Jason Lee Brown,
Jay Prefontaine,
Editors
(Ohio University/Swallow)
And that is exactly happens with New Stories from the Midwest. I plunged in the middle, into Kim Brooks' "Houseguest" and it's the late 1930s and tailor Abraham Auer has been talked into adopting a displaced person from Poland, chased out by the Nazis.
Auer expected a trembling old lady, uneasy, afraid ... but who turns up? Ana Beidler, that's who, who keeps them waiting for dinner and rambles on about her famous acting career in Odessa, Bucharest, London. She also drinks too much.
After the second week, as Abraham shyly says to his rabbi, "This woman was not intended for family life." It's an old story with a nice twist, and it makes Abraham, think back on his own marriage, before the Cassocks came along and ran them out: "When he married her, she had been so beautiful, so fresh, with cheeks the color of strawberries and lips that tasted just as sweet. Lying beside her had been like lying in a valley of wild flowers with the sun on his face."
If you have half-a-hankering for several good literary bits, you might track down a copy of New Stories. Of the twenty here, at least half are worth it. My thought is that if you get a collection with a 50% batting average, you're in luck. Don't miss Abbi Geni's tale of missing sons and a very odd love-affair between the narrator and an aquarium octopus (What?) (Really!)
And Richard Burgin's "Do You Like This Room" which will resonate with any of us who have gone on a computer-generated date and found ourselves saddled with some sort of nutcase. On the second date he wants to play a game in which she is God and he's a human. She says OK, so she asks, "Did you enjoy the flowers I created that were in Tower Grove Park near the restaurant where you ate last night?" He: "I did enjoy the flowers ... as well as the stars, though they require two opposite motions of my head to see."
- You've made so many things, but you've placed them too far apart and in so many direction I'd have to have a very flexible head like an owl to appreciate them all, or even a hundredth of them.
After this, he pulls out a pistol, points it at her, and just sits there. He tells her that since she is a psychotherapist, maybe she can figure out what's wrong with him. Another man playing yet another American version of god.
The best two by far are worth your trouble. "Pure Superior" by Chris Leslie-Hynan tells of a transfer student from Russia (possibly ... no one is exactly sure) ending up with a family in Michigan. She thought she was going to California. When she meets daughter Sinda, she immediately says, (she's very direct), "How'd you get like that?" and Sinda says,
- "I have cerebral Palsy," I said, prompt and calm, to show Katrín that wasn't anything to work your lungs for. "Hemiplegic. I was born with it. Part of my body isn't too good at doing what I want it to. The right side, mostly. My left leg is okay, and my left arm works fine."
"But," Sinda explains patiently, "there's nothing wrong with my mind." And Kartrín, being direct, as I've said, observes "I can tell by looking at you that you're not a retard," which sets Sinda's mother off, about the words "polite people use," but Sinda breaks in, "Listen, Katrín ... Just don't talk to me like you're afraid to break eggs, and don't call me a retard or a spaz, and I won't call you a Commie or a Cossack, and we'll get along like a couple of fine ladies."
And there you have it, a temperamental Russian (who may not even be a Russian, much less a Cossack), and the two of them get along fine, in fact so fine, with the reader so fine that after awhile we're in love with both of them, as spunky and funny as they are, and they are a sight too, in love with each other, so it ends up with them in the Grand Hotel in Mackinac and the mixture of love and a high-spirited exchange student and spikey Sinda who slips into the plot like living with CP is no big deal and it's not, especially when it ends up the two of them in bed in love in the grand bedroom of the Grand Hotel.
Finally there's "Blood and Milk" by Carol Howell. I've read it four times and I can't get enough of it. I won't bother to run down the plot, because it's not just plot that makes it work but I found wondering why The New Yorker (I read the New Yorker out of habit, have for fifty years now, it's like that bad-for-me snifter of brandy I down before trying to sleep) ... I wonder why the New Yorker isn't finding more stories like these, putting them in their obligatory fiction section there just before the dance and movie and TV reviews.
"Blood and Milk" manages to conjoin in sixteen pages what it's like to be giving birth and facing a dying mother at the same time with all those spooks from your past cropping up to explain you to you ... and what it's like to grow up with a father who danced across the floor with you singing "Is you is or is you ain't my baby" (I grew up with that one, too) and what it's like having at the same time having a mother who knows nothing about showing even a little touch of mother-love, she not being "sympathetic to the child's point of view. Couldn't imagine the child's point of view. She was too much of an infant herself, a terrible infant with power over others." and so you go psychotic on occasion.
And this on her new baby,
- When her body finishes clearing that out and her umbilical stub falls off, we will finally and irrevocably be two separate people.
And you thinking, is it possible to break that cycle of grim mothers producing sad children who can just barely function, and you think "Blood and Milk" being so chock-full of funny wise contradictions that maybe it is possible. Maybe.