not even her name rang a bell. She and herfamily had moved out of the projects some forty years ago. Myown family had moved out ten years later. Why should we meet? Icould think of no good reason. And I had the uneasy feeling thatthis woman wanted something?something more than just tomeet. I could not say what it was, but I sensed that there might besome danger?no, danger is melodramatic?some trouble thatcould come of meeting her, and I had enough trouble. Had shebeen a man, I do not think it would have been hard for me to sayno. But a peculiar sense of obligation nagged me, as if I owed thiswoman, this perfect stranger from the margins of my book ofmemories?but what could I possibly owe her?

    I had enough trouble. The arrival of this woman's letterscoincided with an odd time in my life?an unhappy time. Whenher first letter came, I had just broken up with a man I had beenliving with for several years. I had moved out of the apartmentwe'd shared (his apartment before we met) and into a new one.I was alone. (She was alone, too; though she did not say so, Icould not imagine Rouenna Zycinski except living all alone,those two subway stops away in Brooklyn.) Midway throughunpacking, I had lost heart and quit. I was living in disarray, halfout of boxes?I hardly knew where anything was. The kitchenwas bare, I had not yet once used the stove?I went out foreverything, from morning coffee to midnight drink. I went outalone?I was avoiding people. I was avoiding having to explainthat G. and I were no longer together. I was avoiding having toanswer questions about my work, about how my next book wasgoing, and having to explain that it was not going, I had abandonedthat book. I had not written anything for months. I'd hadto move quickly and was forced to take more or less the firstplace I saw. Two small rooms that even put together would nothave made one large one. The sofa here, the bed there, and nomore space. The floor was splintery, the light was?well, therewas no light. Almost all the tenants in the building were women.The landlord would not rent to single men or to families (notthat it was easy to imagine any family squeezing into one ofthe cramped apartments that had been carved out of that once-eleganttownhouse). So we were mostly women; I had youngwomen living on all sides. I had forgotten how much youngwomen cry. And it seemed I was not the only one with romantictroubles. I often heard couples fighting?how my pulse wouldsurge whenever I heard that. And once, an anguished male voicebellowed up and down the air shaft?I love you, you bitch!?andI burst into tears.

    In that building also were many cats. I think every womanhad one. (Dogs were not allowed?the landlord had the samelow opinion of dogs as he had of single men.) Coming homesometimes I would glance up at the facade of the building andsee the familiar curvaceous silhouette in almost every other window.My own cat prowled the cluttered rooms with wide, disbelievingeyes. At first he meowed a lot, as if imploring me ... Thenhe grew silent and grave, as (I supposed) the truth sank in: theorder that he was accustomed to and needed and loved did notfollow wherever we went but belonged to that other life, the onewe had left behind forever.

    Instead of making order, instead of settling down in my newplace and getting on with life, I dreamed of going away. I hadread Marguerite Yourcenar's account of how she had traveled bytrain across the United States, writing portions of her masterpiece,Memoirs of Hadrian. "Closed inside my compartment as ifin a cubicle of some Egyptian tomb, I worked late into the nightbetween New York and Chicago; then all the next day, in therestaurant of a Chicago station ... then again until dawn, alonein the observation car of a Sante Fé limited." Page after page ofthis work that had given her so much difficulty for so many yearsnow poured out of her, and: "I can hardly recall a day spent withmore ardor, or more lucid nights."

    Irresistible fantasy. New York to California. I would visit S.in San Francisco. Days of ardor. Lucid nights. Writing as I hadnever done before.

    Irresistible fantasy: the look on G.'s face when I told him. Ithad been one of his chief complaints: I was incapable of just thesort of act I was now contemplating. I had no sense of adventure,I was the least spontaneous person alive. ("Someone says to youlet's have sex, and you say just a minute I have to go make out mywill.") If I did not do more?go out, travel, see more of the world,get more experience of life?I would end up having nothing towrite about. It had been one of the last things he had said to mebefore we broke up (though he was hardly saying it to me for thefirst time), and the way he said it, that final time, I felt as if he wereputting a curse on me.

    It was not the sort of trip that people made anymore?certainlynot alone. I was told that my fellow passengers wouldbe mostly families. And things were different now than they hadbeen in the forties. Now there would be music, or Muzak, playingin that Chicago station restaurant. Nor would Yourcenarlikely find herself alone in that observation car. The trains werealmost always crowded now, rarely quiet, hardly the place forreading, let alone writing masterpieces. Always the sound ofsomeone's chatter or snoring, the tinny music coming out ofother people's Walkmans, or the beeps and quacks of someone'scomputer game?this, at least, had been my own experience ridingtrains in recent years. The filth of the toilets. The bad food.The families with young children in neighboring compartments."Will all the compartments be full?" I asked the booking agent."Oh, yes. And you'd better make up your mind fast. We bookthese trains ten months in advance."

