The Red Fox Fur Coat by Teolinda Gersao

The first time I read “The Red Fox Fur Coat,” by Teolinda Gersao (translated by Margaret Jull Costa), I flipped back to the beginning and began to read it again. Perhaps the imagery, so specific,… More

Elena Ferrante

The New Yorker has published an email correspondence between Elena Ferrante and Nicola Lagioia. The correspondence will be published in full in Ferrante’s new work titled Frantumaglia: An Author’s Journey Told Through Letters, Interviews and… More

“The Mall” by Evelyn Lau

I’ve always loved “The Mall” by Evelyn Lau published in The Walrus a few years ago.The poem, on the surface, describes the narrator’s experience of visiting a mall.

Hansel and Gretel

Although I don’t remember how or when I first came across “Hansel and Gretel,” I cannot recall a time when I did not know the tale. As a child, what I understood about the story was that a pair of young siblings, a brother and sister, were lost in the forest and needed to find their way home. There were bread crumbs, birds, and disastrously, the candy house. Inside lived the kind old lady who was in fact wretched, lost in a different way. All my life, I thought the story was about the importance of not being fooled by anything too good to be true. When I read it a couple of weeks ago, though, I discovered other layers: the world Hansel and Gretel inhabit is gravely unsympathetic to them, and every character in the story is either touched or motivated by hunger.

Catherine Graham’s “Moths”

I have tried in various moments to imagine how difficult it would be for a child to learn that a parent is dying. Most of us would wish that such an event would never need to occur because we know how unbearably alone the child would feel, become. In her poem “Moths”, from her poetry collection Winterkill, Catherine Graham explores just such an event: a young daughter’s growing comprehension of the fact that her mother is ill and dying.

Laura Lush’s “Highway”

 

A long time ago, when I was going through a particularly difficult time, someone told me, “You need to be one with the road.” When she said this, she meant that life is like a road, and that we cannot escape or fight against its basic nature—the twists, curves, hills or lengths or weather we find. Rather, we must endure. Reading Laura Lush’s poem “Highway” brought the advice to mind. In the poem, the speaker confronts the “brute” (3) nature of the road before her. If we view the road as a metaphor for existence, then we could surmise that the poet is really facing or delineating the more difficult aspects of being alive.

Billie Livingston’s “Clown Lessons”

 

It is interesting how families live not in the present tense but in the present perfect, the tense which connects the past with the present. This inability to exist without the past is what makes being in any family so difficult, so complex, so maddening.

Michelle Berry’s “I Still Don’t Even Know You.”

When I first read Michelle Berry’s story “I Still Don’t Even Know You”, from her collection of the same title, I was struck by the raw, honest moments in the piece. Some writers shape lovely stories that avoid difficult moments, and some writers weave lovely stories that confront pain and confusion. Michelle Berry is in the second category of writers.

Krista Foss’s “The Longitude of Okay”

Krista Foss’s “The Longitude of Okay”, which appears in the 2010 Journey Prize, made me afraid of the moments when we are reduced to who we are and who we are not, when we are made all too clear to ourselves. The story is about Katrin, a college teacher who must try to protect her class against a disgruntled student with a gun. Whether she succeeds or not is uncertain, and this question reverberates through the story.

The alarm sounds, and Katrin asks her students “That fire?” (82), indicating that she is not familiar with the various tones and signals the alarm can produce. Cody, the “smart ass” (82), casually informs Katrin that she should have “read the memo” (82). We learn, though, that she only “glanced at it” before throwing it out, her “small rebellion against scare-mongering and bureaucracy” (83). Not only does Katrin not really know the correct procedure for dealing with an armed intruder, she also finds it difficult to remain in her role of teacher or leader. Once she begins to take action, taping a test to the small window in the door, so that gunman cannot see inside the classroom, she “feels the concavity of her will” (83) and reflects “this is not who you are, Katrin. You don’t save the day” (83). Her voice, when she directs the students to “get down, get back” (83) is a “pant” (83). Also, as the scene unfolds, she cannot help but think about her own potential losses: she hears her daughter’s laughter and feels her husband’s “lips vibrating on the back of her neck” (85). Later, she “regrets …that she is middle-aged, that she is not strong, that she has let disappointment chip away at the better part of herself” (86). Katrin becomes a sort of hero only when, as shots ricochet, she awkwardly pulls off her tights so that she can wrap them around a wounded girl’s arm, to stop blood from “gushing” (88). The fact that the door fails to lock, forcing Katrin to push desks and chairs up against it, hints, perhaps, that the bureaucracy itself is remiss.

