Marisa Silver’s “Temporary”

In “Temporary” Marisa Silver braids together two seemingly separate stories, and, in doing so, explores a young woman’s transition from childhood into adulthood, a transition that compels because the past, it turns out, is not so easily left behind.

During a period when teenage Vivian’s adoptive mother is “on the verge of death” (2) with cancer, Vivian makes an unplanned trip to the mall to meet up with her adoptive father, the owner of a jewelry store. However, in “the dead weather of the mall”(5), Vivian is the one who discovers something unexpected: her father touching another woman’s hair and placing his hands on her shoulders as he helps her to better see a necklace she is trying on. As she observes unseen, Vivian’s “throat [goes] dry” (5) but she says nothing because “she knew that if she did her life would split open and she would slip through the crack” (5). As an adolescent, Vivian experiences the shock of her father’s betrayal, and at the same time, the potential loss of her mother.

The central action begins in L.A. where Vivian moves after completing two years of community college. She lives with Shelly, a promiscuous young woman illegally renting an “industrial space” (1) attached to a ribbon factory. Though Shelly appears to have no attachments to places or people, Vivian admires the way “Shelly slithered through her days and nights, shedding the most outrageous experiences as if they were simply the air she passed through” (1). In contrast, Vivian’s own “care felt like a disfigurement” (4). In wanting to go through the world like Shelly, someone seemingly shatterproof, Vivian might be searching for ways to avoid the consequence of caring or, in other words, the pain of attachment that, during childhood, she came to know well.

As part of her job at an adoption agency, Vivian transcribes taped interviews between prospective parents and social workers, and, though she is not supposed to, adds her comments on the files, reasoning that “a life was at stake”. One husband, a man Vivian has already noted “was unkind to his wife” (2), dismisses his wife’s remark that “[they] have a lot of love to give” as “stupid” (3). Later, he appears at the office without an appointment and Vivian learns that his wife has left him. When he asks her, rather desperately, what social workers look for in prospective parents, Vivian informs him that they look for people who have “a lot of love to give” (6). Vivian’s “cruelty” (6) could be seen as a correction of the prospective father’s selfishness and even of her own father’s past selfishness, since her feelings toward the stranger are strikingly personal.

One night when Shelly is out, Vivian sleeps with Toby, a young man Shelly has discarded. Vivian likes him for “his seriousness and his self-restraint” (3). During sex, though, Toby tells her that it is “just for now”(5). Afterwards, as he lies “spent in her arms” (5), she wonders if she really cares for Toby, and asks herself if it “was possible to care and not to care at the very same moment, the way it was possible to be a husband and not, a parent and not” (5). Even her encounter with Toby leads her into the past. Still, as a young woman experiencing her own complicated desires, she begins to examine the nature of caring, and whether or not it is necessarily constant.

The final scene of the story takes us once again into Vivian’s adolescence. Though Vivian’s mother recovered from her first experience with cancer, the disease returned and could not be treated .Vivian’s mother took up smoking in her final days, but because a brain tumor left her blind, she did not know when she had pushed the smoke completely out of her mouth, and made a strange face as she tried to expel it. Silver renders the moment beautifully:

When her father came home that evening, he watched his wife enjoy her cigarette.
“What is that you’re doing” he said, as she exhaled.
“What?” she asked, her thin voice made even thinner by the stress of the
smoke in her lungs.
“You look like a fish, sweetheart,” he said, and he put his face to hers and
blew out puffs of air onto her cheek until she giggled. For a second, Vivian
caught a glimpse of what her mother had looked like as a little girl. (7)

In this scene, the father demonstrating such unbearable tenderness for his wife, Silver suggests that betrayal can co-exist with love, that a person can be a “husband and not”(5).

Silver’s language, in this scene and elsewhere, is exact and lovely and penetrating. She puts words, sentences and images together in such a way that I felt, reading the story, that someone had called me in the middle of the night, wanting to tell me everything that was wrong, wanting me to listen.

