#486 Cranberry Relish- Katherine Heiny

#486 Cranberry Relish- Katherine Heiny

Josie, a married woman with two kids and a nice happy life has been sleeping with a man she met on facebook. Now this man is breaking up with her for a woman he met on twitter. The irony of all this isn’t lost on Josie of course who has felt strange about the whole order of things anyway:

“We’re doing all this backwards…their minds had fallen in love before their bodies did and what if their bodies got all stubborn and wouldn’t fall in line?”

If Heiny wasn’t an exceptional storyteller, this is where I’d be saying how saturated I’ve become with tales of infidelity, or I’d say how un-clever the love-in-the-age-of-social-media story line is. If I did say all those things, I’d have a lot of evidence to back my statement up. However, even when I don’t get blown away by her story subjects, I still really enjoy reading Heiny’s stories. Perhaps it’s the matter-of-fact nonjudgmental take on morality issues, or that even when there seems to be little emotion in the characters it’s less about being cold and more about not wallowing in other people’s feelings.

This may be my least favorite in this collection so far, but I’ll still take it over the majority of other stories with similar topics.

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 29

#461 Paper Losses- Lorrie Moore

#461 Paper Losses- Lorrie Moore

Here is another story about a failed, loveless marriage, perhaps even infidelity. At this point of this story-a-day exercise of mine there are some topics that I just don’t like to read about anymore. This is one of them. So, I say right away, I know that it’s not Moore’s fault that I am saturated with this topic. On the other hand, stories that astound the reader often do so by transcending the topic. Yesterday, the Lahiri story I read, Sexy, was about infidelity and a failed marriage, but I found interest in it, because at least it was coming from a different perspective.

Trying to stay somewhat objective, I found the writing here to be a little uneven. Moore is exceedingly clever and creative in her word play and ironic observances. However, it seems here that those moments overshadowed the objective of the piece. If I stop and say—hey, that phrase the author used is a clever one—then I’m taken out of the narration a bit. I didn’t believe I was hearing the narrator speaking, I was seeing the writer, writing clever phrases.

But, some of them were definitely winners, or at least fodder for bumper stickers:

“Rage had it’s medicinal purposes, but she was not wired to sustain it, and when it tumbled away, loneliness engulfed her, grief burning at the center in a cold blue heat.”

“Like a person, a marriage was unrecognizable in death, even buried in an excellent suit.”

“Marriage stopped being comic when it was suddenly halted, at which point it became divorce, which time never disrupted, and so the funniness of which was never-ending.”

“All husbands are space aliens.”

“Hope is never false. Or it is always false. Whatever, it’s just hope.”

“Divorce she could see, would be like marriage: a power grab, as in who would be the dog and who would be the owner of the dog.”

Rating: 7-5-5-7 Total= 24

#423 Blue Heron Bridge- Katherine Heiny

#423 Blue Heron Bridge- Katherine Heiny

This story just has a natural humor to it. Not that the topic was all that funny, a woman having an affair with a neighbor, but the breezy style it’s written, somehow softens our judgment of that situation, and we get a story told by someone that could be a friend of ours.

Nina is very self aware about her infidelity and what kind of person it makes her but she does it anyway.

“Oh, it was horrible to have a teenager’s emotions and a forty-year-old’s body. It was humiliating. It was depressing. It was degrading. It made her feel alive to the very tips of her toes.”

Like I said, there is nothing naturally amusing about this story, its just told very well. The humor is in the details. Like the name of her neighbor—Bunny Pringle. “The most interesting thing about Bunny Pringle, in Nina’s opinion, was that everyone always referred to her by both her first and last name, like Darth Vader.”

Heiny has a very plaintive, matter of fact attitude towards her character’s relationships that I find relieving. So many of the stories I’ve read about relationships, infidelity, failed marriages are just so weighty, or self-indulgent. This is just one person sitting at a bar saying: “Guess what I did the other day?”

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total= 32

#406 Report from the Trenches- Lucia Perillo

#406 Report from the Trenches- Lucia Perillo

We all have our demons, and our bad decisions. Some of us are lucky to see a sign, or get some help that gets us past them.

Jimmy has cheated on her again, and she flips out. She breaks her good set of dishes and drives Jimmy away with a curtain rod. Jill comes in to help calm her down. "Don’t clean this up", she advises, "sometimes you have to wallow in it to remind you how bad it can get."

She doesn’t need to be reminded, she wants to hear about Jill’s bad decisions which sound so much more romantic and wild than just having a philandering husband. Maybe Jill’s bad decisions are just the sign she needs to get past her own.

