St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised By Wolves, by Karen Russell

The title story of Karen Russell’s debut collection is a lively, playful romp from start to finish. A fantastical farce, the story follows a group of girls raised by wolves being retrained as humans. “Our parents wanted something better for us; they wanted us to get braces, use towels, be fully bilingual. When the nuns showed up, our parents couldn’t refuse their offer. The nuns, they said, would make us naturalized citizens of human society. We would go to St. Lucy’s to study a better culture.”   Quotations from “The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock” are interspersed throughout the narrative, as the girls proceed through each stage of the ‘humanizing’ process, which involves getting a name, learning to be bipedal, and resisting the urge to bite, lick, howl, or mark one’s territory…”Those were the days when we dreamed of rivers and meat. Full-moon nights were the worst!” Mirabella, the youngest of the group, is having the most difficulty adjusting: “Mirabella would rip foamy chunks out of the church pews and replace them with ham bones and girl dander. She loved to roam the grounds wagging her invisible  tail. (We all had a hard time giving that up. When we got excited, we would fall to the ground and start pumping our backsides. Back in those days we could pump at rabbity velocities. Que horror! Sister Maria frowned, looking more than a little jealous.)”

The consciousness of the narrator Claudette (formerly known as  TRRRR!) grows increasingly “human” throughout the story as she acquires the new rulesof the game: “This wasn’t like the woods, where you had to be your fastest and your strongest and your bravest self. Different sorts of calculations were required to survive at the home.” With a wolf’s instinct to please, she finds herself subconsciously reprimanding and rooting herself on: “mouth shut, shoes on feet.” In a final wink of irony, when Claudette visits her home cave after graduation she realizes what it means to be fully human – to tell a lie.

For any female who has ever felt like she has the feral trappings of a werewolf upbringing buried deep inside, this story will ring true in a way that will have you dreaming of rivers, meat and full-moon prowls. A refreshing and ironic twist of catholic school meets little red riding hood.

 

“The Science of Flight” by Yiyun Li

“It was who she was in the eyes of Henry and Ted that she cherished the most: sure-handed and efficient at her job, quiet yet at times chatty, uncomplicated. That she had memorized passages from “Winnie-the Pooh,” that she had read its Latin translation before reading the English text, she did not share with them, because that would make her an eccentric in their eyes.”

Zichen works in an animal-care center with Henry and Ted, two amiable midwestern men who do not meddle or press much into her past and she prefers it that way. Abandoned at a young age to be raised in her grandmother’s hair salon, Zichen has spent most of her life seeing herself through other people’s eyes and she regards herselves as a series of failures and misfires; divorced, loser, foreigner…

She is planning a trip to England – which is not per her usual annual sojourn to China to visit her “parents”, so of course her co-workers are a little bit curious the nature of her travel. But she is careful not to unravel the already complete ‘her’ that they know and like and depend upon. The trip to England is to visit the land of the one woman who befriended her in America – a woman with dementia who set out to tutor her in English, teaching her Latin instead. Though the woman passed away a little over a year after they met, it was in her home that Zichen felt the gentle bloom of friendship – something she had never before experienced in her life.

She imagines Neville Hill and the Hydrangea House B & B and the conversations she won’t have with the innkeepers – the stories she can’t share because she must be left out – hers is a life of flight.

On an annual employee night out to the bar, Zichen loosens the strings that corset her past and feels a certain happiness in the telling of some twisted truths and eccentricities in her life, not so strange to a stranger as she may have thought.

Li has carved Zichen with such precision that the reader can almost hear her voice and picture the way she would move about a room. Henry and Ted are two sturdy bookends to Zichen’s fragile frame – she has found a calm kind of safety in a strange land (Iowa) in a strange lab – she feels useful. There is hope that with a few more annual beer-outings she can reach through the looking glass and find herself unrejected in spite of herself.

