Dedication
For Ruth Jacobson,
who is my grandmother,
among many other things.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
It’s Bad Luck to Die
Some Have Entertained Angels, Unaware
Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry
The Bar of Our Recent Unhappiness
Mercedes Kane
What We Know About the Lost Aztec Children
June
Secretary of State
The Goings-On of the World
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Elizabeth McCracken
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
A love affair, or a blow to the solar plexus. A ticking bomb that must be allowed to explode. A rebus. A nautilus shell, a string of boxcars, a filmstrip, a scene viewed the wrong way through a telescope, a pond, a snow globe. A magic trick (the sort performed by stage magicians, not sorcerers). A diorama in a natural history museum, with painted backgrounds and half a moose and forced perspective. A piece of photorealistic origami. A magical realist photograph.
What I don’t know about short stories could fill a book. Two books, actually, so far, including this one. When I teach, I’m always striving to explain what a short story is, usually by comparing it to something it surely is not. As a teacher (as well as a writer), I love metaphor, which might not speak well of me. It’s like talking to someone who won’t stop doing impressions. I love impressions, too. Imitations of greatness, or misdirection. A short story is a single instrument upon which any piece of music may be played; a novel is an orchestra, every song and every sound. A short story is the fin cutting the ocean’s surface that lets you feel and fear the shark beneath; a novel’s the entire Atlantic. A short story is an optical illusion: the hag and then the young beauty and then the hag again, the hag eyeballing you uncannily, the beauty always turning away. Or a vase, and then two faces in profile about to kiss and never getting there. A novel—well, it’s any number of old hags and young beauties and old beauties and young hags and, chances are, a fair number of kisses.
When I was young, it wasn’t uncommon to hear in MFA programs that short stories were apprentice work. You completed something small to learn how to complete something big, something real. As a grad student I must have written the first forty pages of half a dozen theoretical novels, but if I began a short story I finished it. Then, with four stories, I landed a contract for my first book (this book) and for the first time in my life I was writing for publication. Not in hopes of publication, but for actual publication, with a deadline and a waiting editor. The first few stories I had to write this way were all right, not so different from writing for a deadline in school, but I grew to dislike it, and there is at least one story in that book—this book—which, when I remember it, not often, I think, Poor half-formed thing: you were the child of a deadline.
Once I’d finished that book—this book—I began writing novels. I wrote two in a row and declared that I was no longer a short-story writer: I had stretched my imagination out of shape and couldn’t go back. Short stories, I explained, were much harder than novels: they showed missteps. Novels were baggy and forgiving; stories had to be both art and perfectly constructed. Harder to mimic real life in a short story, easy to be hokey or overly epiphanic or both. No, I said, I was a novelist now.
Then I began to write novels that didn’t go so well, and I rushed back to short fiction. My first story after about nine years of abstinence was pulled from the wreckage of a failed novel. What I’d forgotten: the way I could hold a short story in my head for the entire composition of it, how the first mysterious intimations—a single line, an image, an exchange of dialogue—were still there when I typed the last line.
When I was young, I scrambled for stories, scavenging through the world looking for scraps. By world I mean stories my friends told me, newspaper articles I read on microfilm, my parents’ family lore, conversations overhead on Greyhound buses, even occasionally the work of other, better writers. There is a scene in a story in my first book—this book—that I only years later realized was stolen from Tobias Wolff’s “Hunters in the Snow.”
Older, I realized that I could will short stories into being. That is, I could decide to write a short story and go picking around my mental debris for a topic, then settle on characters and narrative and structure, and write the thing. Novels—no, impossible. Novels required an obsession with material and people and a great deal of uncertainty. But short stories required no more obsession than I already had stored up in my brain. Will felt like exactly the right word: I was willing stories into existence. I could work my brain like an electromagnet in a junkyard, turn it on, dip it into the heaps of my own mind, and pull something out. Perhaps not everything picked up was fiction-worthy, but some weird remnant would catch my fancy, and I could build a story around it. This felt like an extraordinary revelation.
Then, not long ago, I reread Allan Gurganus’s essay “Garden Sermon.” Allan was my first teacher my first semester of graduate school; his work means everything to me. “Garden Sermon” is about, among other things, novel writing, his own first (and great) book Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, gardening, AIDS in the 1980s, taking care of the dying, the importance of taking things personally, heredity, teaching, compassion. Allan gave a public reading of it when I was his student in 1988.
There in the essay, these words:
“I tell my students: they can will the subject of a story but, a novel? no.”
Not even my revelation was original. I wasn’t ready the first time I heard it; time and other ideas covered it up; then a new wind gusted through the dust heaps, and the idea landed glintingly at my feet, and I thought, mine.
