Kamis, 06 September 2012

It's OK if you don't love me - a novel





Title                             : It’s OK If You Don’t Love Me
Genre                          : Fiction – Romantic
Author                                    : Norma Klein
Publisher                    : The Dial Press, New York
Year                             : 1977
Length of page           : 202 pages

Character :
1.      Jody                  : The main character, a girl who loves sport especially tennis.
2.      Lyle                   : Jody’s friend, loves tennis too, chivalrous, wise.
3.      Whitney            : Jody’s ex-boyfriend.
4.      Elizabeth           : Jody’s mother.
5.      Eric                   : Jody’s brother.
6.      Philip                : Jody’s stepfather.
7.      Elliott                : a friend of Jody’s mother.

Summarizing:

Lyle and Jody are playing tennis in the court.  They are talking during the play.  Jody really likes Lyle’s smile.  Maybe she shouldn’t say that to mean he’s nice.  Jody likes Lyle because Lyle is not New Yorker.  He didn’t grow up in New York City.  He is tall and sort of gangling, with greenish eye, he always choosing his words very carefully, unlike Jody who is just kind of blurt things out.
Lyle comes from Ohio.  He just moved to New York a few months ago.  Jody met him t Sloan-Kettering, the laboratory where they both worked over the summer.  He’s going into his last year of High School, like Jody, and they have a program for senior who are interested in science.  It was terrific job, Jody even got paid, though she’d have done it for free just for the experience.  Lyle worked at a lab down the hall from the one she was in, and they really didn’t get to know each other that well, but once at lunch, which everyone ate at that cafeteria down stairs, he said something about not knowing how to get a tennis permit, and they got to talking about it.  Jody went with him one day to the Arsenal, where he got one.  Today’s the first day they’ve played.  Their jobs ended a week ago, and school starts pretty soon.  He’s going to Bronx Science.  Jody goes to a private school called Talbot that she’s gone to since she was in third grade.

***
One day after they have played tennis, they talk each other in some garden beside the river.  Jody tells about her family and Lyle does too.  He leans back and looks across the river.  And he begins to tell about him to Jody.  He talks about his family that his parents died six months ago.  They were in a car crash.  That’s why he is there.  He is living with his sister.  She’s married.  He wants to go to Yale.  He will apply there, Princeton or Haverford.  He has to get a scholarship.  After a few minutes he said that his sister’s apartment is sort of small and they just had a baby, so it isn’t so ideal in term of space.  He could’ve stayed in Ohio and lived with the family of his best friend, Kent, but Renee wanted him to come to stay with them because her husband got a job there.  His family left some money to Lyle, but not a lot.  That’s why Lyle really wants get that scholarship.  His father taught biology at a small college. The salaries weren’t too high and his mother gave flute lessons.
Jody tries to imagine what that would be like.  Having no family left except Eric, her brother.  Her family is a little different, but still she could see it would be sort of horrible.  Jody’s family were in San Francisco for a while when she was little, only it didn’t work out that well.  Her mother was just twenty four or so.  She said she was much too young when she got married.  So one day she just split and took off for California, not even knowing anyone or anything.  She guesses that was kind oh the point.  To go somewhere she didn’t know anyone.
Jody starts to tell about her father.  Her father stayed behind in Scarsdale.  He was setting up his practice there, he’s a Dentist.  Her father and her mother had broken up.  So, she still lives in Scarsdale with his wife and their kids.  And she tells about Elliott.  He is her mother’s friend who lives with them.  He was married, only now, he’s not divorced exactly, but he’s separated.  His wife doesn’t want to give him a divorce.  After that, she tells about Philip too.  Philip is her stepfather. Her mother married Philip.  He lives right near there.  He teaches physics at Columbia.
Jody thinks that whenever she tells about the saga of her life, she can tell they’re feeling sorry for her.  Partly they’re thinking: Poor thing, her parents split when she was such a tender age, a mere babe, as it were.  But in fact, she was repressing it, but to tell the truth, she can’t even remember much about her whole time in California.  She was only three when they went there.  Eric was one and a half and five when they came back.  Even of her mind is that it was then her mother started working at this literary agency before she set up her own with her friend Harietta.  Before she always used to be at home during the day and after that she almost never was.
When her mother and Philip broke up, she did take it pretty hard.  She was eight when they got married and thirteen when they split, and even though her mother says those five years were the hardest of her life, for Jody they were kind of nice.  Jody really liked Philip a lot.  She was still at the age then when she hoped he mother would stop working and have more babies.  Her mother said that her main problem is that up till now she always married the men she fell in love with.  Now she realizes “you can love someone but maybe not be suited to live with them”.  It’s not that she regrets the other marriages.
After it, Lyle wants to get back.  Renee likes him back at six.  So he offered Jody to walk home, but Jody told him she’d just take the bus down river side.  Otherwise he would have had to go way out of his way, since his sister lives in the Bronx.  Jody doesn’t know anyone who lives in the Bronx. In fact she has hardly ever been there.  To her it seems almost like another state.
On the way home, Jody started thinking about Lyle’s being an orphan.  She never met an orphan before. She doesn’t think people are orphan as much as they used to be, or maybe it’s just you doesn’t hear about it.  Though she supposes it’s different to be one starting at seventeen than starting when you’re a baby.  The thing with Lyle is that you can tell he doesn’t say right out what he feels about things, but you know he does feel them.  It’s just sort of buried way down somewhere.  Jody would have liked to ask more about his parents, what they were like and how he got along with them, but when he started to talk about it, his voice got sort of tight, like it was painful for him.  The funny part is she could tell him felt about her family the way she did about his, as though her mother’s being divorced twice made her practically like an orphan.  But she supposes he doesn’t realize that there in New York everyone’s parents they started out with.  It just seems to be extremely rare.  So she doesn’t think of their setup as being that odd or unusual.  And she’s glad her mother is not marrying Elliott.  Not because she wouldn’t want her mother to get divorced again, but he’s just kind of ponderous.  He’s a psychology professor, and he has all these really out mode ideas about women, which she’d think would bother her mother.

