- Chicken-Flavored and Lemon-Scented - Colette has been a driving examiner for 12 years, in a little team of men. Alejandro is a charming new arrival who she fancies. She rehearses conversation topics. He organises an Xmas party at his flat. She waits for all the other guests to leave then sleeps with him. When they next meet at work, he tells her that they're just friends (giving her the news like he might tell a driver that they've failed). "Chicken-Flavored and Lemon-Scented" is the team's code for a pretty girl. Colette takes one out for a test. They nearly crash. The girl says she's pregnant and needs to pass her test so she can drive to the next state and have an abortion. Colette offers to help. At the end Colette says to Alejandro that they have to talk. She thinks she'll be a good mother.
- Damascus - Mia's 17 y.o. son Gordey is clever and, she thinks, quite good-looking. Scenes with her and Gordey are interlaced with scenes involving teenage Mia and her mother (who lives in Damascis, USA). Mia used to smoke grass in her teens - it helped her find her self. She thinks Gordey is coming home high on something. She checks his friends and workplace. She visits Gordey's father, has cocaine and sex with him, stays out late without telling Gordey. When she returns, she's the teenager and he the disappointed parent. Mia thinks that she, her mother and her son were "rotating through the roles of parent and child, child and parent"
- Twist and Shout - a mother (kids doing well at college) visits her widowered, deaf, rather senile father for a few days. She feels like her teenage self, rebelling against his right-wing attempts. He often sacks his house-keeper of 40 years for reading an Obama book, etc. After arguing with him about recycling the daughter sits in the car and recalls other times she did that. He has a heart attack and she rushes back indoors. The ending is "It will be so much harder to move through the world, now that you move through it alone"
- Turn back, turn back - Lindy (news producer) and Rob (actor, house-husband) have 2 daughters (4 and 8). One evening, when Lindy comes home, Rob's about to leave for acting class. She reads the girls a Grimm story about a girl who avoids a bad marriage at the last moment. The girls bicker and soon fall asleep. Rob had been able to get little TV parts when they had one child. Now auditioning was hard. She checks their joint bank statement and finds that Rob had been at a Queen's Starbucks, which didn't match what 4 y.o. Maud had said. She learns that he's not actually at the class, that he's been working with "Eliza". Her picture's on Facebook - "the kind of very intense freckles that looked like she'd sneezed into a plate of crushed red pepper flakes and suffered the blowback. The kind of freckles that make you look twice: the first time thinking That girl would be so beautiful without all those freckles, and the second time realizing she was so beautiful because of them". When he gets back home he tells her about the class. Lindy realises that he's "Fleshing Out His Character", "Building the Backstory", "Creating an Identity". She tells him what she thinks is happening. He admits it all. The ending is "Lindy had never wanted to live on the edge. She knew that if you weren't careful, you sailed right off".
- Games and rituals - She moved with Conrad to NY so he could do his degree. She didn't get on her course. They live apart. She has games/rituals that she does with Conrad and friends. E.g. Harriet guesses the fate of couples they see; Conrad picks out people they could adopt when married. She discovers at 10 days notice that Conrad's changing university. She thinks of games they used to play - the Lullaby Ritual.
- CobRa - William's worried that his wife Rachael Coburn (ER nurse) will donate him to charity because he no longer sparks joy in her. She starts reading a Japanese de-cluttering book. William calls her CobRa (name-mangling the Japanese way). She's going through perimenopause and keeps having fads, giving his things away - clothes, then books, then bric-a-brac. Finally, she tackles the garage. Without consulting him she gets rid of £1000 snow tires. They're both angry, sleeping in separate rooms. Next day he realises he secretly likes many of the changes (the rules of marriage had made him resist saying so before). She's not so happy - she'd hoped that her efforts would be more "life changing". He realises that this is the start of a new stage of their marriage, not the end of anything.
- 561 - Charlie and her husband Forrest (a surgeon) are helping Forrest's ex, Barbara, move out. When Barbara and Charlie were volunteers at a Suicide Prevention center, Charlie's code-name was 561. There are memory-triggering items around the house. Barbara has migraine -"She doesn't say that having Charlie in the house is the cause but it's sort of implied ... She ... dons a pair of oversized sunglasses that make her look like an insane welder". The 2 women don't like each other. The story goes back to a night 20 years before when Barbara and Charlie were on duty at the call centre. A regular phoned, then phoned again to say that he's overdosed. The ambulance got there too late. Back in the present, packing is done. The (typically low-key) ending is "Of course Charlie knows - everyone knows - that the top three most stressful life events are death, divorce, and relocation. But suddenly she realizes that she and Barbara had gone through a death and divorce together and, as of today, also a relocation. ... And now it's done, as Forrest says. Charlie and Barbara don't have to do anything else together because there isn't anything left for them to do."