I change my mind about what a short story is nearly every day. So, then: a short story is that junkyard magnet. The form itself attracts. All the pieces of a short story—characters and lines of dialogue, events and images, setting, wild ideas—have been forged separately. Now they’re here, clinging to the one thing they have in common. In the junkyard itself, they mean nothing, a jumble. They are refuse. But once the magnet passes over they jump up and hang together, hub cap to hub cup to old pipe to wrenched-off refrigerator door. You see how they fit together, how they make a shape different from any other collection of scraps. Some of them don’t even touch the magnet: the current runs through the whole assemblage and holds it together. That story your parents always told about the early days of their marriage; the insult that ruined one of your oldest friendships; the morning news of 1962; other people’s writing; your worst memory of fourth grade. Turn on a magnet and watch them fly together.
Today, anyhow, that’s what I think.
It’s Bad Luck to Die
Maybe you wonder how a Jewish girl from Des Moines got Jesus Christ tattooed on her three times: ascending on one thigh, crucified on the other, and conducting a miniature apocalypse beneath the right shoulder. It wasn’t religion that put them there; it was Tiny, my husband. I have a Buddha round back, too. He was going to give me Moses parting the Red Sea, but I was running out of space. Besides, I told him, I was beginning to feel like a Great Figures in Religion comic book.
He got dreamy-eyed when he heard that. “Brigham Young,” he said. “And some wives.”
I told him: “Tiny, I’ve got no room for a polygamist.”
Tiny himself had been married three times before he met me, one wife right after the other. I only had him, the one, and he’s been dead six months now.
We drove to Tiny’s shop over on East 14th because that’s where Steve, the crazy boy, had got the panther that had a toehold on his shoulder. The shop was clean and smelled of antiseptic; Babs and I were disappointed. Sheets of heavy paper in black dime-store frames hung on the walls—flash sheets—arranged by theme: one had Mickey Mouse and Woody Woodpecker; another, a nurse in a Red Cross cap and a geisha offering a drink on a tray. A big flash by the door had more ambitious designs: King Kong and Cleopatra on the opposite sides of one page, looking absentmindedly into each other’s eyes.
Tiny was set up on a stool in back, smoking a cigarette, an itty-bit of a man next to a Japanese screen. He was wearing a blue dress shirt with the cuffs turned back, and his hands and arms were covered with blue-black lines: stars across the knuckles, snakes winding up under the sleeves. The wide flowered tie that spread out over his chest and stomach might’ve been right on a big man, but on Tiny it looked like an out-of-control garden. His pants were white and wrinkled, and there was a bit of blue ink at the knee; a suit jacket, just as wrinkled, hung on the coat rack in back.
He eyed our group, scowled at Steve and his two friends, and solemnly winked at me and Babs.
“So,” he said. “Who’s the one?”
“Me,” Babs said, trying to sound tough. She told him what she wanted: a little red-and-black bow on her tush. He asked her if she were old enough; she got out her wallet and showed him her driver’s license.
Steve and his friends were buzzing around the shop, looking at the flash and tapping the ones they really liked.
“Keep your hands off the designs, boys,” said Tiny. “I can’t tattoo a fingerprint.” He turned to Babs. “Okay. Come back of the screen.” There was something a little southern in his voice, but I couldn’t pick out what it was. He jumped off the stool, and I saw that he was about a full foot shorter than me. I’m six feet tall, have been since eighth grade. I looked right down on top of his slick black hair.
We all started to follow him. Tiny looked at us and shook his head.
“You boys have to stay out here.”
“I’m her boyfriend,” said Steve. “I’ve seen it before, and I’m paying.”
“If you’ve seen it before, you’ll see it again, so you don’t need to now. Not in my shop, anyhow. You”—he pointed at me—“come around to testify I’m a gentleman.”
He beckoned us back of the screen to a padded table, the kind you see in doctors’ offices, only much lower. Tiny turned around politely while Babs lowered her blue jeans and clambered up. He spun back, frowned, pulled down just the top of her yellow flowered underwear like he was taking fat off a chicken, and tapped her. “Right here’s where you want it?”
“That’s fine.”
“Honey, is it fine, or is it what you want?”
Babs twisted to look, careful not to catch his eye. “That’s what I want.”
He squirted her with antiseptic, got a razor and shaved the area good. I sat on a folding chair across from them.
Tiny loosened his tie, slipped it off, and hung it, still knotted, on a peg on the wall. “Hey Stretch,” he said, looking at me. “What’s your name?”
“Lois.”
“Lois. Like Louise?” He rolled his shirtsleeves up further. Babs was holding on to the table like a drowning sailor, and Tiny hadn’t even got the needle out yet.
“Lois,” I answered, and fast, because I had to talk to him over Babs’s hindquarters and that made me a little self-conscious, “after my Uncle Louis. I was going to be named Natalie, after my Uncle Nathan, but then Louis died and Mom liked him better anyhow.”
“My name is Tiny. No story there but the obvious.” He picked up an electric needle from a workbench and hunted for the right pot of color.
“I’m Babs,” said Babs, reaching around for a handshake. Tiny was looking elsewhere, and he dipped the needle in some black ink and flipped it on. “For Barbara?” he asked, setting into her skin.
“A-a-a-a-bigail. Ouch.” She gripped the table.