 

A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud by Carson McCullers

“The man leaned his head down  and tapped his forehead on the counter. For a few seconds he stayed bowed over in this position, the back of his stringy neck covered with orange furze, his hands with their long warped fingers held palm to palm in an attitude of prayer. Then the man straightened himself; he was smiling and suddenly his face was bright and tremulous and old…’It is this. And listen carefully. I meditated on love and reasoned it out. I realized what is wrong with us. Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with?’

 The boys soft mouth was partly open and he did not answer.

 ‘A woman,’ the old man said.’Without science, with nothing to go by, they undertake the most dangerous and sacred experience in God’s earth. They fall in love with a woman. Is that correct, Son?’

 ‘Yeah,” the boy said faintly.

 ‘They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder it is so miserable? Do you know how men should love?’ The old man reached over and grasped the boy by the collar of his leather jacket. He gave him a gentle little shake and his green eyes gazed down unblinking and grave.

 ‘Son, do you know how love should be begun?’ The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The old man leaned closer and whispered: ‘A tree. A rock. A cloud.’

In this story, a 12 year old pint-sized paperboy encounters the early morning crowd at a streetcar cafe “owned by a bitter and stingy man called Leo”. Before he can leave he is accosted by an older man sitting in front of a beer who tells the boy that he loves him. The boy assumes the man is a lonely old drunk , and looks to Leo for confirmation, but the cafe owner and self-proclaimed “critic of craziness” refuses to satisfy the boy with a straight answer. Instead he allows the encounter to continue as he lays pink strips of bacon on the grill and serves up refills, but never for free. The older man with the beer tells the boy his tale of love lost and lesson learned – “the science” as he calls it, of love. He says that one has to build up to loving another person – first you have to love the trees, the rocks, the clouds, and so on. The boy is cautious as he listens to this stranger ramble on – looking for reactions and answers from the other adults around.  In the end you know that he will only get answers through his own experience. Does anyone really take advice from strange adults at age twelve anyway? Love inevitably is trial and error for us all, though we try to advise one another. This man was like the streetcar cafe buddha, explaining that we must expand our embrace to include love for all things on this earth. Sometimes the best advice comes from the most unexpected places – but that still doesn’t mean we necessarily take from it. Thanks Carson McCullers.

 

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers

“Children love to sleep in houses other than their own, and to eat at a neighbor’s table; on such occassions they behave themselves decently and are proud. The people in town were likewise proud when sitting at the tables in the cafe. They washed before coming to Miss Amelia’s, and scraped their feet very politely on the threshhold as they entered the cafe. There, for a few hours at least, the deep bitter knowing that you are not worth much in this world could be laid low. ”

Carson McCullers’s story is set in a dusty, primitive Southern town where life is gnawed to the bone for lack of anything to do. She favors freaks of nature as her main characters: Miss Amelia is lanky and strong, with thick hairy thighs; her Cousin Lymon is an extroverted hunchback whose age and appearance remain an eternal enigma. Together, the two open up a small cafe that brings the people of the town a certain amount of pride they never had before. The cafe becomes a bright spot in an otherwise dreary existence. 

People pause to wonder over each other’s lives, tell stories, and find healing through shared meals and moonshine. With the arrival of the hunchaback and the opening of the cafe, Miss Amelia becomes vulnerable to the town in a way that she never was before and the people expect to learn what really happened during her mysterious ten-day marriage to the no-good Marvin Macy. It turns out however that it is not Miss Amelia who pops the biggest surprise in the end, but her odd cousin who appears and disappears along with the existence of the cafe.

The story ends exactly where it began…in a dreary town where there is absolutely nothing to do, and” the soul rots with boredom”. The tune carried on the wind by the chain gang is the nearest form of entertainment to be found in those parts.

