The Blessings (24 page)

“It sounds like you have a very nice family,” the woman says.

Elena nudges the window shade up a little. It
is
kind of cool, seeing the clouds up close, if she can manage not to focus on falling. The clouds look so tangible, so textured, it's hard to believe touching them would feel like nothing. This one is fat and bulging, like one of Raphael's angel paintings. That one is a blanket of ripples, like a Van Gogh field.
Hi, Dad
, she thinks, only partly joking. She believes he's up here somewhere, which she admits is not very agnostic of her, or very realist either.

They are down below the clouds, and Philadelphia is in sight. The cluster of tall buildings, the blinking lights, and the great gray sprawl on either side—easy to forget how huge the city is, the endless grid of it. The smoke from the factories near the airport turns the sky a kind of unearthly blue. As the city draws closer, Elena feels something relax in her chest. She pictures her family, their own little corner of the city, a fortress. Her mom and Max have probably already cleaned the pool, getting it ready for tomorrow. Her cousin Joe will play lifeguard, holding little Joey in his bubbled water wings. Tate and Hayley will splash in the five-foot end, while Stephen mans the grill. There will be all the usual foods—macaroni salad, potato salad, pink fluff—plus cheesecake that Alex and Cynthia bring from New York. The Phillies game will be on in the living room and Uncle Patrick will wander in and out, reporting on the score. Aunt Ann and Aunt Margie will make sure everyone is taken care of, refilling drinks and clearing dishes. As the plane starts down, and Elena's heart begins to pound, she visualizes everybody gathered around the table after dinner, the way the kids will grow tired, wrapped in towels but fighting sleep, and the family will tell stories, grazing over the desserts, as the night turns cool, and the new baby is passed from lap to lap, arms to arms. She can picture it already.

Thank you to Katherine Fausset at Curtis Brown, for her wise and steadfast guidance, and to Emily Griffin and all of her colleagues at Grand Central, for their passion and hard work on behalf of this book. It could not have been in better hands.   

Thank you to Laura Miller, Clark Knowles, Kerry Reilly, Amanda Strachan, and Gina Pierce, for their thoughtful advice on the book in various stages. Thank you to Bob and Jolanda de Levie, who provided the ideal Maine hideaway in which to write it.  

Thank you to Dolores Juska, Phil Juska, and Sally Juska, who have always supported my writing without question or exception. 

To the entire Pierce family, who have taught me about courage, resilience, and the importance of the little things.  

And to Jake, who makes me feel so lucky.

In a way, I feel as though as I've been writing this novel, or some version of it, for a long time. When I was in college and graduate school, I wrote several short stories about close extended families, always with this central image—the aunts around the dining room table, the uncles gathered around the TV, the quiet emphasis on food and children.

I grew up in a big family, one of sixteen cousins on my mother's side, and as I've gotten older, I've thought a lot about what the particular experience of being from a big family means. For me, and I imagine this is fairly common, the family—the beliefs and traditions, that long shared history—is a crucial part of who I am. At the same time, there are parts of my life that remain separate, and private, that the family couldn't or wouldn't know. Figuring out how to write the story I'd been circling since college was probably in part a matter of maturity—approaching the subject with more experience and (hopefully) more insight—and finding the right form in which to tell it.

The characters in
The Blessings
are fictional, but the rhythms and rituals of this close family were certainly influenced by my own. Like the Blessings, my relatives on my mother's side are based in Philadelphia. They've dealt with devastating loss, and they're the strongest, most grounded people I know.

In “real life,” two of my uncles died quite young, and both had young children. These deaths occurred about ten years apart, but they have shaped our family history. Though the events of this book are invented, that absence has loomed large in my life, and in my writing. The multiple perspectives provided a way to show the long ripple effect of such a loss, the way the family grieves both separately and together.

