About Alice
Calvin Trillin
Language: English
Pages: 78
ISBN: 1400066158
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In Calvin Trillin’s antic tales of family life, she was portrayed as the wife who had “a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day” and the mother who thought that if you didn’t go to every performance of your child’s school play, “the county would come and take the child.” Now, five years after her death, her husband offers this loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page–his loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page–an educator who was equally at home teaching at a university or a drug treatment center, a gifted writer, a stunningly beautiful and thoroughly engaged woman who, in the words of a friend, “managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.”
Though it deals with devastating loss, About Alice is also a love story, chronicling a romance that began at a Manhattan party when Calvin Trillin desperately tried to impress a young woman who “seemed to glow.”
“You have never again been as funny as you were that night,” Alice would say, twenty or thirty years later.
“You mean I peaked in December of 1963?”
“I’m afraid so.”
But he never quit trying to impress her. In his writing, she was sometimes his subject and always his muse. The dedication of the first book he published after her death read, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.”
In that spirit, Calvin Trillin has, with About Alice, created a gift to the wife he adored and to his readers.
WHOLE THING, GOT TO SAY MY TOAST (QUITE MOVING) AND EAT CHOCOLATE CAKE AND WATCH BUD’S 87-YEAR-OLD UNCLE JERRY (WHO MARRIED SARAH AND ALEX IN MALIBU LAST JUNE) DANCE HIS ASS OFF WITH ALICE WATERS, WHO HAD BROUGHT ME ROSES FROM HER GARDEN IN BERKELEY. Toward the end of the e-mail, she said she was safe at home, in the Village, eating comfort food and about to watch The Sopranos and an A. R. Gurney play on television. She closed by saying, “Life doesn’t get much better than this.” Four months
WHOLE THING, GOT TO SAY MY TOAST (QUITE MOVING) AND EAT CHOCOLATE CAKE AND WATCH BUD’S 87-YEAR-OLD UNCLE JERRY (WHO MARRIED SARAH AND ALEX IN MALIBU LAST JUNE) DANCE HIS ASS OFF WITH ALICE WATERS, WHO HAD BROUGHT ME ROSES FROM HER GARDEN IN BERKELEY. Toward the end of the e-mail, she said she was safe at home, in the Village, eating comfort food and about to watch The Sopranos and an A. R. Gurney play on television. She closed by saying, “Life doesn’t get much better than this.” Four months
college—Chubby’s name came up while my parents and Sukey and I were having dinner. I asked why we’d never gone to visit him on the farm. Sukey looked at me as if I had suddenly announced that I was thinking about eating the mashed potatoes with my hands for a while, just for a change of pace. “There wasn’t any farm,” she said. “That was just what they told us. Chubby had to be put to sleep.” “Put to sleep!” I said. “Chubby’s gone?” Somebody—my mother, I think—pointed out that Chubby would have
“Y-y-g-h-k-n-i-p-h.” For a few moments the car was silent. Then my father said, “Wrong. Next.” Suddenly the car was bedlam as we began arguing about where our plans had gone wrong. “Maybe we should have got the guy who knew how to spell ‘hayseed,’ “ Dogbite said. We argued all the way to the Scout meeting, but it was the sort of argument that erupts on a team that has already lost the game. We knew Keith had been our best shot. 1986 ABOUT THE AUTHOR CALVIN TRILLIN has been a staff writer
smoke she had grown up in were responsible for her lung cancer, but she was certain that her parents, who were exceedingly protective, would never have raised her in a house full of smoke if they had understood the danger it presented. She had testified to that effect in the late eighties, when the city held hearings on whether to ban smoking in restaurants—a ban that passed and was eventually extended to bars. By that time, she had allied herself with a loose band of anti-smoking crusaders led