 

The 100-1 Club By Richard Lange

“Two years I’d managed to fly under the radar, and just like that, I’m back in the system. But I’m not going to let it spin me sideways. I’m going to focus on all the things I have to be grateful for — like the fact that Larry’s waiting for me out front just like he promised he would, and that he passes me a big old cup of coffee as soon as I slide into his truck, and that he tracked down Domingo and collected the money D. owed me and used it to bail my sorry ass out, all on the back of a single frantic phone call. Unbelievable. You can count friends like that on one hand — hell, one finger. “Larry, my motherucking man,” I say. “Let me buy you breakfast.””

Popped free after 48 hours behind bars, this guy has got a date and he’s the biggest optimist in the world. You can’t help but like him – he seems sure in his shoes even when life keeps handing him a crappy deal. He’s got the girl and her kid at the racetrack and that’s where his dirty secret breaks loose. This story seduces you into the mind of a gambling addict, and before you know it you’re riding the highs, sweating the lows and betting on nothing until it’s nothing again. At the track his “friend”appears — “Paul pops up behind me while I’m ordering food. “Get me a dog too,” he says, shoving a moist dollar bill into my hand…The guy hasn’t showered in days. His teeth are yellow, and he looks like he dressed out of a dumpster. He follows me to the condiment counter and moves in close as I’m pumping mustard.” It’s the little details like these that tip you deeper into what seems to be a more sordid past than the narrator first reveals. He was put in jail for some speeding tickets he never paid, but you learn its a lot worse for him than that. Despite his shortcomings, you’re rooting for him in the end – because as he says: “I thought she’d be happy to see me and her money, that the thrill of winning would do for her what it does for me: wipe away all the trouble it took to get there.”

 

Victory Lap by George Saunders

“Three days shy of her fifteenth birthday, Alison Pope paused at the top of the stairs.”

Alison is your typical fifteen year-old girl, with visions of all her possible suitors waiting at the bottom of the stairs. She is well-loved, cared for and tended to, enjoys school, trusts people and has the quirky habit of including French phrases in her thoughts.Alison is P.O.V. #1 of this story.

P.O.V. #2 grazes Alison Pope’s peripheral vision: a lanky schoolmate, “a skeleton with a mullet” perpetually dressed in small shorts and a cross-country singlet. Meet her neighbor, Kyle Boot:

“Kyle Boot dashed through the garage, into the living area, where the big clocklike wooden indicator was set at All Out. Other choices included: Mom & Dad Out; Mom Out; Dad Out; Kyle Out; Mom & Kyle Out; Dad & Kyle Out; and All In.Why did they even need All In? Wouldn’t they know it when they were All In? Would he like to ask Dad that? Who, in his excellent, totally silent downstairs woodshop, had designed and built the Family Status Indicator?”

You learn very quickly that Kyle operates in the world of “Only Child/Our Beloved”; assigned, scored and strictly regimented in all that he does. He even carries an ongoing dialogue with his parents in his head:

“Mom and Dad would be heartsick if they could hear the swearing he sometimes did in his head, such as crap-cunt shit-turd dick-in-the-ear butt-creamery. Why couldn’t he stop doing that? They thought so highly of him…What was wrong with him? Why couldn’t he be grateful for all that Mom and Dad did for him, instead of- Cornhole the ear-cunt. Flake-fuck the pale vestige with a proddering dick-knee. You could always clear the mind with a hard pinch on your own minimal love handle. Ouch.”

P.O.V #3 is a man in a van- the rapist, the killer, the man with a knife. He appears and Kyle and Alison, long-estranged childhood sandbox friends and neighbors, are confronted with eachother’s existence in a new and challenging way. Kyle hides behind the thousands of parental rules in place that do not permit him to come to Alison’s rescue. He debates, paralyzed on his porch, seemingly without moral compass….and then…he confronts the man, a rock to his skull:

“Really? Really? You were going to ruin her life, ruin my life, you cunt-probe dick-munch ass-gashing Animal? Who’s bossing who now? Gash-ass, jiz-lips, turd-munch—

He’d never felt so strong/angry/wild.

Easy, Scout, you’re out of control.

