Her Native Colors

Description:

Her Native Colors is the story of Phoebe Martin and Molly Adams. Having grown up together in Vermont, the two women have gone their separate ways: Phoebe is now a lawyer with a prestigious San Francisco firm and a divorced mother of a four-year-old boy; Molly has remained in Vermont, teaching school and weaving. Now they are reunited for Molly’s wedding, and while both hope for a warm reunion of old friends, what they experience is the tangle of emotions as they attempt to reconcile themselves to the changes in each other’s life.

Praise:

“Elisabeth Hyde is a remarkably lucid and authoritative novelist; in fact, her technique of storytelling is so precise and polished that Her Native Colors doesn't resemble a first novel at all-except those rare first novels of equally accomplished grace: Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping or Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place.”

“It is also in her knowledge of our individual differences that Elisabeth Hyde appears especially insightful and mature; at a time fraught with the shrillest competition and polarization between men and women-between family life and career-Elisabeth Hyde quietly underlines the conflicts within women. In her exploration of a strained friendship between two women with opposing goals, she writes with both irony and sympathy about the wariness-the potential hostility-with which a single parent views a couple about to marry and have a child. In a stringent landscape of Yankee culture, as fine and straightforward in its detail as an old Audubon print, the novel captures the midpoint of a friend~ ship-and of two women's diverging lives.”

—John Irving

“In her funny and fascinating story of lawyers in and out of love, Elisabeth Hyde has beautifully shown just how our relationships are settled by negotiation and compromise, and how our ordinary lives are governed by daily litigations of the heart. Her Native Colors is impressive not only for its maturity and wit, but also for its wisdom.”

—Ron Hanson

“Her Native Colors is a rich and satisfying story of love and friendship.”

—Hilma Wolitzer

“First Rate -- It is clear that Hyde writes from experience in her hilarious, though quite serious, indictments of the small-minded, humiliating power trips that Big Boy lawyers play on their younger associates – who in turn play them on each other, their support staffs, on down the line.”

—The Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer

“A model post-feminist novel … Her Native Colors explores the idea of ‘having it all’ versus ‘having only some of it’; each of the two central characters realizing that she has been deluded and gulled by social pressures.”

—The Los Angeles Times

“This is a well-written first novel of contemporary women coming to terms with the paths they have chosen.”

—Library Journal

“Hyde delves well beneath the surface of Phoebe’s superwoman exterior to present a balanced, sometimes painfully funny, assessment of the price she has been paying all along.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Ms. Hyde’s prose is clean and crisp; she writes with unblinking honesty about the compromised existences of fast-track lawyers; she has a keen ear for the way people really talk; and she is very skillful at setting up and executing scenes.”

—Kansas City Star

“It is in describing the tangle of emotions that Elisabeth Hyde … excels. She unfolds the torment these women must face as they reconcile themselves to the changes in each other’s life and the paths they have chosen to take.”

—Richmond, VA Times-Dispatch

“This little gem of a book concerns friendship and the changes it undergoes due to time and distance. It is beautifully written, well-structured and populated with real people.”

—The Chattanooga Times

“The novel is touching in its treatment of girls and friendships and women and choices, and the question of whether an important relationship will last when friends begin with the same values, but grow in different directions.”

—The Oklahoman

Excerpt:

From Chapter 2:

Saturday morning Phoebe was anxious to get to work. Upon waking up she had promised herself she would stop brooding about the trip – there wasn’t anything to brood about, as Janice had said; but more importantly there wasn’t time to brood; she had a brief to write before leaving. So she dropped Andrew off with Rusty before breakfast – Rusty liked to cook in the morning anyway – and drove directly to the office. She had a few more cases she wanted to look up before she actually began drafting Herb’s brief, and Saturday mornings were a good time to work in the library: there weren’t many other attorneys around, and those who were there had the same goal as she did – getting in and out as quickly as possible.

