One morning, Faith – “a woman inside the steamy energy of middle age” – goes for a run and finds herself in the Brooklyn neighbourhood where she grew up. In an odd turn of events, she arrives at her childhood home and meets the family who now live in her old apartment. Then, without a second thought, she moves in with them for three weeks. When Faith finally returns home, her partner and grown-up sons are as non-plussed by her explanation of her absence as you might expect.
The story has many things to say – it’s a bit about running (like Alan Sillitoe’s similarly-titled story), and quite a lot about race in 1960s and ‘70s America (in ways that would take a long time to unpack). But what floors me every time is the off-kilter truths it offers about middle age. It reveals something profound about what it means to arrive at midlife, that vantage point from where you can see your own childhood and everything you used to know rapidly receding into the distance, while at the same time you’re looking out ahead and wondering, as Faith puts it, “what in the world is coming next.”
It’s fantastic. And the final paragraph is as sublime and mysterious as a prayer.
First published in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1974, and in The Collected Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994
A Personal Anthology 