Instead of shaping the story into the traditional arc, with one scene leading us causally into the next, the author works in pieces, placing each in such a way that the reader, ultimately, discovers the whole. Vivian’s relationship with Shelly, her encounter with Toby and the man at the adoption agency, her mother’s illness and her father’s transgression all point to Vivian’s awareness that so much is temporary and inconstant. Considering the story’s title, I could not help but make a list of all that is temporary in the story: parents, adoptive or biological, trust, living spaces, sexual partners, occupations, health, life. Still, as Silver seems to suggest, the temporariness of things does not make love impossible. Love, with all of it’s attendant pain, might be, whether we like it or not, the one thing that won’t let us go.

Silver, Marisa. “Temporary.” TheNewYorker.com/fiction/features/search. 28 Sept. 2009: 1-7. Web. 14 May 2010.

Bobbie Ann Mason’s “Graveyard Day”

Reading any of the stories in Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shiloh, I become aware that I am in the hands of not only a tremendously gifted writer, but also an impressively skilled and intelligent one.

“Graveyard Day” revolves around the dramatic question of whether or not Waldeen will marry Joe McClain; as the story moves toward its resolution, we sense the potential for tragic consequences for Mason’s richly evoked protagonist.

Though Waldeen is recently divorced and needs to move on, she believes that families cannot “shift membership” (167) and that Joe McClain “will turn out to be just like” (173) her first husband. While her daughter, Holly, views Joe McClain as a father, and gets a thrill when they sleep at his house, Waldeen compares a step-father to a “sugar substitute” (166). Waldeen does not want to repeat mistakes or to redefine family, but she loves Joe and wants to do what is best for her and Holly. Filling us in on Waldeen’s history and doubts as well as her daughter’s emotional needs, Mason complicates the dramatic question, creating tension, holding her reader.

If Waldeen marries Joe McClain, the marriage could end in another divorce; if she does not marry him, Waldeen may wither in a world that permits no risk or evolution. As it turns out, every other character in the story embraces change. Waldeen’s friends have recently returned from Florida; Waldeen’s ex-husband took flight all the way to Arizona. Holly longs to “go anywhere” (166) or to “go somewhere” (170). Waldeen, however, is “unaccustomed to eating out” (167) and has never flown in an airplane. Joe comments that she is “afraid to do anything new” (175). The question of whether she will allow her life to evolve becomes a critical one because Mason hints at what lies in store for Waldeen if she remains standing still: stagnation and loneliness, not only for her, but for her daughter.

Early in the story Waldeen suggests a picnic, and when Joe declines because “Saturday’s graveyard day” (167), the day on which he must tend to his grandmother’s grave, Waldeen suggests a picnic amid the tombstones. On the day of the picnic, in the presence of her daughter, friends and Joe, Waldeen experiences the “comforting” (177) revelation that the grave is the true symbol of marriage; that is, there is no escape from family, whether that family stays together or not, and particularly if the marriage produces a child. The marriage completes itself in the “burial plot” (177), and one must give in to this. This insight, added to her memory of an adventure at the lake with her first boyfriend, helps Waldeen to make her choice: at that moment, she jumps into the pile of leaves that Joe has raked; finally, she acts with abandon. Mason resolves the dramatic question, but without alleviating Waldeen of her doubts; Waldeen’s “flying leap” (178) might only indicate that Waldeen has surrendered to the ever-present possibility of loss.

If Mason’s skill is her ability to write suspenseful stories in which the stakes are high, what are her gifts? Behind the mastery of technique, I think, lies the what. What truth will the author communicate with her skills? In “Graveyard Day”, Mason gives us a woman, so fully on the page we feel we know her, who is afraid of fracture, of family falling apart -the many and various unknown consequences of attachment. But what can Waldeen do? What can any of us do? In going so deep, Mason tells us our own story, even if the details differ.

Mason, Bobbie Ann. “Graveyard Day.” Shiloh. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc, 1982. 165-178.

Katherine Mansfield’s “The Wind Blows”

In Katherine Mansfield’s “The Wind Blows” Matilda wants urgently to flee her mother’s superficial, stifling world of appearances. So acute is Mansfield’s understanding of her adolescent protagonist’s need to have her inner world recognized, and so skillful is she in portraying this desire, I felt I was reading a story set in the present day, or in any day for that matter.

