Shirley Jackson's "Like Mother Used to Make" (1948)

Jackson, known for "The Lottery" and her dark storytelling, asks what happens when a woman's worth is wrapped up in her housecleaning.

David Turner is an enviable homemaker. His warm, comfortable brownstone offers the sensory pleasures only fastidious décor and the finest furnishings can offer. He has hand-selected the linens, the lampshades, the tea lights. Every movement David makes in his home is a conscious one and is followed by the loveliest adverb: lovingly, agreeably, carefully, happily, tenderly. Every knick-knack and utensil has its place. David’s identity and well being are wrapped up in his homemaking. The problem for David, tonight, is that his neighbor Marcia’s identity is equally enmeshed. Only, her apartment is not the color-coordinated pleasure dome David’s is:

Marcia’s home was bare and at random; an upright piano…stood crookedly…the big room was too cluttered…Marcia’s bed was unmade and a pile of dirty laundry lay on the floor. The window had been open all day and papers had blown wildly around the floor.

David is not about to let Marcia off the hook for being remiss. He advises her:

You ought to keep your home neater.... You ought to get curtains at least, and keep your windows shut.

If a woman is to be judged by her tidying, then Marcia is no prize horse. But it’s not an androgyne’s confidence or a rogue’s idiosyncrasy that allows Marcia to shirk her gender’s duty. The reader learns that Marcia is deeply ashamed of her perceived shortcoming – so deeply ashamed, in fact, that she is driven to pull off a most devious, and rather side-splitting, prank.

When Mr. Harris, a love interest from the office, mistakes David’s apartment for Marcia’s, Marcia--who is enjoying dinner at David’s place--does not correct him. When Mr. Harris is led to believe that it was Marcia who had baked the sublime cherry pie, Marcia takes the credit. The story comes to a head in hilarious fashion, and it is our Davie who is left to bear the burden of Marcia’s disastrous homekeeping.

More than just an amusing piece of situational comedy, Jackson’s story critiques the entwining of domestic duty and womanliness. She suggests first that Susie Homemaker will always finish last and second that finger-waggers might be better off mum.

Read the story here!

           

Andrew Foster Altschul's "y=mx+b" (Ploughshares, 2008/09)

What do you get when you mix alliteration with existential crisis and a dog named Barkley? In this case, one cool story.

The pacing is furious, the details craftily vague. Andrew Foster Altschul writes just enough of this character so that anyone who’s ever worked for a day, owned a dog or had an emotion can identify.

"Our man" is in the pits and our narrator wastes no time tellin’ it straight. All this story needs is The Chemical Brothers to write its soundtrack and Guy Ritchie to direct the action. What could have been overwrought alliteration ends up adding an OCD element that matches the protagonist’s predicament perfectly. The predicament is your standard case of cubicle madness. The fiancée, who figures only dimly, is no bright spot. The 30-something blues have descended to make “same ol’, same ol’” a torturous reality. 

This is how the day begins: Badly. Bleary and bloated and many other b-words. There’s vomit on the blanket and he’s not sure whose. Maybe the dog, Barkley? A bottle on the nightstand, a butt in the tray with a dead two-inch ash. The boiler is broken again, the shower bitterly cold. The driveway? Blocked—call a tow truck.

The only upshot is Barkley. It’s the dog who teaches our protagonist to roll with it. If the story can be said to have a moral—and thankfully it cannot—it’s that dogs do this thing called life with more ease and aplomb than a man can ever hope to.

Barkley brings the ball once more, drops it at your side, panting hotly in your face…. Barkley knows best: Sometimes there’s no knowing. Things turn for the worst, no one to blame, no preparing…. And how about the ball? Well, nothing can stop it.

In what amounts to dramatic apostrophe in print (Now I shall address thee, good audience), Foster Altschul calls attention to the story-ness of his story:

(But wait. Let’s think. Let’s break it down. A briefcase? Who carries a briefcase in this day and age? Which day, which age? And who was he calling? ... Booze and cigarettes—that old story?...)

And later: "There are obstacles, tensions, complications galore."

In this case, the meta-narrative doesn’t detract from the story but suggests something beyond itself—maybe it’s the higher consciousness and unfulfilled potential of our man; more likely, it’s the author saying, Look, I know I’m not the first person who’s spun a tale, but I’m going to do it anyway. 

And he does it in a voice all his own. 

-LB

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Chopin's "A Respectable Woman": To Touch or Not to Touch (1894)

Can a well-mannered woman give in to her sensual side and remain well mannered?

Chopin’s Mrs. Baroda is by all accounts a good wife. When her husband dresses, she makes “a bit of toilet sociably” with him. When he has a friend come to town, she regards him with a healthy suspicion. But to her surprise, the strange man awakens in her a physical self, and our virtuous Mrs. Baroda finds herself tested.

Unlike her gregarious husband Gaston, Gouvernail is a soft-spoken, “rather mute and receptive” man. His gentle nature opens a space wherein Mrs. Baroda can discover what might be called her masculine powers:

...finding that Gouvernail took no manner of exception to her action, she imposed her society upon him, accompanying him in his idle strolls to the mill and walks along the batture. She persistently sought to penetrate the reserve in which he had unconsciously enveloped himself.

The subtle inversion of roles seduces Mrs. Baroda, despite her resistance. She cannot help but become attuned to the tactile world, observing for instance, “…the air that swept across the sugar field,” which “caressed him with its warm and scented velvety touch." As Mrs. Baroda and her visitor make conversation under an oak tree, she is nearly overwhelmed by her attraction. 

