Book one of a trilogy
Illume Publications
Rope & Bone’s thirty-four stories span the years from 1946 to 1993 and act as a kind of prequel to Books 2 and 3. These stories are told in the voices of all of the members of both families: the Merricks and the Morlettis. They all get a chance to give their “take” on their formative years.
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Summary
The novel opens in 1984 on Chicken Farm Road when Del Merrick, an art teacher living without plumbing or electricity, enlists help in changing a flat tire from Carla Morletti, a member of the Pagan Biker’s auxiliary, now studying for her G.E.D. This chance connection between these two women will reroute their lives and the lives of their children.
The first section of the novel, “Wildest Dreams,” flashes back to pivotal moments in the past. Part 2, “Castanets,” tells of Carla and Del’s misadventures as they try to raise their kids, get their old cars started on subzero mornings, and put in enough wood to get through until April—at the same time they’re testing their theory: a good man’s hard to find. In Part 3, “Shelter,” Carla and Del’s friendship darkens as their children’s lives become more chaotic.
Rope & Bone is Book 1 of a trilogy. Book 2, Night Navigation, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2009), focuses on Del and her son, Mark Merrick. Book 3, Doing Time Outside (Standing Stone Books 2013) turns back toward the Morlettis: Carla and her daughter and son, Tess and Rudy. Each of the novels is written to stand alone.
Excerpts
The two women looked at each other through the glass. Both wary.
“Oh, it’s you,” Carla said as she opened the door, “the lady who lives in the log cabin without plumbing or electricity.” Not a Jehovah’s Witness. Not someone from social services.
“Sorry to bother you at dinner time,” Del said, still breathless from the fast walk.
Carla stepped back and motioned Del inside. “For a minute, I thought you were God.”
Del hesitated. The woman must be on something.
Carla opened the door further. “Come on in by the stove. I’ve always wondered about you, how you wash all that long hair without indoor plumbing for one thing. We call you Mystery Lady 2. What we really wonder is why you or the first lady …”
“Sally—the woman I’m renting the cabin from …”
“… would want to go out in your yard to pump your water, use kerosene lamps? We used to think the lady—the woman you’re renting from—might be one of the sixties radicals. You know: living there off the grid because she was undercover, but when you, a respectable school teacher, moved in, we figured we were wrong about that.”
Del followed the woman back through the dark hallway into the warm kitchen.
“Oh,” Del said, stopping in the doorway, surprised by a hair curler that floated in the air a few feet over the sink, two pink plastic prongs stabbed through the bristles and wire. Her scalp winced with the memory. A few inches above the curler hovered a carved bird—a swallow, its dark, burnished wings banked for a dive. Then she saw they were fastened to long strings attached to the beam. She gave the delicate branched tail of the bird a small push; she couldn’t resist. The swallow’s shadow glided across the back wall.
“How lovely,” Del said, reaching up again to run her finger along the gleaming wing.
“Yeah,” the woman said and then switched her finger back and forth, indicating the two objects floating above her head. “This and that. Something I’ve been thinking about.”
Del waited for more words that would give some clue as to what on earth she meant, but instead the woman smiled and said, “I’m Carla. Carla Morletti.”
They marry:
Rope and Bone.
Sunday and Saturday.
That and This.
He said, “It was our finest hour.”
She wept.
Speaking in tongues
untranslatable,
they move in experimental space suits,
uneasy in the other’s gravity.
(To say nothing of the difficulty of dancing.)
Two of the voices from Rope & Bone:
Del:
Del Merrick knew something was wrong, but she didn’t know what. A pulling to the left, a dragging. She felt it just as she turned onto Chicken Farm Road. She punched the off button on the radio and listened: a dull thumping, left front. Then she knew what it was even though she’d never had one and miles either way to any kind of help. Damnation.
She eased the car onto the shoulder. Just before it nosed over the embankment to tip into the brook below, she stopped. If someone took the corner wide, it’d be all over.