Phoebe’s law firm, Judson and Day, was one of the largest in San Francisco, with a present count of 78 partners and 123 associates. Phoebe had been there three years since graduating from law school. Within her first month she had devised a system for categorizing her fellow associates: there were those who would go for partnership – the Nuts – and those who would leave after three or four years – the Bolts. (The Nuts were clearly in the majority.) Each group had its own set of marked characteristics: Nuts, for instance, chatted with partners on the main set of elevators, while Bolts used the back elevators and kept to themselves. Nuts regularly were asked out on recruiting dinners – usually held at the finest restaurants in the city, where they would spend upwards of eighty dollars per person while glorifying the firm to the candidate. Bolts, disgusted with this deception, begrudgingly went out on one dinner, and afterward – if they were asked again, which they usually weren’t, since they failed to give enough of a pep talk to the poor interviewee -- became unavailable due to their heavy workload. Nuts had a knack for knowing when to speak at meetings and when to stay quiet; Bolts played it safe by keeping their mouths shut the whole time.

And there were other differences, of course: Nuts buttoned and belted their raincoats neatly; kept their hair trimmed; jogged along the Embarcadero with other members of the firm during lunch hour; got married and stayed married; bought houses out in Orinda; wore rubbers over their wingtips when it rained; remembered the names of the wives of senior partners; and decorated their offices with framed Japanese prints. Bolts, on the other hand, ate with the same people (other Bolts) every day; rented; took mid-afternoon breaks at nearby video arcades; and only had time to grab a plateful of shrimp and crab from the buffet at the weekly thank-God-it’s-Friday-afternoon party before escaping back to their own private office gatherings in the Barracks. Nuts and Bolts were similar in two respects: they all padded their hours, some more, some less; and they all hated Herb Sullivan.

Phoebe, of course, was a Bolt.

Her friend Janice was also a Bolt, and often Phoebe and Janice would spend their lunch hour at the baths on Van Ness – one of the few places where they could be reasonably certain not to run into any other members of the firm, who if they were inclined toward this kind of relaxation would have joined one of the more acceptable and more elaborate health-and-fitness clubs downtown. But there in the privacy of a small redwood-paneled room, Phoebe and Janice would soak themselves in one of the large round tubs, listening to rock music and letting the jets of hot water pulse against the smalls of their backs as they commiserated with each other. Janice’s problem wasn’t Herb Sullivan; her problem, for the past two years, had been Francis Clapp, a shy, bumbling Milquetoast of a partner who specialized in wills and trusts. Francis Clapp was the only partner at Judson and Day who practiced in this field, and Janice was the only associate assigned to him. Janice, who had accepted the job offer after receiving an explicit promise that she would be assigned to the litigation section, despised that area of law; she had taken a course in wills during law school, but never went to class, and managed a sixty-eight on the exam only by having hand-copied an old bar review outline on the subject the night before. “Transcription,” she would always claim, “saved my ass.” Yet although she had made it clear to the partner in charge of assignments that she wanted out – she even emphasized her grade as a sign of her lack of expertise in the area – he was unsympathetic. Janice worried that the longer she worked for Francis Clapp the more likely it was that she would get locked into wills as a specialty field. She was right.

“But look at the bright side,” Phoebe told her one day at the baths. “You’re not working your ass off for Mr. Fuckface. Try working for Herb. See what it’s like having someone throw your work back in your face when he hasn’t even read it.’

“But the guy’s so incompetent,” Janice said. “We went into probate court the other day; Frank turned beet red when it was his turn to talk. I don’t think he had even read the will.”

“What did you do?”

“Kept my mouth shut, of course,” Janice said. “It’s not my place to talk in court. Not with this firm.”

Phoebe took a sip of her Calistoga water.

“It’s enough to make you want to go back to Iowa and hang out your own shingle,” Janice grumbled.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Phoebe said.

“Well, if I keep working for Frank my career’s going to be ruined.”

Phoebe closed her eyes. “How did a guy like that ever get to be partner?” she wondered aloud.

“Who knows,” Janice said. “Maybe he slept his way to the top.”

“I still think you have a better deal,” Phoebe said later, drying off. “When was the last time you had to work on a weekend?”

“I don’t know,” Janice said. “A month or two ago?”