***
On weekend, Jody took the subway up to Lyle’s sister’s house.  It was way far up, around two hundred and something street.  They live in one of those small houses, the kind with about five six stories, and she had to walk up because there wasn’t any elevator.  There were papers in the hall and the walls needed painting.  Lyle was wearing white sweater and chinos and his tennis sneakers.  It was a cool day for late August.  He took me into the kitchen and made grilled-cheese and bacon sandwiches.  Lyle starts to tell about Kitty, Renee’s baby.  Her name is Katherine, but that’s what they call her.  Renee was a Math teacher, but she gave it up when Kitty was born.  Renee said she wanted to devote herself to the baby till the baby’s three or four.  Lyle shows Jody the rest of the apartment and it is true, it’s really small.  There is what Jody guesses is the master bedroom, but it’s not like the one her mother and Elliott share, where there’s room for a desk and an extra chair and everything.  This one just a double bed, which about took up the whole room.  There is a TV in one corner on a bureau, and that’s all.  The baby’s room was even smaller, just a crib with a mobile hanging over the bureau and some kind of changing-table thing.
They go back into the living room and sit down on the couch.  As Jody said, to her privacy is pretty important so she really feels sorry for Lyle.  She would hate sleeping in a room without even a door.  Renee had just told that she was pregnant when Lyle’s parents were in the accident.  Lyle was the type who would find a way of making even a situation like that seem not so bad.  She’s not sure she’d be that adaptable.  Jody looks around at the rest of the room.  On the piano were some photos.  Those are Lyle’s parents.  Lyle looks like his mother.  She was not as tall, but had that some expression, sort of serious and a little puzzled, as though she was trying to fit everything together.  His father was tall and thin with a dark moustache, and he was laughing.
  
***
Every year Jody goes to the U.S Open with Philip at Forest Hills for the quarter or semifinal.  This year Jody asked if she could bring Lyle and Philip said sure.  First thing that Jody’s thinking about Philip is hi was practically the ugliest person she’d ever seen.  He looked almost like a monster to her.  He’s about six feet like an albino and his hair is that sort of whit-blond that people can only see on little kids.  Philip lives by himself in this horribly messy apartment near Columbia.  During the tennis matches Jody sat between Lyle and Philip.  We watched for a couple of hours, men’s singles, than men’s doubles, than the women’s singles.  Philip says he likes watching women play more than men, and usually Jody does too, only this day there was a long, very dull match between Chrissy Evert and Virginia Wade.  It wasn’t very interesting.  Jody keeps looking at Lyle, wondering what he was thinking.
Afterward Philip takes them back to his place for supper.  He made spaghetti, which is all he ever makes.  The only difference is that sometimes he makes meat sauce and something clam.  Jody’s seeing Lyle glancing around the living room and the bedroom.  There were stacks of books and papers piled knee-deep all over the place as usual, and there was a queer, musty smell.  Philip always forget to open the windows.

***
Lyle and Jody had been planning to go to a movie, but evidently his sister was counting on him baby-sitting, so Jody said she’d go up and keeps him company.  Renee was tall and slightly thin with brown hair, darker than Lyle’s, pinned up in back.  She looked nervous and had one of those quick, soft voices where you had to listen carefully to hear everything she said.  Her husband was quite handsome, though not in the way Jody likes.  He was sort of chunky with square features and thick black hair.  His name is Wesley.
As they are going out, Lyle and Jody watch TV in the bedroom for a while then they go into the living room and start making out on the couch.  Jody starts having a fantasy that they were a teen-age couple that had to get our baby, Kitty.  After we put Kitty back, they go back to the living room.
Lyle says that he’s just sure he’s love with Jody.  Jody knows it, she says she doesn’t care if he loves her or not.  Lyle feels so sorry.  He thinks that they just have to know each other better.  He wants to have love-affair with Jody, but he wants Jody to know the problem is about his parents.  He just feels like this year is going to be pretty tough for him.  He’s just got to get a scholarship and works hard and yet to start all over with teachers who don’t know him and underneath, he supposes, he’s afraid of going to pieces.  What he’s really afraid of is if they start having an affair and it doesn’t go well.  It might be kind of throws him, and he just can’t afford that right now.  Jody knows it.

