43 stories (about 400 pages) for £9.99 by a rediscovered writer whose work has been compared to Munro, Carver and Chekhov. She had a lively start to life (3 failed marriages and 4 sons by the time she was 28) and was an alcoholic for decades. From the age of 10 she had scoliosos, which was often painful. For a while she was an elective mute. Her mother had alcohol problems and may well have killed herself. Her output was intermittent - she did many jobs because she needed the money - but she ended up being a creative writing prof, dying in 2004.
As the introduction notes, her stories don't hang around. The first story begins in a laundromat. In the second paragraph the narrator recalls Mrs Armitage from a previous laundromat she visited - "I was a young mother then and washed diapers on Thursday mornings. She lived above me, in 4-C. One morning at the laundry she gave me a key and I took it. She said that if I didn't see her on Thursdays it meant she was dead and would I please go find her body. That was a terrible thing to ask of someone; also then I had to do my laundry on Thursdays". It's zappy, with the speed of stand-up or Flash. Indeed, there are pieces which are little longer than a page.
"Point of View" begins by explaining, using a Chekhov story as an example, why the 3rd person can be more effective than the 1st. Readers "feel, hell, if the narrator thinks there is something in the dreary creature worth writing about there must be. I'll read on". So the story continues in the 3rd person, mostly. The final paragraph is
| She hears someone drive up slowly to the phones. Loud jazz music comes from the car. Henrietta turns off the light, raises the blind by her bed, just a little. The window is steamed. The car radio plays Lester Young. The man talking on the phone holds it with his chin. He wipes his forehead with a handkerchief. I lean against the cool windowsill and watch him. I listen to the sweet saxophone play 'Polka Dots and Moonbeams.' In the steam of the glass I write a word. What? My name? A man's name? Henrietta? Love? Whatever it is I erase it quickly before anyone can see. |
All I know of her life is from the notes in this book, but that's enough for me to view the pieces as thinly disguised autobiography - overlapping attempts at using the source material of her life. Fact and fiction merge -
- "Her First Detox", about a young woman having to leave her 4 children (Ben, Keith, Joel and Nathan) behind for a week, doesn't have much of a story structure.
- In the next story, "Phantom Pain", Lu is with her ill father. The details sound familiar.
- Next is "Tiger Bites" where Lou, 19, with baby Ben is trying to forget her problems by attending a family reunion. She's met at the station by Bella Lynn (her cousin in another story) who warns her that Lou's mother is in hospital after a suicide attempt, her father's too angry with Lou to see her, and that Bella's loved husband got beaten up by Bella's relatives and has left her. When Bella finds out that Lou's husband has divorced her and she's 4 months pregnant, she arranges within minutes an abortion just over the border in Mexico, and gives her $500. Lou arrives at the clinic, decides (having paid) that she won't go through with it, suspects that another woman has died while she's at the clinic. Bella forgives and understands. It has a story structure, and some details that match facts in the introduction.
- "Unmanageable" sounds like another anecdote that could be true. A mother wakes wondering how to get some booze before her kids wake up. Her son Nick, 13, has taken her wallet and car keys for safe keeping but she rustles up enough change. She goes out and gets some drink. When she returns, Nick disciplines her. Once she's got her sons off to school she leaves for the nearest liquor shop. In a later story, "So Long", she writes "I don't regret my alcoholism anymore. Before I left Carolina my youngest son, Joel, came to breakfast. The same son I used to steal from, who told me I wasn't his mother"
The tone as well as content can sound autobiographical. In "Silence" (which summarizes her early life, repeating details from other pieces) she writes about the exclusive Radford School of Girls - "I haven't talked much about this school. I don't mind telling people awful things if I can make them funny. It was never funny", and that "I gradually became a part of the Haddad family. I believe that if this had not happened I would have grown up to be not just neurotic, alcoholic, and insecure, but seriously disturbed. Wacko", and "I exaggerate a lot and get fiction and reality mixed up, but I don't actually lie".