Ultimately, the students must help Katrin keep the gunman out. Esam, “her quietest student” (85) removes his belt and “loops it around the door knob” (85), tightening it so that the intruder cannot open the door that won’t lock. Ole Bill, an injured steel worker with his “bum leg” (85), becomes the strong man, helping Katrin push desks out of the way. Warbly, “a tall awkward boy” (85) helps Katrin stack desks against the door and she thinks, “Him, of all people?” (85). It’s as if no one present can remain who they are or who they imagine themselves to be.

After the shooting, Katrin grows depressed. Having failed to protect her students, she now sees other failures, how she has neglected her daughter, for instance. Encounters with her students, though, begin to lighten her. Coming across Esam in the convenience store where he works and perceiving that he is the same as he always was, that he hasn’t been changed by the incident, she asks him, “This isn’t the worst thing to happen to you is it?” (93). For the first time, she is able to see Esam not only as a well-behaved student, but also as human being who knows worlds of violence she does not know. Later, Katrin visits Giovanna, the girl who is shot, and Giovanna challenges Katrin. She is furious that the newspapers call Katrin a hero for pulling her tights off, and don’t mention that she did not “read the fucking memo”(94), implying that if Katrin had read the memo, and had acted quickly and effectively, disaster and Giovanna’s own terrible pain might have been avoided. After this moment, Katrin feels released: “Giovanna’s version of events feels familiar, akin to her own.” For the first time in weeks, she eats and “her stomach throbs with its new fullness” (95).

Finally, Katrin runs into Cody at the grocery store. He is the muscly “smartass” (p.82) who during the shooting “toppled into the shoulder of the girl next to him in a dead faint” (p.89). He, like Katrin, was not who he was supposed to be. He was not strong, nor was he the capable hero his physique and demeanour suggested he would be. He tells her that he is ashamed that he was not brave.

The threat of death reduces teacher and students to their most basic selves, making it impossible for them to maintain their usual roles. Esam can no longer remain the quiet, passive student; Bill can no longer remain disabled; Warbly can no longer remain awkward. The teacher fumbles and shows fear, and Cody cannot become the superman he thinks he should be.

In the final moment, Katrin remembers Cody fainting, and is somehow grateful for the awful vulnerability she witnessed. He stands in direct contrast to the armed student, who wants to express his vulnerabilities through murder.

Foss’s writing is robust and inventive. Every sentence contains an original, resonant image. When the gunman breaks the window Foss writes “The glass shatters and tremolos like a harpsichord” (87). Also, Foss finds the exact, telling detail, so that every character who comes on the scene is somehow fully known to the reader. Katrin’s daughter is described this way: “ the girl’s shoulders curve over a fleshy continuum of breasts, the belly pushes against an outgrown T-shirt and busts out at the waist of her sweatpants” ( 89). Finally, Foss sees well past her characters’ surfaces. Here is Cody during his encounter with Katrin in the grocery store, a moment after she “brushes his shoulder” (96): “she feels him deflate, right there between the Magic Baking Powder, coconut milk, and instant frosting tins. Weeks of something sour and uncomfortable escape through the invisible puncture made by her touch” (96). She finds the very heart of him.

Foss, Krista. “The Longitude of Okay.” The Best of Canada’s New Writers The Journey Prize. Ed. Pasha Malla, Joan Thomas and Alissa York. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010. 82-87.

Mona Simpson’s “Lawns”

The narrator of Mona Simpson’s “Lawns” draws the reader in with her very first words: “I steal”. The words are meant to provoke but also hold the reader. The narrator’s voice, angry and lonely, did hold me, although there were moments when I wanted to turn away from the horrible truth she told.

A first year, pre-med student at Berkley, Jenny steals mail from the dormitory mail room where she works on Saturday mornings. She steals cash, presents, and cookies, among other items, and she reads letters her former high school classmates receive. After stealing, Jenny feels a “rush” and “like she is even for everything she didn’t get before” (80). When the thefts are reported to the police, Jenny stops.

We soon learn what Jenny “did not get” or how she herself has been stolen from. Jenny’s father, in beginning a sexual relationship with Jenny when she was a small child and continuing that relationship into her young adulthood, could be said to have stolen Jenny’s childhood and adolescence, her very happiness. But Jenny is in college now, and the story explores her attempt to end things with her father and to begin a relationship with Glenn, a young man she first sees riding a lawn mower “on a little hill by the infirmary” (82) She loves him and he “thinks” (82) he loves her.