“I work every other goddamn weekend,” Phoebe said. “Whenever Rusty has Andrew. And I don’t screw around during the week, do I? Not like others? I work hard all week long and still I have to come in every other weekend for that baboon.”

“Yes, but at least you don’t have a problem with your hours,” Janice said. “I haven’t billed more than a thousand.” That was back in August; associates were expected to bill between eighteen hundred and two thousand hours annually (though Nuts usually billed more), and yearly reviews were coming up in November.

“Pad,” Phoebe said. She pointed her toe into her stocking and pulled.

“I already have,” Janice said.

“I’m so fat,” Phoebe sighed. “Look at this gut.”

Reviews

Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer 6/1/86 by Rebecca Brown

Seattle writer Elisabeth Hyde was a Justice Department lawyer before she quit to write Her Native Colors, her first novel. Hyde’s clear prose and insight into character were undoubtedly valued in the world of law, but they are probably put to much better use in this sharp work of fiction.

Her Native Colors has a strong sense of place and is full of loving insights into the relationships between friends, family and lovers. Although it could easily fall into the trap of being merely an urban vs. rural moral tale, Her Native Colors is spared that fate through Hyde’s compassion and wit in describing her characters.

Phoebe Martin and her former husband, Rusty, are young attorneys in San Francisco. Invited to the wedding of her oldest girlhood friend, Phoebe returns, with her precocious 4-year-old Andrew, to the small New England town she left behind so many years previous. The tensions that began developing when Phoebe made the transition to West Coast big-city life comes to a head as Phoebe examines – and forces her family and friends to examine – the choices they made that led to their very different lifestyles.

In the prestigious San Francisco firm of Judson and Gray, Phoebe has one confidante, a fellow associate named Janice, who is a sort of indentured servant in the Wills and Trust Division. Phoebe and Janice divide the firm’s associates into “Nuts and Bolts”: Nuts want more than anything to become partners, and pursue that lofty goal via jogging with firm members during lunch hours, making pleasant conversation on elevators and wearing regulation lawyer raincoats.

On the other hand, Bolts – among whom Phoebe and Janice count themselves – hate the difference between the reality of corporate law and the idealistic fantasies they had in law school. They dream of walking out on their jobs and seek what little vengeance they can by ducking out to play video games in the afternoon, hiding in seedy saunas and stealing vast quantities of paper clips and yellow Post-its. They resent work that they feel is basically useless, offensive paper pushing. It also gives them ulcers.

It is clear that Hyde writes from experience in her hilarious, though quite serious, indictments of the small-minded, humiliating power trips that Big Boy lawyers play on their younger associates – who in turn play them on each other, their support staffs, on down the line.

When Phoebe manages to escape Judson and Gray for her brief trip home, she discovers that though her former and present lives seem very different, neither is perfect. Rural New England offers equally irritating local equivalents for corporate lawyers with inflated egos and incomes. Small town gossips bicker over how to drink milk and who left the Friday night dance with whom. Phoebe’s old schoolmistress is still the same, glaring disapproval at anything more racy than breathing.

Even Phoebe’s old friend seems to have been sucked into the apparent mediocrity of the town by becoming a teacher at the very school from which she and Phoebe graduated – her artistic interest in fabric too often relegated to knitting sweaters for Christmas presents. Faced with the contrasts between her two lives, Phoebe reconsiders what she values in each.

Hyde does not opt for facile accusations or easy answers. She shows Phoebe in the process of redefining what attracts her to and repels her from these seemingly disparate poles of her existence. Phoebe’s self-awareness comes out of a sense of courage, of love and compromise. She discovers that her own native colors may not be as fast as they had appeared.

Reader’s Guide Questions

Why do Phoebe and Molly have such a difficult time reconnecting? Do you think their relationship is one of equals?
How can someone in Phoebe’s position find balance in her life? Do you think it is possible – or satisfying – for a woman to combine a high-pressure job with child-rearing?
This novel was published in 1986. Do you think the situation for working mothers has changed much since that time?
How important are your women friends? Your childhood friends?