Naming the book was largely about naming the family, which was surprisingly difficult. Ultimately, the name Blessing was chosen for a few reasons. It's an Irish-Catholic surname, one I'd heard in Philadelphia; it's also, in the context of this story, a name that has dimension. At first I hesitated about choosing a name with an extra layer of meaning, but the meaning of this word, a
blessing
, felt so right for this family. It's not pretentious or grand. It's an abstract concept, but still rather everyday. It's a word I can imagine Helen using. To me, it speaks of small things, ordinary joys, and a fundamental inclination toward what is good.

Writing linked chapters from multiple perspectives enabled me to capture that relationship between the individual and the clan, and to explore the experience of a big family from several different angles. In writing Lauren, for instance, I imagined what it would feel like to be a sister-in-law from a small family, unaccustomed to the constant togetherness of big family life. In Alex's story, I wanted to explore geography, to think about what a close-knit, intensely local family feels like when you're far away from home for the first time.

I enjoyed writing each one of these characters. I suppose the most difficult to write was Helen, not for reasons of craft, but because my grandmother died while I was writing the book. They weren't the same person, yet there is something at the core of Helen that reminds me very much of my grandmother. After she died, it was difficult to go back to that chapter; it took me a while to get through it.

The chapter that came easiest was probably Elena's, though that must have been partly a function of how I wrote it: in a little cottage in Maine during Hurricane Irene, the trees thrashing wildly, bracing myself for one of them to come crashing onto the roof or my power to go out—I'm sure that some of my own anxiety was in the mix as Elena waited for her plane to take off.

I didn't have much of a plan when I started writing, but as the families began taking shape and the relationships falling into place, there were certain characters' perspectives I naturally gravitated towards. As I wrote their stories, many moments came unexpectedly—in “Two Houses,” for instance, the fact that Patrick was contemplating infidelity—but the one that surprised me most was when Stephen started beating up the old man in the parking lot at Wendy's. It was one of those scenes that sort of appeared on the page, and part of me wished it hadn't, though I knew that it felt true to Stephen, who wasn't a violent person but just didn't know how to handle his anger and sadness.

Going to college seems to me a moment when you begin to define yourself as an individual in a number of ways—to make independent decisions, separate yourself from your family, see your life at home with more objectivity. I clearly remember going to college and, like Abby, being surprised to find that not all kids had families like mine. It was the first time I understood that it might not be the norm to see your first cousins on a weekly basis and to have fifteen relatives watching you go to the prom!

Abby, Alex and Elena all find themselves at similar junctures. For Alex, away at grad school, traveling abroad with his girlfriend causes him to confront how he is (and isn't) like his family, to evaluate his values and priorities. Abby's and Elena's stories I see as bookends to the novel and parallels in various ways, both in terms of plot—both are eighteen years old, one is leaving and the other coming home—and insight, as Abby is realizing that she's not just like her family, while Elena is coming to appreciate the ways that, despite their differences, she and her family are alike.

I loved living with these people so much, I felt as though I could have gone on writing them forever. But if there's one family I feel particularly compelled to return to, it's Margie and Joe and Joey and Stephen. Specifically, I'm interested in Amy's experience after she marries former high school basketball star Joey and how it might not end up being quite what she'd expected. I'm also curious about Stephen's daughter, Faith, and what would it be like for her—the daughter of a dad with very partial custody, parents who were never married to each other and are no longer together—to be part of a close extended family like this one. What is her mother's family like, and how does she reconcile the two? I wonder how the dynamics of the Blessing family might change, in general, as the grandchildren get older and have families of their own. Maybe I'll check in with them in ten years or so to find out.

Elise Juska's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in
Ploughshares
, the
Gettysburg Review
, the
Missouri Review
,
Good Housekeeping
, the
Hudson Review
,
Harvard Review
, and many other publications. She is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction from
Ploughshares
and her work has been cited in
The Best American Short Stories
. She lives in Philadelphia, where she is the director of the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of the Arts.

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