The Matter of Sylvie by Lee Kvern
Fiction Friday, August 27th, 2010
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The Matter of Sylvie by Lee Kvern
A Wednesday in July 1961 begins like any other for Jacqueline Burrows. Jacqueline is the mother of three children, including her sweet, difficult daughter Sylvie. In a story that deals with the extraordinary challenges of raising a child with severe special needs, The Matter of Sylvie traces the course of Jacqueline’s Wednesday, a life-shifting day. The mother’s impulses on that day, combined with her absent husband and her other young children, culminate in an event that echoes into the next two decades.
The resulting decision reverberates over the course of decades and resounds in the individual, pivotal Wednesdays of both her husband, Lloyd, in February 1973, and her adult daughter, Lesa, in October 1987. A familial triptych: three Wednesdays, three decades, three narrators whose lives are intricately woven, The Matter of Sylvie explores the depths of mother, father, and daughter—and ultimately, the matter of Sylvie herself.
Praise for Lee Kvern’s first novella, Afterall
“A spirited, funny and poignant first novella.”—Vue Weekly
“An inspired morality tale that is funny, scary, and bright as a midnight neon strip.”
—Marina Endicott, author of Good to a Fault
Lee Kvern is an award-winning author of short stories and fiction. Her novel, Afterall, was nominated for the 2006 Alberta Book Awards. Her short stories are well celebrated: “White” was the winner of the 2007 CBC Literary Awards, and “I May Have Known You” is nominated for the 2010 Alberta Literary Awards. Her work has been published in Event, Descant, enRoute and Joyland, New York. Lee lives in Okotoks, Alberta.
Read an INTERVIEW with Lee Kvern
Visit Lee’s website at: www.leekvern.com
REVIEWS
EXCERPT
The Pyrex on the stove is bubbling gently, making soft sighing sounds like those of a satisfied woman. Jacqueline stands a moment in the kitchen and enjoys the hushed murmur of the coffee. She looks out the window, her focus somewhere off in the distance at the ravine beyond where the children are not allowed to go. She notices a car in the alley, which in itself is not unusual; certainly cars pass through the alley all the time. But the long, sage-coloured station wagon with wood panels on the sides is stopped; she can hear the motor idling in between the sound of a radio playing elsewhere, the chickadees in among the cotoneasters with their two-note refrain, first high, then low, Be-there, Be-there. At least that’s what it always sounds like to Jacqueline, a wearisome reminder that she’s running behind and she won’t ever catch up. She stands on her toes to get a better look at the car and sees the familiar glint of Sylvie’s black hair in the bright sun. The hair on the back of Jacqueline’s neck stands on end. She feels abruptly nauseated, as if she will throw up right then and there in the kitchen sink on top of the dirty dishes leftover from breakfast and lunch that she hasn’t got to yet. She feels the bile rise in her throat. She fights it back down. Not now, not now.
As if in her dreams, helpless, she watches the man at the wheel of the idling station wagon as he kicks open the passenger door with his foot. She can see him clearly in the light of day: his brown brush cut, the angle of his cheeks, she registers that the right one is scarred, the blue eyes, the startling size of his extended hand that has something in it—what, she can’t tell, but Sylvie sees it and is interested. Sylvie steps toward the car door. Sylvie loves car rides. It’s her favourite thing to do. Car ride? she asks whenever she sees one pass by on the street. Sylvie go car ride?
Without taking her eyes off Sylvie, Jacqueline scans the alley peripherally. Where is Lesa? Her steadfast guardian angel, Sister Lesa? Doesn’t Lesa know a child’s safety lies in numbers? She can’t see Lesa anywhere. The man smiles widely, encouragingly. He’s saying something—Sylvie’s name? How can he know? Sylvie moves toward the smiling car, the idling man. If Lesa were there, Jacqueline could yell for her to get Sylvie and Sylvie would come. Jacqueline never raises her voice to Sylvie; it only causes Sylvie to run faster, farther away. She is afraid to open her mouth now at the screen window in her kitchen in the bright light of day, radios playing, chickadees singing, the smell of freshly mown lawn on the slight breeze, the strange smiling man, the car, her daughter.
She’s paralyzed by the fear that if she opens her mouth and a scream is what comes out, then she’ll terrify Sylvie. Who knows what Sylvie might do? Jump into the passenger seat, reach for whatever the man has in his hand, or bolt, and turn and run the other direction down the alley? Oh God, if there ever was one, let there be one now. Be-there, the chickadees scold. Be-there. But Lesa’s not there. She’s nowhere in sight.
Sylvie takes another step forward to see what the man has in his hand. She’s half in, half out of the station wagon now. Jacqueline feels the underside of her fear fall out, terror spikes through her body like an electrical charge.
“Sylvie!” she yells out the kitchen window.
Sylvie pauses, surreally, as if perched precariously at the top of the steep basement stairs over and over again like in Jacqueline’s dreams. Sylvie turns from the car and grins her crooked smile back at her mother, holding up a single red Smartie, as if to say, “See, Mom, it’s all right. It’s just a Smartie.” The man follows Sylvie’s gaze to the woman in the kitchen window, and for a brief exacting moment, mother and stranger lock eyes. Then the man smiles at her too, a smile that etches itself in Jacqueline’s mind like a pick-axe, so that when she tells it to the rcmp constable they send in lieu of her rcmp husband who couldn’t be found at the moment, nor could they raise him on the radio, then Jacqueline will tell the husband of the woman waiting for her coffee on Jacqueline’s front step right now that the man’s top two middle teeth were inverted like a V, and he had a scar on his right cheek and his eyes were blue, arctic ice.
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[...] novel The Matter of Sylvie is shortlisted for the George Bugnet Fiction Award. Read more about The Matter of Sylvie. Read an INTERVIEW with Lee Kvern about The Matter of [...]
[...] Read more about The Matter of Sylvie [...]
THE MATTER OF SYLVIE, by Lee Kvern, is a delight—humorous and thoughtful at the same time. Three individuals from the same family experience separate Wednesdays, each more than a decade apart, each grappling with the matter of Sylvie. Ms. Kvern draws the reader in from the outset as together we too consider Sylvie from the perspectives of Sylvie’s mother, father, and older sister. I found the writing to be honest and engaging, with a terrific sense and depth of character and place. The characters were well-drawn and vivid, and the locations shivering—particularly the father’s story in the frozen Canadian winter. Sylvie’s specialness reaches across 36 years in this novel as each of her family members, in their own way, seeks to place Sylvie in their lives. Not your ordinary, every day novel and constructed to keep the reader turning pages as these three perspectives intertwine and reveal themselves, perhaps as only family can. There is a lot here in this novel of about 200 pages—a read that will not disappoint.