Rating: 8-6-7-7 Total= 28

#288 Ghost Knife- Sharon Pomerantz

#288 Ghost Knife- Sharon Pomerantz

Annie is having an affair with a married man. They are passionate, loving, but there is not much time. She wonders how she got here. “When, I wonder did my life become someone else’s morality tale? When did I learn to ask for so little."

Dimitri is stuck in his Father’s life. He also loved two woman and kept them both for his whole upbringing. He was hoping to do the same thing, which freaks Annie out:

“Suddenly I am old and bitter and living over someone else’s drafty garage in a  room full of doilies and cracked mirrors and brown shades. Nothing is my own, everything belongs to someone else. This isn’t Edith Wharton, it’s Stephen King.”

Both hope that life will fix their problems, that something will intercede to set them on a better path, but both know that is unlikely. “We are alike, he and I, hoping time of circumstance or other people will decide for us what we cant decide for ourselves.”

Notable Passage: “Home, the word reserved for the place you don’t take your mistress.”

Rating: 7-7-6-7 Total= 27

#206 The Blush- Elizabeth Taylor

#206 The Blush- Elizabeth Taylor

Lying, deceit, domestic squabbles, and class warfare, this story had a little of each but not enough of any to make it all that interesting. The mistress of the house is a judgmental gossip. Here she begins by making it sound as though she supports and defends her house maid, but then by the end she turns her harsh eyes on the ugliness of the lower class:

“She did not deliberately mislead him, but she took advantage of his indifference. Her relationship with Mrs. Lacey and the intimacy of their conversations in the kitchen he would not have approved, and the sight of those calloused feet with their chipped nail varnish and yellowing heels would have sickened him.”

But then we have nothing to actually celebrate in the servant either. She’s a drunk, absentee mother, and lying, cheating spouse. So, without a true protagonist, there was little to hold onto.

Rating: 7-5-5-4 Total= 21

#135 Airplane: Or, How He Talked To Himself As If Reciting Poetry- Haruki Murakami

#135 Airplane: Or, How He Talked To Himself As If Reciting Poetry- Haruki Murakami

A twenty year-old man is having an affair with an older woman. Neither of them are entirely sure why the affair exists, they don’t love each other, nor do they hate each other. Their love-making is cold and mechanical, but yet, it seems to have meaning.

“Far more meaningful than age differences, he felt were the different tendencies that each individual possessed. He couldn’t help thinking that this was an important key for unlocking the riddle of life.”

While they spend time wondering about seemingly important things, she cries often, and he talks to himself in poetic verse. These odd, personal idiosyncratic tics is what makes them unique. It’s in the others reaction of these traits that their own being becomes apparent. It seems that we only know ourselves through each other’s eyes. There can be something so apparent and germane about yourself to the outside world but it is something that we can only see through the help of others.

We often spend time worrying about the wrong things, things we have no control over, things that will go on ticking even if we had not noticed:

“…she looked at the clock again. It had done its job: in the five minutes since her last look, it had advanced five minutes’ worth.”

Subtle and impossibly simple at first, Murukami can be utterly florid when we look slightly deeper. A point made by the following passage, that at first can seem like a cliché point, but when read in full context of this piece, sticks with you:

“I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.”

Notable Passage: “She seemed to have lifted the edge of the world, and now she was loosening its threads little by little—perfunctorily, apathetically, as if she had to do it no matter how long it might take.”

Rating: 9-8-10-9 Total= 36

#89 Two Boys- Lorrie Moore

#89 Two Boys- Lorrie Moore

Mary is enjoying her young single life. For the first time, she has two boyfriends. Number One is good-looking, funny, and married with two kids. Number Two is brooding, warm, and a little intense.

“Alone Numbers One and Two were missing parts.” She fantasizes about having a Number Three, perfect and there when the first two aren’t enough. This goes fine for a while, but she has predictable problems balancing her desires and her emotions.

“Her heart was big and bursting. Though her brain was drying and subdividing like a cauliflower.”

She reacts in odd ways like painting her entire apartment white, and throwing out all the furniture, "she needed plans.” So, she takes a random trip to Canada and writes to both suitors when she will be back. Number Two is at the station waiting. She is grateful and disappointed as she always seems to be about Two. Number One is glib about not being available and seems to be leaning back towards going back to his wife and family.

She has not found happiness, has stressful dreams and imagines herself as a young girl waiting for her boyfriends, who are either dead, or hanging there as slabs of meat.

Notable Passage: “You choose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one’s heart to knock against like a spook in the house.”

Rating: 8-7-9-7 Total= 31