This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Leslie Jamison

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Free Press trade paperback edition May 2011

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Eight lines [“O love, how did you get here?/… not yours.”] from “NICK AND THE CANDLESTICK” from ARIEL by SYLVIA PLATH. Copyright © 1966 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. For additional territory contact Faber & Faber Ltd., Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA, England; e-mail: [email protected].

Manufactured in the United States of America

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Jamison, Leslie.
The gin closet / Leslie Jamison.—1st Free Press hardcover ed.
1. Adult children—Family relationships—Fiction.
2. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS 3610.A485G86 2010
813’.6—dc22             2009020264

ISBN 978-1-4391-5321-5
ISBN 978-1-4391-5323-9 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-4391-5787-9 (ebook)

Dedication

For my grandmothers

Patricia Cumming Leslie

and

Mary Dell Temple Jamison

O love, how did you get here?

O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby,
The pain
You wake to is not yours…

(FROM SYLVIA PLATH, “NICK AND THE CANDLESTICK”)

The Gin Closet

Content

Chapter 1: Stella

Chapter 2: Tilly

Chapter 3: Stella

Chapter 4: Tilly

Chapter 5: Stella

Chapter 6: Tilly

Chapter 7: Stella

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About This Guide

Reading Group Guide For

STELLA

On Christmas I found Grandma Lucy lying on linoleum. She’d fallen. The refrigerator hummed behind her naked body like a death rattle. There were bloody tissues balled in her fists, but she was alive and speaking. “I just wanted a little yogurt,” she said. “I got a nosebleed.”

Her arms fluttered in the air, clutching for handholds, human fingers, anything. It was the first time I’d seen her whole body—her baggy ghost-skin and all the blue veins underneath.

I’d ridden a train through the brittle Connecticut winter with a wedge of gingerbread and a ham sandwich full of fatty cuts, her favorite kind. I had a bag of presents. From the floor she asked: “Are those for me?”