An autumn wind disturbs Matilda’s sleep, pulls her into a tumultuous day, and the story begins.

After getting dressed, Matilda, on route to her music lesson, tries to leave the house without having her appearance assessed by her mother, but her mother sees her: “Matilda. Matilda. Come back in im-me-diately! What on earth do you have on your head? It looks like a tea-cosy. And why have you got that mane of hair on your forehead?” (107).

A moment later, Matilda tells her mother to “go to hell” (107) and “run[s] down the road” (107). Matilda’s defiance could not be more intense, decisive, or directly portrayed.

At her music lesson, Matilda grows warmly fond of her music teacher, Mr. Bullen, a man honoring music and soul rather than appearances. Mansfield tells us that “[Matilda’s] fingers tremble so that she can’t undo the knot in the music satchel” (108). She blames the autumn wind for her unsteady hands, or, in other words, for her excitement in his comforting presence.

Later, in her bedroom, confronted with the stockings “knotted up on the quilt like a coil of snakes” (109) that her mother wants her to darn, Matilda refuses and then wonders if anyone has ever written poems “to the wind” (109), suggesting that she, unlike her mother, who is annoyed by the wind, is thrilled by its wildness; because poems emerge from one’s core, her desire to write a poem gives us the strong sense, again, that she prefers the inner world to an outer world of socks and bedrooms and hats and chores.

A minute later, she takes up an invitation from her brother, Bogey, to visit the sea; once they are outside, she says to him “ ‘This is better, isn’t it?’”(109). Down at the sea, with drops of sea water in her mouth, her hat off and “her hair blow[ing] across her mouth”(110), she spots a steamer in the harbor, and enters a reverie in which she is on the ship, departing the island forever. In these few lines, Mansfield demonstrates exquisite sympathy for the young girl’s chronic vulnerability- her need for a rich, alternate world empty of silly expectations and preoccupations is so intense, she slips into dreams.

Matilda wakes, though, and discovers “the wind—the wind” (110). She is not on the steamer; rather, she stands on the esplanade with Bogey. Ending her story with Matilda’s recognition of the wind, Mansfield gives us the sense that just as the wind never ceases, neither, perhaps, will Matilda in her need to find a place where her inner world will be recognized, where she will be recognized. The wind, throughout the story, can almost be viewed as a second Matilda; that is, Matilda and the wind have so much in common, particularly restlessness and ferocity.

Mansfield’s characterizations are detailed and nuanced:

“Shall I begin with scales,” she asks, squeezing her hands together. “I had some arpeggios, too.’
But he does not answer. She doesn’t believe he even hears…and then suddenly his fresh hand with the ring on it reaches over and opens Beethoven.
“Let’s have a little of the old master,” he says. (108)

In this short sequence, Mansfield portrays Matilda’s fragility, her sensitivity to Mr. Bullen’s physical presence, and Mr. Bullen’s paternal ease with her.

Also, Mansfield does a wonderful job of showing us Matilda’s feelings: “Mr. Bullen takes her hands. His shoulder is there—just by her head. She leans on it ever so little, her cheek against the springy tweed” (108). In a few strokes of her pen, Mansfield draws Matilda’s longing to be comforted by the closest person she can find to a friend, and this longing veering into desperate, poignant action.

When I finished “The Wind Blows”, I wondered how Mansfield could have known, when she wrote this story, what I was like when I was young. She died so many decades before I was born; in fact, she died decades before my mother was born. Certain experiences must be universal to the adolescent girl: confinement of one sort or another, reverie and longing for a world in which she is understood and where she is not stifled.

Considering all of the stories Mansfield wrote in her short life, I wonder if it was her ability, along with her eye for physical detail and her musical writing, to penetrate the heart of any character without closing her eyes to what she saw and felt there, that explains why she is read today, and why I felt, at such a distance of time and geography, that I was reading a story about me.

Mansfield, Katherine. “The Wind Blows.” The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield. London: Penguin Group, 1981. 106-110.

