#318 The Package- Kurt Vonnegut

#318 The Package- Kurt Vonnegut

Earl Fenton just sold the plant he spent his life building and after spending months traveling the world, he comes home to his brand new state of the art home, the whole package.

He wasn’t always rich however, he was the poorest of his college fraternity brothers. He wasn’t “exactly behind the door when they passed out looks and brains.”

“No—but when they passed out money, they handed me a waiter’s jacket and a mop.”

So, he has got a bit of a chip on his shoulders. When he gets a call suddenly from one of his wealthier Frat brothers, he sees it as a great opportunity for a little bragging. But as he starts showing off the opulence and grandness of his life, he doesn’t get the satisfying jealousy and envy he wished for…and that deepens the resentment he has unfairly held for Charley the last forty years.

It turns out that Charley isn’t exactly the person Earl thinks he is, but that chip on his shoulder is hard to remove after all these years.

Rating: 7-7-7-7 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

#272 Dream Children- Edith Pearlman

#272 Dream Children- Edith Pearlman

Willa is a live-in nanny for a family on Manhattan’s upper west side. They are a nice family, thoughtful and careing and probably a little over-protective. She notices how controlled their environment is:

“In her country there was a TV in every village bar, and in the island’s capital city even the poorest family owned a set. But in this New York apartment—none.”

She quietly and gracefully takes care of the children, quietly watching her privileged employers and their friends. She gives them comfort and piece of mind, and even though they don’t recognize their lucky place in the world, she is understanding on a very human level. Their neighbor is losing her apartment and with it the office where her dentist practice is. Instead of taking the opportunity to move to a diferent neighborhood and take a position with another dentist office, she is intent on wallowing in self-pity. Willa sees her in a sympathetic light:

“Back home this woman would have been respected. She would not have been forced to work. People would have brought her stew and beer and smokes, and she would have sat on her porch and looked at the sea.”

Two stories in, and although I see grace and shape in her writing, I have yet to feel a personal connection with the subjects or characters in her stories. That happens.

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

#76 Her Sweet Jerome- Alice Walker

#76 Her Sweet Jerome- Alice Walker

A wife struggles with herself, her ignorance, and her husband.  Walker does not portray this woman in a good light:

“She was a big awkward woman, with big bones and hard rubbery flesh. Her short arms ended in ham hands, and her neck was a squat roll of fat that protruded behind her head as a big bump. Her skin was rough and puffy with plump mole-like freckles…etc.”

She is a seemingly friendly, if not off-balanced proprietor of a beauty parlor. She comes from money and falls for a dapper young professor, Jerome. Jerome seems to have married her for he family’s wealth, and does not seem to have any love for is wife, and is actually repulsed by her presence. He is verbally and physically abusive.

She pretends that she is the luckiest woman in town and tries to forestall small town gossip by weaving her own tales during the daily beauty shop gossiping sessions…unsuccessfully:

“…fixing her face in a steamy dignified mask that encouraged snickers.”

Her life becomes unhinged when she believes that Jerome is cheating on her, and she becomes a public menace trying to track down the infidels.  Her father dies, leaving all his money to Jerome and while he becomes a man of respect she is left behind personally, socially, and politically.

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