The pieces often aren't in the shape that we expect of stories. Is that a good thing? It perhaps means the pieces are better as part of a collection. Characters recur ("Conchi"; César - a diver/fisherman, a sister Sally, Kentshereve). Phrases (e.g. "she tried a noose but couldn't get the hang of it") and events recur. "Panteó de dolores" recapitulates themes -
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The three [builders] made so much noise I said forget it, my sister is sick, grave, and you're too loud. Come back another time. I went back into her room but later began to hear some huffing and panting and muffled thuds. They were taking all the doors off the hinges so they could carry them up to the roof to fix them there without making any noise. Am I really just mad because Sally's dying, so get mad at a whole country? The toilet is broken now. They need to take out the entire floor. I miss the moon. I miss solitude. In Mexico there is never not anyone else there. If you go into your room to read somebody will notice you're by yourself and go keep you company. Sally is never alone. |
So does "So Long". Here's the ending -
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Her ex-husband is a politician. He stops by almost every day, in a car with two bodyguards, and two escort cars with men in them. Sally is as close to him as I am with Max. So what is marriage anyway? I never figured it out. At now it is death I don't understand. Not just Sally's death. My country, after Rodney King and the riots. All over the world, the rage and despair. Sally and I write rebuses to each other so she doesn't hurt her lungs talking. Rebus is where you draw pictures instead of words or letters. Violence, for example, is a viola and some ants. Sucks is somebody drinking through a straw. We laugh, quietly, in her room, drawing. Actually, love is not a mystery to me anymore. Max calls and says hello. I tell him that my sister will be dead soon. How are you? he asks. |
Nearly three-quarters through the book, "Let me see you smile" is a surprise, beginning with a male PoV (a defense attorney) then switching to the PoV of a previously mentioned female, back in time, before switching to the male again, then the female, who resembles the Lucia character. This time she's with Jesse, an under-18 musician friend of her son Ben, and she's in trouble with the law. The defense lawyer, having been initially dismissive of them, enjoys their company. He reassesses his life and splits with his wife. He asks Ben about his mother and boyfriend -
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"they're feeding each other's destructive side, the part that hates themselves. He hasn't played, she hasn't written since they moved to Telegraph. They're going through his money like water, drinking it mostly." "I never get the feeling that they are drunk," I said. "That's because you've never seen them sober." |
He talks to the woman (in this story she's Carlotta) - "Being with Jesse is sort of meditation. Like sitting zazen, or being in a sensory deprivation tank. The past and the future disappear"
A little later, "Mijito" repeats the double-threaded structure. This time the PoVs are a doctor's female helper (like a character we've met in earlier stories) and an under-age Mexican girl who comes illegally to the States, marries someone who is soon imprisoned, and is pregnant. The girl doesn't do much wrong but has a bad time. She seeks medical help (hence the PoVs intersect). Her baby dies, for which she's not entirely blameless.
"Carmen" piles on the suffering. Mona is living with Noodles, an addict. She has kids and she's pregnant. She agrees to be a drug-mule, flies off, nearly gets raped, returns with a condom of heroin. Her waters break as he tries the new supplies. She gets herself to hospital, has a baby girl, but the baby dies moments after birth. It's hard to feel sympathy for Mona, who puts herself at risk for the love of Noodles, though she "knew with a sick certainty that always if there were a choice between me and the boys or drugs, he'd go for the drugs.". Can things get worse? Yep. In the next piece, "Silence", we read that the narrator and her little sister Sally were sexually abused by their grandfather. It has a good (even happy!) ending.
The later pieces have more variety. "502" is too minor. In "Here it is Saturday" the first-person narrator is a 32 year old white male spending time in prison again. He and a friend like books and attend writing classes taught by an old, street-wise woman (Berlin taught in prisons). The final few paragraphs are good, though the genre's become a mite hackneyed nowadays. "B.F. and me" has a 70 year old narrator, another first for the book, though she has autobiographical arthritis and an oxygen tank. "Wait a Minute", which revisits her stay with her dying sister, has a more literary start - "Sighs, the rhythms of our heartbeats, contractions of childbirth, orgasms, all flow into time just as pendulum clocks placed next to one another soon beat in unison. Fireflies in a tree flash on and off as one. The sun comes up and it goes down. The moon waxes and wanes and usually the morning paper hits the porch at six thirty five". Then after a death, "when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. All is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid relentlessness of time"
The final piece, "Homing", is essay/biography, wondering how her life might have turned out if she'd married the boy from school who'd shared with her an interesting in geology - "I didn't realize I loved Willie since our closeness was so quiet, not nothing to do with the love girls talked about all the time, not like romance or crushes or ooh Jeeny loves Marvin". She reckons she'd still have trangressed.
"Point of View" , "A manual for cleaning women", "Toda Luna, Todo Año", "So Long", "Wait a minute" and "Homing" are my favourites, though they're not all stories. I'd have been interested in knowing the dates of publication - or better still, when they were written. The introduction says that "B.F. and Me" was the final piece she wrote, but 2 pieces follow this in the book.
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