#444 That Dance You Do- Katherine Heiny

#444 That Dance You Do- Katherine Heiny

Mom is throwing a birthday party for her eight-year old son. It is a long day filled with frustration, exasperation, and an uncomfortable third-rate magician who demands a good-bye hug as part of his payment.

“In fact, now that you think about it, children’s birthday parties are pretty similar to your wedding day: you pay too mcu attention to meaningless detail, you overinvest in certain decisions, you see your friends but don’t really get to interact with them, you end up incredibly stressed, and in retrospect you would certainly do it all much more simply.”

All this is worth it for the joy of your children.

Notable Passage: “The road to manners is a long one…and possibly you can’t get there from here.”

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#338 Eleanor’s Music- Mary Gordon

#338 Eleanor’s Music- Mary Gordon

I guess you could call Eleanor old-fashioned. Perhaps stubbornly complacent is a better term. It’s not that she is happy or content with her life, as much as she doesn’t want anything to change.

She had a husband, but they divorced when he admitted his homosexuality. They are still friends now, and for the last 18 years, she has lived with her parents, a situation to all of them that seems normal.

“She knew that many people thought it odd, to say nothing of unhealthy, for her to be living with her parents at age fifty-one…She had long ago given up that last residue of her embarrassment, which at one time, like a pile of dried leaves, could be set adrift by the slightest wind, and would flutter inside her, cause her to put her hand splayed out flat against her chest.”

“She considered the shape of her life not peculiar, but original; she lived as she liked; real courage, she believed, was doing what you believe in, however it appeared.”

Like her parents who never leave the house without impeccable dress, Eleanor believes the details of her life should be kept from everyone, including her family. She lives with small enjoyments. These will rarely change, and anything ugly or new should be avoided or hidden.

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

#274 Coins- Mona Simpson

#274 Coins- Mona Simpson

It seems that stories about foreign nannies taking care of American children is a popular short story subject. We’ve seen a few by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and we just had another by Edith Pearlman a few days ago. While each has it’s own theme, I find most of them to feel very similar.

Here we have a Philippine live-in nanny. She jokes that people always want a nanny from the Philippines: “Like a BMW…we are status symbols.” I find that way too true to be funny actually. Like the other stories, the parents seem to be loving and well-intentioned, but aloof, guilty, and slightly jealous of the closeness between their children and their employee.

“Dee told me, when I first came here, I don’t need to teach you children. You have been a mother to five…Children they are not hard. But most you need to think about the mother. Here, the mothers are the ones that throw tantrums.”

What a weird system. The nanny is here raising another couples children so she can send money to her own children. Her services are needed because the couple is so busy working to give their own children—the ones they put in the care of a stranger—the best life they can.  Seems we’ve become a satire about ourselves. This has nothing to do with the story, just a thought while this topic keeps popping up in my reading.

Rating: 7-6-6-7 Total= 26

#236 Under No Moon- Amy Hempel

#236 Under No Moon- Amy Hempel

The narrator and her parents are on a cruise to the mouth of the Amazon to see Halley’s comet. The mother believes upon seeing this sight, she will die.

“This was not superstition; it was sixth sense, or second sight. Clairvoyance. It was something she said she knew the way she said she knew the moment her children were conceived. It was how she said she knew which song would be played on the radio next, how she knew to circle one more time around the block before a parking space would open.”

She never got to see the comet due to sickness, but then, or because of that she didn’t die either. The viewing for the other passengers were said to be the worst visibility of the comet in 2,000 years. However, even after trekking into the jungle with tri-pods, and heavy gear, nobody left disappointed.

It’s funny. Sometimes you read something and can imagine it in another voice. Hempel always reads to me as genuine, and straight forward. Even when she’s writing something funny or ironic, it doesn’t have a biting edge. That’s hers style and it’s wonderful. However, reading this story about 45 taxis (out of the whole country’s 47) taking old people into the interior of a tropical island to barely see a comet--one whole taxi used to carry a portable toilet—I imagine the buffoonery that would spew out of the pen of someone like T.C Boyle or better yet, Hunter S. Thompson.

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total=28

#216 Sleepy- Anton Chekhov

#216 Sleepy- Anton Chekhov

The Masters are asleep and the thirteen year-old nanny, Varka, is tending to their child. She is exhausted, cannot keep her eyes open, but she must. The child needs care and if she sleeps, the masters will beat her. All night, she falls into half awake half dreamlike states, never getting enough. When the morning comes, even without sleep, she is expected to work:

-Varka, light the stove.

-Varka, set up the samovar.

-Varka, clean the master’s galoshes.

-Varka, wash the front steps.

-Varka, run and fetch the bottles of beer.

-Varka, rock the baby.

Night after day after night, reality is a myth. The baby is the enemy and must go. Then she can get sleep. Chekhov does a great job creating tension and anxiety. You really feel tired and angry and want this poor girl to get some rest.

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

#212 King Bee-T.C. Boyle

#212 King Bee-T.C. Boyle

Wow, what a nightmare! A couple has trouble conceiving a child. They look to adopt but do not want to wait the many years it would take to adopt a new-born of their choosing. They get duped into adopting a 9 year-old boy named Anthony. He appears at first to be the Norman Rockwell archetype of the American male child, but things turn quickly.

“The smile was a regular feature of those first few months—He stopped smiling when the trial period was over, as if he’d suddenly lost control of his facial muscles. It was uncanny. Almost to the day the adoption became formal—the day that he was theirs and they were his—Anthony’s smile vanished.”

His calm demeanor turns to erratic behavior, foul language and an obsession with bees. He likes bees because they have no mercy, “You fit in or you die.” Nothing seems to rid him of his psychotic behavior and he goes in and out of institutions and youth prisons until he becomes an adult, scarier and even more bee-like.

There are obvious literary links here, from the Kafka-esque alienation insect references, or a twilight zone story arc. Personally, I see a lot of Stephen King in this story, which is something I wouldn’t have expected from Boyle. This is a fun outlier so far in this collection.

Rating: 7-8-8-7 Total= 30

#78 Flower Children- Maxine Swann

#78 Flower Children- Maxine Swann

Happy Friday! Here is another Prize Story from the O. Henry Awards. Flower Children is written with an easy flow of a pastoral childhood.  If only everyone could grow up like this, happy, free of boundaries, nothing to do but explore and learn.

Of course this utopian view of what existence would be like without a tether is fraught with problems. What starts out as innocence and joy eventually turns to cynicism and angst, at least for the parents.  Children are adaptable as we see here. They love the openness of their hippy home, but then they also learn to love the confines of rules and expectations. 

When you raise a child to be sensitive and aware of their surroundings, guess what? They can see through your façade as well.  I liked this story. Swann has a subtle style and the use of imagery is a nice framework for the underlying emotion. The young apple trees at the start give way to “gnarled apple trees with puckered gray skins” as the children’s lives become more real. In the end, the Utopia has dissipated and is replaced with hope, and that should really be enough.

Notable Passage: “They hold leaves up to the light and peer through them. They close their eyes and press their faces into showers of leaves and wait for that feeling of darkness to come and make their whole bodies stir.”

Rating: 9-9-9-8 Total= 35