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.