Jenny’s desire to be free of her father moves the story forward, but her attachment to him and his manipulative neediness become the obstacles. When her father drops her off at Berkley, he weeps, and Jenny reflects that though this “ was the moment [she] was waiting for, him gone and [her] alone”, she is “sad” (82), indicating that while she longs to be away from him, she is still attached to him. When he visits her, she doesn’t want to see him, but so that he does not simply mope around her dorm room, embarrassing her in front of her roommate, she decides to “get it over with” and “go with him” (88). Still, when he takes her to the Claremont Hotel, rents the bridal suite (“makes me sick” is Jenny’s response) and Jenny wakes up with her “legs hooked over his shoulders” she says, “Dad, stop it.” (90) Soon after this point, Jenny’s anger begins to win out over her pity and her need for him. When he phones her the next day, she tells him to “leave her alone” and when he asks if they will “end up together” (91) she tells him that they will not. Nevertheless, she is “scared” because she doesn’t “know what’ll happen” (92) suggesting that in spite of her father’s behaviour, she needs him. Given the fact that he is her father, and that the abuse has been going on for so long, I cannot really wonder at Jenny’s mixed feelings.

At the same time that she longs to be free of her father, she wants to begin a relationship with Glenn. But her past intimacy with her father intrudes on her intimacy with Glenn. During Jenny and Glenn’s first sexual encounter, Jenny is afraid she smells, because her father told her when she was “fourteen or fifteen”(82) that she had an odour. Also, feeling that she is “bad” and not like others, Jenny doesn’t want Glenn to know about her past; in fact, she’ll “die” (82) before she tells him. When she has sex with Glenn, she must tell herself that it’s “OK, this is just Glenn” (86).

Finally, Jenny gets so “mad” (94) that her father will not leave her alone, that she tells her mother about the abuse. After this, she tells Glenn, who breaks up with her, a heartbreaking consequence. He tells her that things are “always so serious” (95). Later, the narrator reflects: “I keep thinking of Glenn ‘cause of happiness, that’s what makes me want to hang onto him” (95). Her recollection of riding on the handlebars of Glenn’s lawn mower is poignant:

I was hanging onto the handlebars, laughing. I couldn’t see Glenn but I knew he was there behind me. I looked around at the buildings and lawns, there’s a fountain there, and one dog was drinking from it……I want more days like that. I wish I could have a whole life like that. (96)

Jenny wants carefree happiness, love. But the moment she tries to show Glenn who she really is, the moment she makes a move toward this happiness, it becomes impossible.

Not surprisingly, once everything is out in the open, and Jenny’s sexual relationship with her father seems to be over, Jenny “feel[s] more alone” (98) and she begins to steal again, to fill herself with love and attention meant for others. She limits herself to one letter a day, and refuses to steal letters of anyone she knows. In the last moments of the story, Jenny spots a letter with her name and address typed on it, and after putting it into the trash and then fishing it out, sticks it in her mailbox so that she can “go like everybody else and get mail” (98). The lack of return address leads me to believe the letter is from her father, that Jenny senses this, and that she cannot yet break the attachment. The letter she finds with her name on it is the first piece of mail she receives.

When Glenn breaks up with Jenny, she feels “like [her] dad’s lost [her] everything” (95). We know what she means: he has taken not only her childhood and adolescence, but now her hopes for happiness as an adult. When a person has lost everything, where does she turn? This is one of the questions “Lawns” asks, and I suspect the answer is that a person turns to love or any of its substitutes.

Simpson, Mona. “Lawns.” The Iowa Review. 14. 3 (1984): 80-98. Online. 5 Jan. 2011. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/20156080]

“The Golden Key”

I’ve always loved this very short story, “The Golden Key,” about a boy who must go out into the forest in winter to gather wood. Whenever I read it, I feel as cold as the boy does.

After the boy gathers wood, and before he pulls his sled home, he decides to light a fire because he is “so cold” (614). He “scrap [es] away the snow” (614) , finds a golden key, then, digging into the earth, an iron box. He discovers a lock in the iron box that the key fits. The story ends as the boy begins to turn the key, and the reader never learns what the box holds, whether it will provide treasure or something malicious, something the child will not want.

It doesn’t really matter what the box holds, though, for the story is about how badly the boy needs the “precious things” (614) he believes he will find. The story contains few details, but we can speculate that the boy’s father is working or, worse, is dead or sick. The boy is too young to be charged with the responsibility of collecting wood for his family. Also, he does not seem to possess warm enough clothes. The only adjectives used in relation to the boy are “poor” and “cold” (614).