- Pandemic Behaviour - On the 63rd day of the pandemic Daphne Zooms Dr Ventura to say that she's getting more migraines. "what migraines really feel like is being tied to a railroad track while the world's longest, loudest freight train thunders over you". Before the pandemic she helped prof Rossignol with his book. "His speech was full of exclamation points, but they were proclamatory rather than excited - imagine Cicero if he'd lived in Florida instead of Rome and wasn't so interested in politics". Her room-mate Lohania is a cosmetics buyer for Macy's. Prof Rossignol dies. Lohania thinks that Dr Ventura is chatting Daphne up. At the end, Lohania and Daphne venture out together.
- Bridesmaid, Revisited - Marlee, 24, wears her bridemaid outfit to work. What will people think? "Maybe that my building burned down and this was the only dress I saved? .... Or that I'm having an odd kind of mental breakdown ... Or that you escaped from somewhere ... from a bridal shop or wax museum". She wore it at the wedding of Rhonda, a hanger-on at school "(being a bridesmaid is like a prison sentence where you try to serve your time and keep your head down and hope no one will rough you up in the shower)". But by the afternoon, the fun's wearing off. "A terrible thing happens that afternoon. Well, actually two terrible things". There's a long flashback to the wedding 3 years before, the fault-finding bride, how Marlee was caught kissing the bride's father. Back in the story's present, she cries at a meeting. The story ends as she's on the way home - "She should have thrown the dress away ... she's a different person now ... She closes her eyes and focuses on changing, renewing. Three stops away from home now. When they get there, she'll be that much closer to being somebody else"
- King Midas - Oscar's 52. He's been married to Winifred for 25 years. "if you were in a good mood, you might describe her as petite and determined, and if you were not in a good mood, you might describe her as a birdlike control freak". His girlfriend of 8 months is Tessa, 33. She has a 7 y,o. son. She's wacky and unreliable. She sees him going into a local bar when she said she was away. He realises that it was only his efforts that kept the relationship going. He gives up [the weakest piece].
- Sky bar - Fawn, 39, used to be married to much older Joel, who owned a music shop. She'd married young, having been unhappy at school. They split after 8 months, 20 years ago. After returning to her hometown to help her parents move, she's stuck at the airport waiting for a delayed flight. "It wasn't accurate to say she lost weight - it was more like she chased the weight off her body the way a farmer would chase a stray dog off his property. And like a suspicious farmer, Fawn still patrols the borders of her body.". She ends up drinking with a drunk woman, Meredith, and 2 men. Joel happens to phone. She apologies for not dropping in. She looks after Meredith, making her vomit in the toilets. When flights are called off for the night, they leave. Joel's waiting outside. They briefly chat before she catches up with her new "friends". At the end "It's just like high school. Only now it's fun" [a good ending]
She often compares appearance with reality -
- "He looks like a retired history teacher and is, in fact, a retired history teacher" (p.4)
- "It seemed extremely important that the Uber driver understand that Mia was not the sort of person who did drugs and fu**ed lawyers and stayed out all night. She did that, yes, but she was not the sort of person who did it, or at least not the the sort who did it regularly" (p.44)
- "Georgia sounded world-weary, or at least as world-weary as an eight-year-old can sound" (p.67)
People are (sometimes consciously) playing roles within a convincing setting/institution (marriage, workplace, etc). The most common setting is the family, between generations. Roles slip and slide - adults go back to being teenagers when with their parents; people adopt the work-roles when off work. I enjoyed all the stories - they had momentum and good one-liners. But I wasn't completely convinced by any of them - the endings often seemed tame.
Other reviews
- booksaremyfavouriteandbest (There are some standouts – ... Bridesmaid, Revisited ... Damascus ... Twist and Shout ... CobRa ... In all of the stories, Heiny demonstrates how to create normal, believable characters while maintaining tension and humour and startlingly good writing.)
- Ian MacAllen (Both the first and last stories look outward, even as the main body of the collection is focused inwardly toward the home. The contrast amplifies the differences in these relationships.)
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