    So much for spontaneity.

    But I had fallen into one of those writer's traps: I had letmyself become convinced that in order to begin writing again Ineeded to be elsewhere?preferably somewhere I had neverbeen before. I wanted to write about us, about G. and me, howwe came together, how we came apart. But it was too soon, probably.And anyway I had promised never to ...

    Still, I wanted to go away. It didn't have to be such a big deal,I told myself. I would go anywhere I did not have to hear youngwomen cry. I thought of renting a house for a month or so somewherein the country. But it was winter. I saw myself cold, snowbound.And how would I get around? Not only did I not have acar, I did not know how to drive.

    The train trip, the house in the country. A journey, a retreat.A place to grieve. A place to write. Irresistible fantasies, but inthe end I never went anywhere. I stayed home and finishedunpacking. G. was right about me then. But he had reminded meof something. As soon as I was finally settled in my new home,for the first time in my life I made out a will.

I did not answer the woman's second letter right away. I put it offfor weeks. She had given me her telephone number, but insteadof calling I wrote again. I said that she had caught me at a busytime, but perhaps in a month or so ...

    In a month to the day, she wrote again. I saw that it would beuseless not to call. It was no longer a question of putting this dutyoff but of getting it over with.

    I had expected she would come to me, in Manhattan. I hadseveral places in mind to suggest for us to meet. Instead, to mydismay, she invited me to lunch at her Brooklyn apartment. Abreathy, slightly stammering voice: she sounded both flusteredand excited. She sounded as if she was afraid I would say no. Isaid that I would bring dessert. And that Saturday?a cold grayday with a little dry snow blowing?reluctantly, still fearing someobscure trouble, still burdened with that peculiar sense of obligationand now also with a chocolate mousse pie, I took theL train to Williamsburg.

    I was early?I am usually early for appointments (a habitthat always irked G., who saw it not as the virtue of punctualitybut as a neurotic fear of being late). We really did live only minutesapart, this woman and I, and in my usual (punctual or neurotic)way I had allowed almost an hour for the trip. In those fewminutes, though, the weather had changed. I climbed the subwaystairs into sun. The snow had stopped. It was a differentkind of day entirely?a good day for a walk. And it was while Iwas walking, careful not to swing the cake box too vigorously,that my mood started to lift.

    I knew this neighborhood. I knew several people who livedhere, all artists. It had been one of my first thoughts about thiswoman, that she too might be one of the hundreds of artists whohad settled in this part of Brooklyn over the past fifteen years.Easy to recognize, from the style of their clothes and hair andeven their backpacks, they thronged the streets that bright Saturdaynoon, easy to tell from the Italian, Polish, and Latino immigrantsthey threatened soon to displace. (Displacement anxiety:in the subway station, a sign taped to a post: a woman looking forsomeone to share her loft: SMOKERS OK, BUT ABSOLUTELY NOWALL STREET YUPPIE TYPES!)

    On my walk I went north, into Greenpoint. I rememberedthe first time I had ever been to Greenpoint, almost ten yearsbefore, and had gone into a grocery to buy tea. When I asked theman behind the counter where to find the tea, he pressed hispalms together like a priest and shook his head: no English. Thatstore was there still; I paused to look in the window, filled withPolish specialties, and wondered whether the man ever hadlearned English. To do so, he would have had only to cross thestreet, where then as now an English language school stood. Onthe other hand, so long as he never left that neighborhood, therewas no real need. Polish was spoken everywhere?in the stores,in the bank, in the health and beauty clinics. Walking throughthe park, I heard two men arguing in Polish, children playingjacks in Polish, and an ardent young couple sitting on a parkbench, making Polish love.

