Excerpt from I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

That evening, Nedra Frank picked up on the first ring.

"I know you're busy," I said. I told her what Ray had just called and told me: that my mother's condition had gotten worse.

"I'm working on it right now, as a matter of fact," she said. "I've decided to leave some of the Italian words and phrases intact to give you some sense of the music."

"The music?"

"Italian is such a musical language. I didn't want to translate the manuscript to death. But you'll recognize the words I've left untouched--either contextually or phonetically. Or both. And some of the proverbs he uses are virtually untranslatable. I've left them in whole but provided parenthetical notations--approximations. Now, I'm preserving very little of the Sicilian, on the assumption that one weeds the garden. Right?"

"Yeah," I said. "Whatever. It's the English I'm more interested in, anyway." She sure didn't have a whole lot of use for Sicily. "So . . . what's he like?" I asked.

There was a pause. "What's he like?"

"Yeah. I mean, you know the guy better than I do at this point. I'm just curious. Do you like him?"

"A translator's position should be an objective one. An emotional reaction might get in the way of--"

The day had been brutal. I had no patience with her scholarly detachment. "Well, just this once, treat yourself to an emotional reaction," I said. "For my sake."

There was dead air on the other end for the next several seconds. Then I got what I had asked for. "I don't like him, actually, no. Far from it. He's pompous, misogynistic. He's horrible, really."

Now the silence was coming from my end.

"You see?" she said. "Now you're offended. I knew I shouldn't have relinquished my objectivity."

"I'm not offended," I said. "I'm just impatient. I just want it to get done before she's too sick to enjoy it."

"Well, I'm doing the best I can. I told you about my schedule. And anyway, I think you'd better read it first before you decide to share it with her. If I were you, I wouldn't talk it up just yet."

Now her lack of objectivity was pissing me off. What right did she have to tell me what I should or shouldn't do? Screw you, I wanted to tell her. You're just the translator.



Ma's third round of chemo made her too sick to eat. In February, she landed back in the hospital weighing in at ninety-four pounds and looking like an ad for famine relief. By then, I'd stopped bringing Thomas to see her. The incident on the highway had scared me shitless, had kept me up more nights than one.

"This may jab a little going in, sweetie pie," the nurse said, her intravenous needle poised in front of my mother's pale face.

Ma managed a nod, a weak smile.

"I'm having a little trouble locating a good vein on you. Let's try it again, okay? You ready, sweetheart?"

The insertion was a failure. The next one, too. "I'm going to try one more time," she said. "And if that doesn't work, I'm going to have to call my supervisor."

"Jesus fucking Christ," I mumbled. Walked over to the window.

The nurse turned toward me, red-faced. "Would you rather step outside until we're finished?" she said.

"No," I said. "I'd rather you stopped treating her like she's a friggin' pincushion. And as long as you're asking, I'd just as soon you stop calling her 'honey' and 'sweetie pie' like we're all on fucking Sesame Street or something."

Ma began to cry--over my behavior, not her own pain. I've got this talent for making bad situations worse. "Later, Ma," I said, grabbing my jacket. "I'll call you."

Late that same afternoon, I was standing at the picture window in my apartment, watching unpredicted snow fall, when Nedra Frank pulled up unexpectedly in her orange Yugo, hopping the curb and coming to a sliding stop. She'd parked half on the sidewalk, half in the road.

© June 1998 , Wally Lamb. Used by permission.