She was not thinking of his words, only drinking in the tones of his voice…. She wanted to draw close to him and whisper against his cheek—she did not care what—as she might have done if she had not been a respectable woman.

For a time, and in an effort to maintain her faithfulness, Mrs. Baroda requests that her husband never again invite Gouvernail to stay. She gives him the impression that his friend had made a poor houseguest, and she shows “strenuous opposition” when Gaston talks of another invitation.  

At the heart of this story is a woman’s struggle to reconcile what society expects of her with what she desires in private. Before the story starts, we are to assume that Mrs. Baroda was so influenced by external forces that she married a man with whom she shared, apparently, only friendship. It is not until she interacts with Gouvernail that she comes to understand carnality. In a triumphant shedding then of convention and respectability, Mrs. Baroda decides to explore her dormant desires.

Gaston is pleased that she has overcome her distaste for Gouvernail. ‘“Oh,’” she tells her husband, “laughingly, after pressing a long, tender kiss upon his lips, ‘I have overcome everything! you will see. This time I shall be very nice to him.” Chopin seems to believe that respectability is overrated. A woman, her story implies, must learn herself no matter what the risk to her reputation.  

-LB

Read the story here!

Chekhov's "Sleepy": When Baby Murder Doesn't Seem So Bad

            

Can you think of a storyteller so adept at his skill that his readers find themselves sympathetic to the murder of a baby?  In the middle period of his career, Anton Chekhov accomplished just such a feat. 

 In Chekhov’s “Sleepy” (1888), a 13-year-old “little nurse” named Varka strangles to death the infant in her charge. The brutal and rather unexpected ending exemplifies Chekhov’s approach to story writing—that is, as he once admitted in a letter, he “conduct[s] the entire action peacefully and quietly,” then “bash[es] the [reader] in the snout.” But what is most remarkable about this story is the suspension of conventional morality Chekhov demands and receives from his reader. In the space of five short pages, the reader is lulled along, much like the main character, by recurrent dream imagery. What results is a reader who finds herself defending the act of murder.

The first of the dream images, a lamp’s green reflection, appears and reappears to draw Varka into sleep. The lamp makes its first appearance to set the scene: “When the lamp begins to flicker, the green patch and the shadows come to life, and are set in motion, as though by the wind.” Later, the same images lead Varka irresistibly into half-slumber as she rocks her mistress's baby:

The lamp flickers. The patch of green and the shadows are set in motion, forcing themselves on Varka’s fixed, half-open eyes, and in her half  slumbering brain are fashioned into misty visions.

Beyond the lulling cadence of dream imagery, the reader is rapt by Varka’s sorry history. Her father has died an agonizing death. She longs for her mother. She has been born into subservience. It is through her dreams that the reader is delivered the girl’s exposition, and it is through the details revealed by this exposition that the reader develops sympathy for the girl.

Her dreams, however dismal in content, act as a hopeful alternate setting for both reader and protagonist. Perhaps not accidentally, she dreams of a “broad high road” that symbolizes possibility or a substitute reality wherein this duty-shackled girl might have access to opportunities offered by the wider world. And even though that road is one of “liquid mud,” the reader is invited to wonder whether Varka’s fate might lead her down a freer path than the one that binds her to a baby’s cradle.

Chekhov further earns his readers’ sympathy for the little nurse by illustrating a pattern of mistreatment. The first time she falls asleep she is called a “scabby slut” by her master and is administered a hit so hard to the back of her head, “that her forehead knocks against a birch tree.” Later her mistress calls her a “wretched girl.” Following her sleepless night, Varka must make good on a series of requests: “Varka, wash the steps outside…!” “Varka, set the samovar!” “Varka, fetch some vodka!” And signaling the conclusion of at least one sleepless cycle of night and day: “Varka, rock the baby!”           

Finally, the reader cannot blame the girl for her heinous crime but instead must blame her situation or even indirectly her “fat, angry mistress.” Varka’s situation is so miserable, her perceptions so justifiably muddled by sleep’s beckoning that it is with complete understanding—even some relief—that the reader bears witness to the murder she commits. In a telling choice of words and voice—here dream images are active, the girl passive—Chekhov absolves Varka of guilt, painting her powerless over sleep’s active devouring of her:

The green patch and the shadows from the trousers and the baby-clothes take possession of her brain again. Again she sees the high road covered with liquid mud.

Even the travelers in her dreams fall asleep despite circumstances that require their attention when they “fall on the ground in the liquid mud… ‘To sleep, to sleep!’”

The reader believes as heartily as does the main character that a force is at work in opposition to the little nurse. Forgivably, Varka has no clear sense of who or what is to blame for her present suffering: “…she cannot understand the force which binds her, hand and foot, weighs upon her and prevents her from living.” That the girl misplaces her blame then is not surprising:  “That foe is the baby.”

 The girl’s final action, according to Chekhov’s narrative equation, is the natural sum of her misfortunes, so the reader need not protest:

She gets up from her stool, and with a broad smile on her face and wide unblinking eyes, she walks up and down the room. She feels pleased and tickled at the thought that she will be rid directly of the baby that binds her hand and foot… Laughing and winking and shaking her fingers at the green patch, Varka steals up to the cradle and bends over the baby. When she has strangled him, she quickly lies down on the floor, laughs with delight that she can sleep, and in a minute is sleeping as soundly as the dead.

The reader then, having been a docile witness to murder and moved to rationalize the little nurse’s actions, might rightly be called a guiltier party to infanticide than is the perpetrator herself.

-LB

Read the story here!