    And, on the side of a bus stop shelter, someone had felt-pennedthis:

    Q. What did the Polish artist do?

    A. He moved to SoHo.

    But none of this had anything to do with my mood, any morethan did the change of weather. It was something that hadoccurred to me?now that I was actually about to meet thiswoman. Until this moment I had not really given her muchthought. Only now did I begin to wonder seriously about her.She was not an artist, I decided. She would not be like one ofthem or like any of my other friends?she was from anotherworld entirely. The voyeur in me was aroused. Would she reallyturn out to live alone as I'd imagined, or would there be a roommate,a lover, family? What would her apartment be like, andwhat did she do for a living? I saw that it would not be hard forme to get through this visit?all I'd have to do would be to eatand listen. For it was not about me that the woman would wantto talk, but about herself?I was quite sure of this. I had come toexpect it from the kind of people who got in touch with me. Thatletter from the penitentiary was a full confession?thirty pages inwhich that old high school boyfriend of mine poured out thewhole sad sordid tale of how he'd got there. Rouenna Zycinski,too, wanted to tell me how she'd got where she was. She hadn'tdone so in her letters?she had said nothing about herself. Shewas saving her story for when we met. So my thought went. Andas I turned around and headed back toward the street whereshe lived, I found myself intensely curious, and curiosity alwaysperks me up.

    Her building was near the subway. A three-story framehouse with green vinyl siding, graceless, homely almost to thepoint of grimness, like most of the buildings around it; like mostof Brooklyn. As I rang the bell, the yellowish-gray curtains of awindow on the ground floor stirred, and a yellowish-gray headappeared: a woman, the landlady perhaps, keeping an eye out, orjust some nosy neighbor. But when I nodded at her, she made afrightful face and withdrew, angrily jerking the curtain shut.

    Inside, it smelled of roasted meat.

    "Hello? Up here?I'm up here." That nervous, breathyvoice. I climbed the stairs toward it. She stood in the doorway?shefilled the doorway, she was so stout. Her face was flushed,from cooking perhaps, or from nervousness, or stoutness?Ididn't know?but she was all red, unnaturally red. No, I did notrecognize her in the slightest. "I'm Rouenna," she said. Barefooton a doormat printed with sunflowers. A long, loose, tent-likedress?it too was printed with flowers. The roast-meat smell wascoming from here. I handed her the cake box, and she took itshyly, she made a little show of grateful surprise as if she weren'texpecting it, though I had said that I would bring dessert whenwe made our date on the phone. She backed into the apartment,into the overpowering roast-meat smell. "You look just like yourphoto," she said, and it took me a moment to figure out that shewas talking about the photograph on my book jacket. She heldthe door open for me, she wafted her hand in a gesture of welcome,and I entered her world.

    The word parlor came to me, so old-fashioned did that livingroom seem, with its stuffed furniture and bric-a-brac, its doiliesand afghans and needlepoint. A tall birdcage in a nook by thewindow held a pair of dozing parakeets. Fake Persian rugs, curtainsof moss-green velour?it was the kind of place that makesme want to sneeze, no matter how tidy it is. The kind of placethat makes me go a little weak in the knees?I who have lived inrooms so meagerly furnished people visiting for the first timeassumed I had just moved in. The Japanese are my heroes in thisregard and, closer to home, the Shakers. Neurotic, again, washow G. saw this fear of decoration. But think of it as a way toavoid what always happens: how one possession always leads toanother, and how this goes on and on, complicating life until, inno time at all, what we own ends up owning us.

    It was summer in that parlor: hot and humid. The windowswere opaque with steam. I went weak in the knees right there.The throbbing busyness of the place?all that stuff?the heat,the heavy smell?Rouenna herself all that floral-printed flesh. Isank onto a chair whose cushion gave under me like a featherbed. My misgivings returned. What was I doing there? On a coffeetable, among full candy dishes, magazines fanned out as in adentist's office, a stack of plastic coasters, and a giant kidney-shapedashtray was my book.

    Something to drink, offered Rouenna. I asked for anythingfizzy and cold, and she fixed me a ginger ale with ice.

    She had cooked, of all things, a turkey. She seemed embarrassedabout this. But it was her habit to cook large meals onweekends, she said. She would give part of the turkey to thewoman downstairs?not the landlady, as it turned out, but afrail, addled old widow who could barely take care of herself.And some of the turkey would go to the church, where everyweek volunteers fed Sunday dinner to the homeless.

    A good heart. And here I had been inwardly sneering?no,sneering is too harsh I had been shaking my head at her. Isipped my iced drink to cool my shame. Rouenna went back intothe kitchen and returned with a tray of different cheeses, crackers,and olives?enough for a meal in itself. Now, and later, whenwe sat down to the turkey, I noticed how, like many obesepeople, Rouenna ate daintily?at least in front of a witness. Ofthe hors d'oeuvres she ate nothing at all; they were for company?likethe giant ashtray, I supposed, since Rouenna did notsmoke. I noticed too that, for all her weight, she was quite buoyant,bustling about the table, which stood in a little alcove outsidethe kitchen, light on her small bare feet. She had beenslender once, and her body, under its excess pounds, had not forgotten.(I had seen this before, in the plump but graceful mesdameswhose photographs from lither days hung in the studioswhere they now taught ballet.)

