Months go by and one after another of the antidepressants Dr. Payne (incredibly, that was his name) could help her get back to her old self. She was baffled by this dark mood but still trusting that medical science in the guise of Dr. He asked a lot of questions, referring to what seemed a long list on a clipboard-about whether Alma had fantasies of killing herself, whether she had a gun in the house (Richard did keep an old shotgun down in the basement, which he would occasionally use on the raccoons and groundhogs that invaded his garden), whether there had been any untoward events in their family.Īlma tried to be accurate and provide him with the information requested. "What kind of birds?" he had asked.Īt least he is being thorough, Alma thought. He was so young he probably hadn't seen the film. The doctor, who'd been jotting down her explanation, had looked up. She explained that she felt as if a whirling darkness were descending on her, like dirty water going down a drain or that flock of birds in the film by Hitchcock. Day after day, Alma feels that peppery anxious feeling that she has truly lost her way.Įarlier this year, she went to see the local, small-town psychiatrist, a very short man with an oversized face that reminded her of the post-deaf Beethoven. But instead she wonders who might be alive in her dotage whom she would care to be with? Richard, her husband, overworked and project-driven, will probably not live that long Tera, her best friend, over-weight and full of political-activist rage, will likely die before Alma does her saintly neighbor Helen, already in her seventies, fat chance she'll stick around. She should probably feel glad that her glass of time is half full. In fact, it makes her sad when she reads that women of her profile (active, slender, vegetarian, married) will probably live-if they take care of themselves-to ninety and beyond. It's not her own mortality that weighs heavily on her. It's late September she has actually not turned fifty yet, but she has already given that out as her age, hoping to get the fanfare and menopause jokes over and done with. In the fall of her fiftieth year, Alma finds herself lost in a dark mood she can't seem to shake. In depicting their confrontation of the great scourges of their respective eras, Alvarez exposes the conflict between altruism and ambition. This resplendent novel-within-a-novel spins the disparate tales of two remarkable women, both of whom are swept along by machismo. Her strength and courage inspire Alma, who finds herself becoming obsessed with the details of Isabel’s adventures. She agreed- with the stipulation that she would accompany the boys on the proposed two-year voyage. Of greater interest to Alma is Isabel Sendales y Gómez, director of La Casa de Expósitos, who was asked to select twenty-two orphan boys to be the vaccine carriers. To do this, he required live “carriers” of the vaccine. It’s the story of a much earlier medical do-gooder, Spaniard Francisco Xavier Balmis, who in 1803 undertook to vaccinate the populations of Spain’s American colonies against smallpox. The truth is that Alma is seriously sidetracked by a story she has stumbled across. She promises to work hard and follow him a bit later. But Alma begs off joining him: the publisher is breathing down her neck. Her husband, Richard, works for a humanitarian organization dedicated to the health and prosperity of developing countries and wants her help on an extended AIDS assignment in the Dominican Republic. Latina novelist Alma Huebner is suffering from writer’s block and is years past the completion date for yet another of her bestselling family sagas.
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