Should she put the emergency brake on? She knew there was a rule: Before jacking up your car, set the parking brake. Before jacking up your car, do not set the parking brake. Richard Larson always said, If you understand the concept, there’s not that much to memorize. But she had no idea how this connected to that with what result. Safer to have the wheels locked or did you need free movement to change the tire? She shrugged, pulled up hard on the lever and got out. Dank. The bleak smell of November.
It sure was a flat.
Carla:
Carla Morletti could not remember when she was supposed to turn the numbers upside down, when she was supposed to reduce them to the lowest common denominator. She read the problem again: You have $53.97 for groceries this week. You have four people to feed three meals each day. “Good luck,” Carla said to the ceiling. On average, how much do you have to spend for each person per meal?
53.97; not 54 dollars. Clearly the person who made up this question needed help, or as her counselor would say was “carrying around a lot of free-floating hostility.” God knows, she herself detested the 7s and the 9s.
Her final G.E.D exam, or as she liked to call it, the GD E, was only three days away; it was time to stop making jokes, time to stop imagining she had the pale little person who made up the test across from her in a counseling session. It was time to get what got turned upside down straight, and the 9s memorized once and for all.
Reviews
“. . .Ginnah Howard’s Rope and Bone introduces two mothers—an art teacher and a bartender—as they meet each other for the first time in early midlife, one of those odd chance meetings that leads to unlikely friendship. It starts with a flat tire and ends with a missing child.
“From there, Howard draws the lens back and shows us the beginning of each woman’s journey, building a series of vignettes through pivotal moments in both lives. A free-standing prequel to two earlier novels, Rope and Bone forms part of a wide-angle meditation on family life that includes Howard’s Night Navigation and Doing Time Outside, both gritty and eloquent takes on mothering in the modern world. In Rope and Bone, we get their backstories.
“In the vivid, searching light that Howard sheds upon each woman’s life in turn, we see the forces that pull them together and push them apart without judgment, without any oversimplified sense of angels and demons. Carla’s life spins farther out of control, while Del strives to rein hers in; we come to love them both.
“Howard’s time-shifting Zen take on the perils and pleasures of loving rings very true. Families, friendships, catastrophes, achievements: life really is what happens when you’re making other plans, and Howard excels at telling the truth about women who live on the hardscrabble edge…”
— Anne Pyburn Craig, Chronogram
01/01/2015; read full review at
www.chronogram.com
“Howard weaves together a collection of short stories (some previously published) to create this powerful novel, the final piece in a trilogy (after Night Navigation and Doing Time Outside) about two very different women and the children upon whom their accidental sins are visited. Though separated by age, education, and circumstance, Del Merrick and Carla Morletti lead parallel lives in a grim upstate New York hamlet, both struggling to gain a toehold in their worsening marriages while helplessly watching their children slip away. When the two become friends after a chance meeting, Del’s and Carla’s families are irrevocably linked, and as their entwined stories begin to unfold, both women make decisions that reverberate far into everyone’s future. Spanning from 1946 to 1993, the book lays bare Del’s and Carla’s lives with quiet compassion, wit, and an unhurried anticipation. Stunning in its simplicity, Howard’s lean prose belies the detail and richness of the characters she conveys.”
— Publishers Weekly
02/06/2015
“I am so grateful for Ginnah Howard’s third novel, Rope and Bone, as it gives us a rich, intriguing back story of the families that appear in her first two novels. And what a back story it is. I admire these characters tremendously. They are genuine, troubled, resourceful, infuriating, and mostly trying to find their way against a tough upstate New York world. Rope and Bone is one of those books that challenges us to remember the context and complexity of every human life.”
“Howard develops characters that just grab at your heart. “Rope & Bone” is written in short stories so the character’s lives open story by story. I was disappointed when I turned to the last page and I’m still thinking about the characters and wondering what’s going to happen to them next.”
— Reader Commentary