    It was like Thanksgiving. She had stuffed the turkey. She hadmade gravy and mashed potatoes and peas and cornbread. Shemust have been cooking since she got up that morning, and shemust have got up early. I caught myself shaking my head again.So much food?"lunch" was going to take hours. Rouenna, asI say, ate only small portions of everything, but I ate a lot, as Iusually did when the food was good; though nowhere nearRouenna's size, I had already for some time given up trying tobe thin.

    It turned out she did live alone in that apartment, the rest ofwhich I would see before going home: a bedroom as bright andbusy as the living room, with a ruffled paisley bedspread andmatching paisley window curtains, and a thick shaggy gold ruglike the fleece of the mythic sheep. (A house without books,I noted. Only that one book, mine, on the coffee table.) Shehad been living in that same apartment for about six years, shesaid. Before that she had lived in Manhattan. "I had a nice rent-stabilizedplace in Kips Bay, but after twelve years I was ready fora change. Or maybe I just needed to get back to my roots." Shewas Brooklyn-born, with grandparents on both sides fromPoland. Though she was only joking about getting back toher roots, she had never regretted leaving "snotty Manhattan."This immigrant working-class neighborhood suited her, and sheloved the narrow streets and the low skyline, the Italian cafeswith their excellent coffee, the small cheap restaurants servingpierogies and boiled beef and borscht. A bakery on every corner,and in every bakery the delicious poppyseed cake that broughtback Grandma ... Rouenna had been happy those six years inWilliamsburg, and she said she wished the artists had chosensomewhere else to settle. To ruin was what she actually said?asif many of them hadn't beaten her to Williamsburg bymany years. All these artistes, she said. Moved here supposedlybecause they were poor, but buying up buildings left and right!As if these could not possibly be people I would ever know orwant to know.

    Snotty Manhattan was where she worked still. She was themanager of a women's discount clothing store. She had a car butshe took the subway every day, to Thirty-fourth Street. Not anexciting job, she admitted; not a job she loved, but better thanother jobs she'd had over the years?and she'd had plenty. Waitressing,bartending, grooming pets. All jobs to get by, to pay therent. And yet Rouenna had a profession: she was a trained nurse.

    I had been right about not being bored that day, and wrongabout Rouenna's eagerness to talk about herself; I had to drawher out. At first, she kept trying to draw me out. But I was evasive?I had no desire to talk about myself with this strangewoman?and in the awkward pauses that fell between us, Iwatched her struggling, her flushed face turning a deeper, mortifiedred, as if she was afraid she had offended me. To make it upto her, I kept praising the food, and each time I did so shesquirmed and batted her eyes self-consciously. She had unusuallypale but intense blue eyes?the one beautiful and still young-lookingfeature in an otherwise ordinary fiftyish face.

    I could not quite see her as a nurse?not with all that weight.But then that time when she had been a nurse was so long past,she herself placed it "in another life."

    "If I met that person walking down the street today, I wouldn'trecognize her."

    "You didn't like being a nurse?"

    "Well, back then a girl didn't have many choices."

    Three, as I recalled. The others were secretary and schoolteacher.My elder sister, the one who was Rouenna's age, had alsogone into nursing, also halfheartedly.

    "Don't get me wrong," Rouenna said. "I was a good nurse?Idid my job. I just didn't last very long. And besides, look atthese." She held out her hands. They were small and plump, likeher feet. "A nurse really should have large hands."

    I had never thought of this. I said, "When did you quit?"

    "After I got out of the army."

    "You were in the army?"

    She nodded once, sharply, with pursed lips.

    "What made you join the army?"

    "If you enlisted, they helped pay for nursing school," shesaid, in a tone that suggested that this had been anything but thegreat deal it might sound like to me. And then she did a very oddthing: she clutched her head between her hands, opened hermouth, and mimed a loud scream.

    She had my full attention. I had never known any womanwho'd served in the military, and I wanted to hear more. But itwas not to be. Rouenna was on her feet, clearing the table. WhenI got up to help, she patted the air with one of her small plumphands until I sat down again.

Continues...

Excerpted from For Rouennaby Sigrid Nunez Copyright © 2002 by Sigrid Nunez. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312420633
• ISBN 13: 9780312420635
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240