Table Of ContentContents
Title Page
Dedication
1. Tell the Truth
2. Later Classified as Our First Date
3. Leo Frawley, RN
4. We Entertain
5. A.k.a. the Transportation
6. Alice Makes Up Her Own Mind
7. Reveille
8. Leo’s House
9. Née Mary Ciccarelli
10. I (Nearly) Kill Someone
11. Now What Do I Do?
12. Clarification
13. Ms. Bravado
14. I’m a Normal Person
15. Advanced Social Outreach
16. Slow-Normal
17. Venues Not Available to Me
18. The Life of the Party
19. The Annals of Surgery
20. Saturday Night
21. Social Work
22. I Move On
23. Here Comes the Bride
24. Hiatus
25. Do It for Dr. Thrift
26. Plan A
27. The Opposing Argument
28. The Wife-Bride
29. We’re Engaged
30. A Free Woman
31. Alice Thrift, A.D.
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Elinor Lipman
Copyright
For Mameve Medwed,
dear and exemplary friend
PRAISE FOR ELINOR LIPMAN’S
The Pursuit of Alice Thrift
“Elinor Lipman’s latest airy, lovelorn comic novel turns out to be her most
buoyant. . . . Ms. Lipman takes a very familiar notion—that the wallflower will
blossom once she starts to dance—and gives it an amusing new spin.”
—The New York Times
“Lipman is the diva of dialogue; her repartee flashes like Zorro’s sword.” —
People
“Such a sharp wit and deft touch. . . . Funny and pitch-perfect throughout.” —
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“A delightful romantic romp that toys with social conventions and mocks a
classist society. As usual, Lipman’s characters are brilliantly fleshed out.” —
Chicago Tribune
“Lipman has a real skill for crafting idiosyncratic characters and placing them in
life-altering situations with lots of humor and warmth.” —The Boston Globe
“Lipman’s subtle comic portraits make the reader believe in the ridiculous, root
for the socially inept and, most pleasing of all, laugh at the misfit in each of us.”
—Time Out New York
“About the best trick any writer can possess is the ability to make everything
look easy, even to other writers who know better. Elinor Lipman possesses this
gift in spades, and The Pursuit of Alice Thrift treats head, heart, and funny bone
with equal respect.” —Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls
“Alice emerges as an anti–Bridget Jones: a smart, centered woman who doesn’t
get the guy—and ends up better for it.” —Entertainment Weekly
“[Lipman] writes eloquently and beautifully . . . and seems to get better with
every book.” —Cincinnati Enquirer
“Funny enough to make you laugh out loud.” —The Seattle Times
“Elinor Lipman writes with perfect pitch. I started to underline all the bits of
Alice Thrift that either amazed or tickled me, but I finally had to quit, there were
simply too many.” —Anita Shreve, author of The Pilot’s Wife
1. Tell the Truth
YOU MAY HAVE SEEN US IN ‘VOWS‘ IN THE NEW YORK TIMES: ME, alone, smoking a
cigarette and contemplating my crossed ankles, and a larger blurry shot of us,
postceremony, ducking and squinting through a hail of birdseed. We didn’t have
pretty faces or interesting demographics, but we had met and married in a
manner that was right for Sunday Styles: Ray Russo came to my department for
a consultation. I said what I always said to a man seeking rhinoplasty: Your nose
is noble, even majestic. It has character. It gives you character. Have you thought
this through?
The Times had its facts right: We met as doctor and patient. I digitally
enhanced him, capped his rugged, haunted face with a perfect nose and
symmetrical, movie-star nostrils—and he didn’t like what he saw on the screen.
“Why did I come?” he wondered aloud, in a manner that suggested depth. “Did I
expect this would make me handsome ?”
“It’s the way we’ve been socialized,” I said.
“It’s not like I have a deviated septum or anything. It’s not like my insurance
is going to pick up the tab.”
Vanitas vanitatum: elective surgery, in other words.
He asked for my professional opinion. I said, “There’s no turning back once
we do this, so take some time and think it over. There’s no rush. I don’t like to
play God. I’m only an intern doing a rotation here.”
“But you must see a lot of noses in life, on the street, and you must have an
artistic opinion,” said Ray.
“If it were I, I wouldn’t,” I said for reasons that had nothing to do with
aesthetics and everything to do with the nauseating sound of bones cracking
under mallets in the OR.
“Really? You think the one I have is okay?”
“May I ask why you want to do this now, Mr. Russo?” I asked, glancing at the
chart that told me he’d turn forty in a month.
“Let’s be honest: Women like handsome men,” he said, voice wistful, eyes
downcast.
What could I say except a polite “And you don’t think you’re handsome
enough? Do you think women judge you by the dimensions of your nose?”
Next to me he smiled. The camera mounted above the monitor played it back.
He had good teeth.
“I haven’t been very lucky in love,” he added. “I’m forty-five and I don’t have
a girlfriend.”
“Is your date of birth wrong?” I asked, pointing to the clipboard.
“Oh, that,” he said. “I knock five years off when I’m filling out a job
application because of age discrimination, even at forty-five. Bad habit. I forgot
you should always tell the truth on medical forms.”
“And what is your field?”
“I’m in business, self-employed.”
I asked what field.
“Concessions. Which puts me before the public. Wouldn’t you think that if
everything was okay in the looks department, I’d have met someone by now?”
I hated this part—the psychiatry, the talking. So instead of asserting what is
hard to practice and even harder to preach in my chosen field—that beauty’s
only skin deep and vastly overrated—I pecked at some keys and moved the
mouse. We were back to Ray’s original face, bones jutting, cartilage flaring,
nose upstaging, a face that my less scrupulous attending physicians would have
loved to pin to their drawing boards. If it sounds as if I saw something there,
some goodness, some quality of mercy or masculinity that overrode the physical,
I didn’t. I was flattering him to serve my own principles, my own anti–plastic
surgery animus. Ray Russo thought my silence meant I wouldn’t change a hair.
“Vows” would reconstruct our consultation, with Ray remembering, “I heard
something in her voice. Not that there was a single unprofessional moment
between us, but I had an inkling she may have been saying ‘No, don’t fix it’ in
order to terminate our doctor-patient relationship and embark on a personal one.”
Reading between the lines, and knowing the outcome, you’d think something
was ignited in that consultation, a spark between us, but I wasn’t one of those
attractive doctors with a stethoscope draped around her shoulders and a red silk
blouse under her lab coat. I was an unhappy intern, plain and no-nonsense at
best, and hoping to perform only noble procedures once I’d finished my
residency, my fellowship, my board certification—to reconstruct the soft tissue
of poor people, to correct their birth defects, their cleft lips and palates, their
cranial deformities, their burns, their mastectomies, to stitch up their torn flesh in
emergency rooms so that no scar would force them to relive their horrible
accidents. I’d hand off to my less idealistic and more affluent associates the nose
jobs, the liposuctions, the face-lifts, the eye and tummy tucks, the breast
augmentations, and all cosmetic procedures that make the marginally attractive
beautiful.