Katherine Anne Porter’s “Theft”

Whenever I read “Theft” by Katherine Anne Porter, I find myself mesmerized, as I was by certain horrible fables and nursery rhymes when I was a child. The protagonist, referred to only as “she”, is a writer struggling on the margins with no one but herself to attend to her needs; rather than collecting and holding onto possessions-concrete or abstract- she chooses to “let [them] go” (83), putting herself at risk of becoming not literally homeless (although such a situation is almost foreseeable) but homeless in the sense that everything from books to love is “missed” (85).

The curtain of the story rises, and Porter’s protagonist emerges from her bath to see that her “gold cloth” purse is no longer on the bench where she spread it out to dry the night before. As she recalls the previous evening, trying to discover when it may have gone missing, we learn that she has been robbed several times either “material[ly] or intangib[ly]”(85), but not of the purse.

The subtle yet critical thefts of the night before take place, as so many petty thefts can, under the guise of friendship. As they leave a cocktail party together, her friend, Camilo, insists on walking her through the rain to the Elevated and in doing so ruins his hat; still, she thinks, he will “associate her with his misery” (79), as if his offer to walk her through rain puts her at fault. Roger, another artist friend, spots her on the steps to the Elevated and offers to take a taxi with her, but then borrows ten cents, a quarter of all the money she possesses, to pay his fare. Once in her apartment building, she runs into a playwright who owes her money for writing the third act of his play, but he won’t give it to her; instead, she is supposed to understand that his money goes toward alimony payments to his wife and child. “Let it go, then,” (83) she says. In every interaction she is, in one way or another, complicit with the thief.

The character then recalls that the janitress entered her apartment while she was in the bath in order to check the radiators and reasons that she must have taken the purse. The woman’s response is to “let it go, then” (84), but then “there rose…in her blood almost murderous anger” (84). When she confronts her, the janitress explains that she stole the purse to give to her seventeen-year-old niece who has got “young men after her maybe will want to marry her…[and] oughta have nice things”(86). The janitress adds that she did not think the protagonist would mind because she “leave[s] things around and [doesn’t] seem to notice much” (86). When the protagonist attempts to repossess her purse, the landlady says: “It’s not from me, it’s from her you’re stealing it,” (86) as if in asking for the return of her purse, she is ruining the prospects of the janitress’s niece. Also, the janitress cannot resist pointing out that the protagonist’s romantic opportunities have passed; she does not need lovely accessories with which to attract men.

The purse, possibly a gift from an ex-lover and certainly containing her last thirty cents, is something the protagonist feels the momentary loss of more than anything else. The janitress’s trespassing and robbery jolts her awake. She sees that the “general faith” (85) by which she operates (not locking doors, for instance) and her “rejection” (85) of the “ownership” (85) of things have prevented her from shoring up all kinds of essential belongings- everything from simple objects to sustaining relationships. Porter allows us to feel the full weight of her realization: “In this moment, she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible…all that she had had and all that she had missed were lost together…in the this landslide of remembered losses”(85). Later, she concludes that she is the thief. In being permissive of various kinds of potential belongings, instead of possessive, the protagonist has participated in every robbery, small or large, superficial or deep.

I enjoyed how the images of cold and wet work in the story to identify the character’s unmet needs. Over the course of the evening (the evening takes place off stage, before the story begins) the rain alters her more and more. Roger describes her as “looking as though she’s going to catch cold” (82) and encourages her to take a bath. Bill says she is “perfectly sopping” (82). At the moment the story begins, the character is walking across her apartment “holding her bathrobe around her and trailing a damp towel in one hand” (78). In the final moment of the story, just before the curtain falls, she sips “chilled coffee” (87). The impression is of a woman who is somehow careless, and too cold, too open. She seems to have difficulty finding shelter and warmth, critical possessions.

In “Theft” Porter presents us with an unsentimental, almost grueling picture of this woman’s inability to tend to her life. Rather than mitigating her character’s desperate circumstances or rescuing her from herself, she allows her the full consequence of her choices, the realization that she will leave herself with “nothing” (87).

In sparing her characters so little, Porter writes a tale that burns in the mind as dire warnings always do.

Porter, Katherine Anne. “Theft.” Flowering Judas and Other Stories. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers. 1990. 78-87