When I read the story, I imagine an overcast sky and a low, pressing, assaulting wind, the kind that makes you think the world will always be cold. I see the boy pulling his sled across the snow towards the forest. He worries, I think, about his family, and he might wish that he had toys and money, that he could rest. His scarf and mittens are not warm enough. The wood takes a long time to gather, and he is alone as he does his work. The sky through the trees is like grey milk. After he has gathered the wood, and discovers the key and the iron box, he inserts the key in the lock and turns it because he wants what could be inside—what is supposed to be inside–riches, relief, power. He is young, so he is certain the box, even though it is iron, contains the treasure he needs. The golden key would have mesmerized me, too, but I am sure that there is nothing at all good in the box—the iron warns the adult. Likely, the boy is tricked by the golden key, its lovely promises.

He first digs into the snow so that he can find warmth. I wonder if in times of great cold and poverty, especially emotional cold and inner poverty, we are like the boy—pulled away from the warmth we actually need, distracted by the golden keys we find to people or places or things that could bring relief. But the worst that can happen, perhaps, is to become so mesmerized that we forget that we are cold.

Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm. “The Golden Key”. Grimms’ Tales for Young and Old. The Complete Stories. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Anchor Books, 1983. 614.

Patricia Stone’s “Passing On”

Patricia Stone’s intricate and vivid “Passing On”, from her collection Close Calls, examines how a mother “pass[es] on” her anxiety about health and premature death to her daughter, and how her daughter tries to cope with this inherited “dread” (7).

Stone sets the story up skillfully: “Nan Adams sat in the bathtub and solemnly stared at her toe” (6). Having accidentally dropped the “sharp side” (6) of a knife on her toe two days earlier, she fears she has “blood poisoning” (6) or that her toe will require “amputation” (6) and has hidden the condition of her toe from her mother.

As Nan takes a bath, Stone exposes the possible causes of Nan’s worry. We learn, for instance, that when Nan received a tuberculosis test at school and her “circle of pin pricks remained red a day after her test” (10), her mother concluded that Nan had tuberculosis and might need to spend “a year in a sanitorium” (10). On a different day, a pain in Nan’s leg lead her mother to tentatively diagnose rheumatic fever, a disease that could leave girls “crippled” (11). If only slightly ill, Nan must surrender to “shining half-moon bed pans, thermometers, a bed to feign sleep in all day” (12). Furthermore, if Nan needs a drink of water after playing outside all afternoon, she hesitates, “because once her mother…explained that excessive thirst was a symptom of sugar diabetes” (11).

Perhaps as a way to escape her mother’s vigilance, Nan spends a lot of time in the woods near her house:

She had been coming up from the woods after running all day along the paths pretending to be galloping on an unbroken black Stallion; and then to be running faster than anyone had ever run before, down hills never losing her footing” (12).

In her mother’s absence, Nan temporarily becomes an unstoppable force- energized and agile. Still, even on this particular day, as Nan climbs through the slats on a fence, “it was as if the whole world clicked off, jarred to a sickeningly permanent halt for just an instant-and she thought of death again” (12). Nan realizes in this moment that the “thought of [death] would always effect her life” (12). By exploring how Nan descends from feelings of empowerment to powerlessness, Stone allows Nan to emerge on the page in her full complexity: although Nan can escape her “dread” (7), the “thought [of death]” (12) can find, catch and overwhelm her at anytime.

The story ends as Nan’s bath ends. Before bed, as Nan makes (and burns) a piece of toast, Mrs. Adams discovers the condition of Nan’s toe and calls in Nan’s father to assess it. When he says that it is “just a little cut” (14), Mrs. Adams says, “Look at that red streak; that’s the first sign of gangrene” (15). The father wins out, and Nan goes off to bed.

Rather than neatly exiting the story in this moment of clarity and relief (15), Stone takes the time to show that Nan’s knowledge of her mortality cannot simply vanish.

In the final moments of the story, Nan experiences a “peculiar, familiar” (16) sensation that she is “tall” (16) and then “tiny” (16) and then that she is “melting taffy” (16). Stones gives the impression of a young girl whose borders are painfully flexible, whose shape is not yet definite, whose sense of herself is open and undefined.