Slow your motor down, Beloved Only.

Quiet. I’m the boss of me.”

Every once in awhile you read a story and you realize that it’s not in English, at least not the normal, everyday man’s straightforward English that most of us compose ourselves in. This is an entirely unique post-Juno- 2000’s- texting-MySpace-sound-byte language. It translates seamlessly, consistently with the sort of  grace and beauty that no one ever attribute’s to teenage speech and thought. It’s slightly eccentric yet grounded, attempts to follow rules while making up it’s own. Saunder’s is downright funny. And I think his choice to write the story using three p.o.v. ‘s was critical – the vision almost cinematic. And the climax — it breaks the illusion of safety and silence formed by figurative and literal fences that separate neighbors, childhood friends — Each party has created some truth  for themselves to cope with the dead end; the road block. And it was so easy to be passive all of this time…up until now. What do you do?

 

Jason who will be famous by Dorothy Allison

“…what came after the snatch became more and more important…It was all about him and the basement and what he did down there, who he would become, who he was meant to become. It was set and in motion. It was coming, Jason was sure of it…he was going to be ready.”

This is one of those stories that blindsides you right about the second page when you realize it is not at all about what you thought it was going to be about according to the title, which sets up certain expectations for the reader. We assume Jason, the young man walking down the road, confidently daydreaming of the day he will be famous, is daydreaming about the typical fame and fortune attained by rock stars and celebrities. But no. His fantasy; his fate as he believes, is that he will be “snatched” from the road and kept in a basement for months, until he escapes and finds fame in the transformation he has achieved under the duress of the abduction. Physically stronger; he’s been running in place and lifting heavy things, bored out of his mind. Mentally genius; “the movie scripts, plays and dialogues between characters that will come and go when he is all gaunt and feverish.” Spiritually pure and cleansed;  “He could learn to eat imaginary meals and taste every bite- donuts and hot barbecue wings – and stay all skinny and pure. That would be something. He could teach people how to do that afterwards maybe.”

As he fences himself off in his daydream, we learn about all the shit that’s piled up on the other side  –  he is quiet and picked on at school, his dad’s dropped out of his life and doesn’t think much of him. We understand and sympathize with Jason’s escapism in the form of this perverse fantasy. He’s been beaten so low by life that this is the only way he imagines he could ever get any attention.

It is the story he has been taught by a hundred Hollywood films – a man’s suffering transforms him into the slick hero – all who are weary, misunderstood, alienated and abused, you will get yours someday – fate will quarantine you until you become something better than yourself; something everyone can love. The American Dream?

 

Americca by Aimee Bender

” I ate the lobster soup. I liked it. It had a neat texture. I liked it better than the usual plebeian chicken noodle my mom got. I liked the remaining wild rice one…it was so hearty and different. I used the cow cup I’d salvaged from the trash, and the truth was, I liked the cow holding a balloon; it was cute. When I looked in the mirror, I sneered my upper lip and said, Benedict Arnold, Benedict Arnold, your head is on the block.”

Aimee Bender is one of those writers who half way through a story you just have to wonder – Who comes up with this sort of stuff? Who thinks this?  And the fact is she makes the wacky, the original shine through on the page – here through the voice of a 10 year-old narrator whose family is being “reverse” robbed. Things are appearing on their shelves; an extra tube of toothpaste, cans of gourmet soup, an octopus hat that fits better than the one she made her mom buy her at the mall, a toy that was broken long ago. At first it is unusual and a little creepy, and then they adjust and it becomes normal to the point where the young girl spends her own money to make things “appear” when they haven’t been for awhile. Her older sister has a boyfriend, her mom is taking a class called “Learning to Focus Your Mind”, Dad is always interjecting from the other room. Ms. Bender recreates this atmosphere of “Age 10 and I am being Ignored!” so perfectly. It is about change; how we adjust as we reject and covet what has been gained and lost.