***
Jody’s mother are going to have the operation in January, and then two weeks later she and Elliott are going away for a week to some island in the Caribbean to relax.  At first, she wasn’t sure if it would be okay to leave Eric and Jody home alone.  In the past when she’s gone away, Jody and Eric have stayed with her mother’s friend, Harietta, or her younger brother, Howard.  Jody’s mother and Elliott left on their trip on Friday evening.  On Saturday Lyle and Jody are planning to go to a folk-music concert.  Jody used to play guitar and even took lessons for a couple of years at school.  She stopped the lesson, but she still plays sometimes, mostly alone in her room.  The concert was good.  Afterward, they went out for pizza and beer.  They didn’t get back to the apartment till almost two.  Lyle looked around the living room.  Suddenly, Lyle asks to Jody what if he loves her.  Jody answers that it will ok, she loves Lyle too.  And they get a relation that night.
Jody’s mother always says that men can’t help having illusions about women and that you’d go crazy trying to make them give them up.  So if Lyle really and truly wants to think of her as a “good” person, she supposes it doesn’t hurt to let him.  It’s not that she thinks she’s a bad person, even, it’s more that she would have thought, say, if she were describing herself to someone who’d never met her, to list “goodness” as one of my major attributes.

***
The second week of April, Jody was sick for most of the week.  She hadn’t been sick for that long in more than two years.  In the third day, when she was debating if she should go in for a day of school, the letter came from Cornell and Swarthmore.  She got into both of them!  Cornell she had applied to more as security, but she was pretty nervous about Swarthmore.  Jody gets home late at Thursday, almost at supper time.  The second she opened the door, her mother came bounding out of the kitchen, a huge smile on her face.  She pulled this letter out from behind her back.  Jody could see from the stationery it was the letter from Radcliffe.  Her mother was really happy that her daughter got letter from Radcliffe.  But Jody wasn’t.  She doesn’t like Radcliffe to be her next college.  Her mother stared at her and asked what she was talking about.  She didn’t believe that Jody would prefer Swarthmore than Radcliffe.
Lyle got into all the places he applies to, but Haverford id the only one that offered him a more or less full scholarship, so he’s going there.  He knew Jody was planning to go to Swarthmore.  At the end of the week, Jody went to her mother and told her she’d thought it over and had decided that she’d be happier at Swarthmore and her mother said “Ok”.

***
Someday, on May 14th each year Jody’s school has an event called Alumni Day.  Not all the alumni come back.  She had the feeling that Whitney, her ex-boyfriend, might be one of the ones to come back.  When she got to school that morning, she wasn’t really surprised to see him standing in the front hall.  Jody and Whitney were talking and make some dating that night.  Jody feels guilty though, mainly in relation to Lyle. 
The following night, which was a Saturday, she’d agreed to go up to Lyle’s sister’s apartment and baby-sit with him.  Frankly, that night, Lyle knows that Jody had ever slept with Whitney.  Lyle’s very angry and they broke up.

***
Finally, day by day they never talk each other.  One night, Jody can’t sleep.  She suddenly get this tremendous urge to talk to Lyle.  Jody says that she’s really sorry for that night with Whitney.  She’s repenting for her sins.
The following day, no one was home.  The apartment was completely silent.  Jody started into her room, when she saw a note in Eric’s hand-writing.  He’d tape it into the refrigerator.  “Meet Lyle at the court”, it said.  So, Jody decided to go to the court.  When she got to the court, she could see Lyle playing.  He was playing doubles with three other men.  Jody walked over to the side of the court and sat on the hall, looking down, watching him playing.
He didn’t see Jody.  He was too intent on the game.  She began feeling excited, despite herself, and then mad that just a little call from him could have that effect on her.  It’s funny about couples.  It’s not that she thinks the only relationship is the kind that last for all time.  Maybe it’s sort of romantic, to want that.  But she wish she could be looking back ten years from now so she could know if Lyle will be someone important, someone who’s still there, or someone whom she’ll just remember because he was the first.  Not the first in one sense, but the first in term of being all-out in love.



Comments:

Love is magic.  When people felt in love, the word seems brighter and more beautiful.  Lyle and Jody are the couple who knows about love.  Jody was eighteen when she felt in love with Lyle.  Maybe she had a sin with Whitney, but she knows her last love is Lyle.  If Jody told to Lyle about Whitney with patient and guilty, Lyle would forgive Jody and they’re still in their relationship.  But Lyle is a different person.  He didn’t grow up in New York where having sex without marrying is usual thing there.  So, he felt angry when he knew that Jody was one of the New Yorker who did that thing.

Rabu, 23 Mei 2012

this is my first blog!

It's 1.18 a.m and must I introduce my self? hahaha.
well, this is my first blog. I dunno what to do with this term or whatever it is.
my name is kiki. now I am on my fourth semester and it's not as easy as I considered before -__-"
hm, whatelse should I write on this posting?? I even do not know! hahahah :D
just enjoy my new blog. and.... nice to meet me yaa ^^,