Just before sleep, Nan thinks of how her father “rescued’(17) her, suggesting her belief that she has been spared death not simply because there was nothing wrong with her to begin with, but through his intervening hands. Or perhaps Nan believes that her father has “rescued” (17) her from her mother and her conviction that death will come unexpectedly and horribly. In any case, Nan lies in bed, not wanting to enter “dizziness and black sleep” (17). I cannot help but think, given Nan’s avoidance of sleep, that her rescu[e] (17) is temporary, and that “the thought [of death]” (13), is one that has permeated her thin, adolescent skin and that belongs to her now whether she wants it or not.

Patricia Stone, the author of three superb collections, of which Close Calls was the first, has been designated by Kenneth J. Harvey as one of Canada’s “finest short story writers”. What constitutes such a designation? The kind of stories that Stone consistently produces- stories in which every word is the right one, where characters live and breathe, and where the stories, over and over, strike true and profound notes.

Stone, Patricia. “Passing On.” Close Calls. Dunvegan, Ontario: Cormorant Books, 1991. 6-17.

Amy Hempel’s "In A Tub"

I eyed my grey, suede moon boots and my white ski jacket in the front closet, smelled snow on the draft seeping through the front door, then climbed the steps of the landing and lay on my back– overwhelmed. When she pushed open the front door at five-twenty, her hair windblown, my mother would say through tight lips that the school called again and that she didn’t know what to do with me. But nothing would change how awful school was. Most days, I believed I was alien and wrong, and this belief paralyzed me so much that in a couple of months, having missed so many days I could not pass a single subject, I would quit grade ten altogether- pull my coat from my locker, then step uncertainly across the frozen lawn of the school to the intersection.

On this particular day, as I lay on my back, gazing at the white stippled ceiling and planning excuses that would satisfy my mother, but that wouldn’t really, my heart skipped a beat. I sat up and pressed my palm against my chest, but by that time the gulping emptiness in my ribs was gone. Still, in the second that my heart skipped a beat, I somehow saw trees upon trees and experienced the weird thought that I did not know what they were, that I was witnessing them for the first time. I filled with agony that I could not remain in the world, that my time was up.

“My heart—I thought it stopped” (3). So begins Amy Hempel’s “In A Tub”, a story that reminded me of that morning I decided to skip school. Hempel’s story gathers around the “scare” (4) the “missed beat” (3) causes the character. While the character’s moment of fright is of a different nature than mine, Hempel articulates the moment beautifully. The unnamed woman “head[s] for God” (3), to better hear her heart, but then discovers that the best way to hear it is in a tub of water, rather than inside a church.

It’s not surprising, given the story’s title, that images of tubs hold the story together. A clay pot on the patio is “filled with water like a birdbath” (3) . When the narrator is young, she sits in a concrete mixer that she has pulled from a construction site down to the shore of the lake; she sits in it, imagining floating across the water, “hearing nothing, for hours” (4). Her cat sleeps so deeply in the flower box that a gentle knock on the window does not disturb her.

The animals or humans contained in the “tubs” experience moments of rest and closeness with their bodies—moments that seem somehow outside of time.

Later, the narrator suggests how a person may best hear the heart:

Here is what you do. You ease yourself into a tub of water, you ease yourself down. You lie back and wait for the ripples to smooth away. Then you take a deep breath, and slide your head under, and listen for the playfulness of your heart. (4)

The narrator’s need to hear her heart sheds light on what she needs, what she’s lacking—connection with her quieter and more hidden self , the self she might have been closer to as a teenager, as she sat in the concrete mixer by the lake.

Reading “In A Tub” , it occurred to me that Hempel’s stories, gaining so much power through use of image, among other techniques, are complete in fewer words than are other stories. Hempel expects readers to turn images every which way in the light, and by doing this, to access a story’s full meaning. If the reader searches for the usual clues—exposition, dialogue, telling actions, gestures—, presented in the usual way, she may feel defeated by Hempel’s work. In “In A Tub”, the tubs or tub-like structures form part of the story’s spine or plot; the plot of the story would weaken without them.

Even after my heart skipped a beat, I knew only that there was another way to see the world, and that I had to be frightened I would die to see it that way, but that I did not want to see it that way again. I wanted to stay home and watch One Life to Live or General Hospital, and I wanted to love the world the way it usually seemed.

Hempel’s character wants to hear her heart, while I, at fifteen, would have preferred to go through life without one. In both cases, though, the heart is central, as it always is.

Hempel, Amy. “In A Tub.” The Collected Stories. New York: Scribner. 2007. 3-4.