The premise of the story is so simple – no big plot, just a family, a girl growing up and stuff seemingly appearing out of nowhere. So why does it haunt me as if  it was my own memory? That is the genius of it.

 

Child’s Play by Alice Munro

“Every year, when you are a child, you become a different person. Generally it’s in the fall, when you reenter school, take your place in a higher grade, leave behind the muddle  and lethargy of summer vacation. That’s when you register the change most sharply.”

This is the story of one summer vacation that locks two girls in time. Marlene and Charlene meet at summer camp and become fast friends. Alice Munro details the initial comparing and then sharing that accompanies all female bonding – the expected transactions that proceed the intimacy of friendship. “The kind of intimacy I’m talking about – with women-  is not erotic, or pre-erotic. I’ve experienced that as well, before puberty. Then too there would be confidences, probably lies, maybe leading to games. A certain hot temporary excitement, with or without genital teasing. Followed by ill-feeling, denial, disgust.” Here it is the exchange of confidences: Charlene tells of walking in on her brother having sex with his girlfriend. “His thing slapped…his bare white bum had pimples on it. sickening.” Marlene counters with Verna, the mentally handicapped girl who she grew up in a duplex with. Marlene believes that there is a kind of evil power that Verna haunts her with – “Something that clings, in the way of love, though on my side it felt like hate.”

Verna arrives at the summer camp with a group of “special kids”  for the final weekend. Between them, Charlene and Marlene heighten the sense of drama and victimization that Marlene spoke of in memory. It becomes the driving force that leads them, in their one and only confrontation with Verna, to quickly and quietly push her head beneath the water and hold it there. “Charlene and I kept our eyes on eachother then, rather than looking down at what our hands were doing…This could have been an accident. As if we, in trying to get our balance, grabbed on to this nearby large rubbery object, hardly realizing what we were doing. I have thought it all out. I think we would have been forgiven. Young children. Terrified.”

But the reader does not know of the guilt that binds the two friends through the rest of their lives, though they never see each other after camp. The second half of the flashback – the drowning scene –  comes at the very end, after Marlene receives a cryptic letter from her friend on her deathbed, wanting her to seek a Catholic priest in her hometown. We are baffled by  this last request, and assume Marlene is also, until we see her try to fill it and learn the truth. Marlene:  “I am sure we never said anything as banal, as insulting or unnecessary as Don’t Tell.”

Alice Munro is a master of the short story framed by a flashback – this is a great example.

 

Man and Wife by Katie Chase

“”Now, I know Daddy explained that you’re going to be a wife. But do you know what that means?” I refused to look at her; though I could feel her eyes on my face. ” Yeah. I’ll go live with Mr. Middleton. I’ll have to make him dinner.”

“Yes,” she said. “But you’ll have to do more than that.”

“Can I still play Barbies with Stacie? I promised her.”

“You did, did you.”

Man and Wife is the story of an arranged marriage between a nine year-old girl and an aging, wealthy business man. It is a preposterous and creepy concept for white-middle class suburban america, but the characters act so naturally, that it seems a strangely familiar scene, a version of something we’ve seen before; barbies next to profit margins, quarter analyses and diet cokes, a young girl in training to be a wife.

One Saturday Mr. Middleton arrives at the house when Mary Ellen’s parents are out. She proceeds to show him her much coveted Barbie house and he admires her reuse of materials: “A creative way to cut costs.” She says her parents won’t buy her anything else, and he tells her: “You work well within limits…you have quite a talent for design – I’ve seen professional blueprints more flawed.”

We stick with the story because Mary Ellen has an original and surprising voice that defies her position as she succumbs to it. The voice of this wife-child has a combination of candor and wisdom that one could not expect to find under any other circumstances. The transaction and title has clear sexual implications of course, but in this story we are suspended between a sterile ‘matter of business’ mindset  and the pious romance of a child.  The reader is perhaps the implied pervert, the one made to inquire “What If?”