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, so poetically and precisely conveyed, lead me to want to reenter the world of the story. Or perhaps the events of the story, impossible yet psychologically so real and vivid, compelled me to want to go back to the first sentence. Since then, I have read the story many times.

In “The Red Fox Fur Coat,” a woman, identified only as a “humble bank clerk,” spots a “red fox fur coat in a furrier’s shop window,” and feeling that “this was the coat she had always wanted” makes arrangements to purchase it in three installments. The weight this arrangement will have on her finances is clear when she reflects, “She could always sacrifice her holidays…Or divert some of the money intended for a car loan. She could use less heating, eat smaller meals. It would do her good, really, because she was beginning to put on a bit of weight.”

From the beginning of the story, the woman’s response to the coat is physical. After first spotting the coat, with its “golden, coppery sheen, so bright it looked as if it were on fire,” she “pushed at the door,” the “push” suggesting an eagerness to possess the coat that is just within the woman’s control.

Once she starts making installments, she “visit[s] the shop at night,…and each time the [coat] brought her more joy, each time it was brighter, more fiery, like red flames that did not burn, but were soft on her body, like a thick, ample, enfolding skin that moved when she moved.” In this moment, she is again physically attracted to the coat, but the coat seems to reach out for her as well, to almost wrap itself around her.

Gradually, as she continues to visit the coat at night, admiring it from the street, and imagining her ownership of it, the woman begins to develop the sensory awareness of an animal, becoming, “more alive now, more alert,” able to “sense atmospheric changes long before they happened” and to smell “the earth, the bark of  trees, plants leaves…a whole spectrum of smells that came to her on waves through the air.” She becomes intrigued, too, by prey animals, birds, rabbits.  All the while, “a hidden hunger ..[gnaws] at her.” The woman’s visceral desire for the coat, her physical need for it, leads to the beginning of an unsettling transformation.

Eventually, the woman, at a party, eats a “slice of meat” and reflects on “the taste of almost raw meat…of making the blood spurt.” The next day, when she picks up the red fox fur coat from the shop, and pulls it on, she, on all fours, “plung[es] off into the depths of the forest.”

On the one hand, the plot is simple: a woman becomes a fox. However, the complexity in the story lies in the answer to these questions: why does she become a fox, and what does it mean that she does?

I read this story (most recently) on the subway. When I exited my car, I couldn’t help but see all the women around me through the lens of the story. As I looked around, it occurred to me that as we women move around in our lives, on the subway, the city streets, the corridors of our homes, from birth to death, our bodies are only ever partially ours. Our bodies our entirely ours, of course, but some men, not seeing it this way, and believing our bodies belong to them, can remind us, viciously, that we are not to think we own our bodies, or rule them.

Jumping back into the world of the “humble bank clerk,” recalling her transformation from woman into a fox, I realized why, perhaps, she had transformed from prey into predator, and why it was so glorious, why she let out a “howl of pleasure and joy” as she [leapt] off into the forest:  she was really experiencing the sensation of complete ownership of her body, a primal sensation I have also felt, swimming in the lake or running a trail or standing in the sun, but that in my life, and I suspect in the lives of other girls and women, is usually painfully disrupted.

The Red Fox Fur Coat, by Teolinda Gersao

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 Occasional Writings.

“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]