“Honey,” said Tiny, “this doesn’t hurt. I got you where you’re good and fleshy. Might sting a little, but it doesn’t hurt.”
“Okay,” said Babs, and she sounded almost convinced.
“For Abraham,” I said suddenly. “Abigail after Abraham.”
“Pretty girls named after men,” said Tiny, taking a cloth and wiping some ink off of Babs so he could see what he was doing. “Thought that only happened in the South.”
Looking back, it seems like he took an hour working on Babs, but now I know it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes. He looked up at me from time to time, smiling or winking. I thought that he was just one of those flirty types, one of those bold little guys, and that if he had been looking at Babs in the face instead of where he was looking at her, he would’ve flirted with her the same. Years later he told me that he was bowled over by all those square inches of skin, how I was so big and still not fat. “I fell for you right away,” he said.
Up until then, I’d always thought it was only sensible to fall in love with tall men so that I wouldn’t look like so much of a giantess. That way we could dance in public, in scale, no circus act. It didn’t matter, though: I never had a date all through high school, couldn’t dance a step. I spent my time in movie houses, because most movie stars looked pretty tall, even if it was only a trick of the camera, a crate under their feet in love scenes.
Tiny, no doubt, no tricks about it, was short, but he charmed me from the start. His charm was as quick and easy as his needle, and he could turn it on and off the same way. On the Tuesday afternoons I visited him before we got married, I saw all types jangle the bell on the front door as they pushed it open: big men, skinny kids, nervous couples gambling on love forever. Most of them asked the same thing: “Does it hurt?” To people who rubbed him wrong, he’d say, “If you’re worried about it, I guess you don’t really want one”; to those he liked, chiefly the women, he’d drawl, “I could make you smile while I do it.” He could, too; he could tell your background by the feel of your skin, and would talk about ridiculous things—baseball scores, recipes for homemade beer, the sorry state of music—anything but the business at hand.
He could even charm my mother, who, on meeting Tiny, this little man only two years younger than her, was grieved to discover she liked him.
When he was finished with Babs, he put on a bandage and handed her a little white card that said How To Take Care Of Your New Tattoo. It had his name and address at the bottom. She read it and nodded. He turned and gave me a card, too.
“Anything for you today?” he asked me.
“No, no. I’m a chaperon, that’s all.”
“Too bad. You’d tattoo great. You’re pale—high contrast.” He reached up and tapped me on the collarbone.
Babs looked a little white herself now, standing up, zipping her pants. Tiny got his tie and put it back on, tightened it as we walked around front.
“I like to look natty,” he told me. Then he said to Steve, all business, “Eight dollars.”
The boys crowded around Babs, who was suddenly looking pleased and jaunty, shaking her head: no, it didn’t hurt; no big deal; no, not now, I’ll show it to you later. I’m still the only member of the family that knows she has that tattoo.
“You wanna stick around and chat awhile?” Tiny asked me, pocketing Steve’s money. “Tuesday’s my slow day.”
The boys turned and looked at me, like I was the tough one all of a sudden; I could see Babs was jealous.
“Sure,” I said.
“Careful, Lois,” said Steve. “By the time that
character gets through with you, you’ll be the tattooed lady.”
But he didn’t give me my first tattoo till a year later, the day after we were married: a little butterfly pooled in the small of my back. Five years later, he began referring to it as his “early work,” even though he’d been tattooing for twenty-five years before he met me. That didn’t rankle me as much as you might think—I liked being his early body of work, work-in-progress, future. That little butterfly sat by itself for a while, but in five years’ time Tiny flooded it with other designs: carnations, an apple, a bomber plane, his initials.
When I told my mother about that first tattoo, she said, “Oh Lord. Is it pretty?” Like all good mothers, she always knew the worst was going to happen and was disappointed and relieved when it finally did. But she didn’t ask to see that tattoo, or any of the ones that followed. Sunday afternoons, when I went to have lunch with her, I dressed very carefully. I covered myself whenever I left the shop, anyhow: I hated nosy women in the grocery store trying to read my arm as I reached for the peas; I suspected all waitresses of gossiping about me in the kitchen. On my visits to my mother, though, I was extra wary. Through the years, my sleeves got longer, the fabrics more opaque. I never wore white when I visited her: the colors shimmered through.
How could I explain it to my mother? She has always been a glamorous woman, never going anywhere without a mirror, checking and rechecking her reflection, straightening, maintaining. When I was a teenager, there were days that I didn’t look in a mirror at all; I avoided my shadow passing in shop windows. Makeup hated me: mascara blacked my eyes, lipstick found its way onto my teeth and chin. At best, on formal occasions, I would peer into the rectangle on my lipstick case, seeing my mouth and nothing more. Tiny changed that. He caught me kneeling on the bathroom counter trying to get a glimpse of part of my back between the medicine chest and a compact, and he went on a campaign, installing mirrors, hiding them. He put a triple mirror from a clothing shop in our bedroom, put a full-length mirror over the bathtub. Once, I opened the freezer and saw my own reflection, chalked up with frost, looking alarmed in a red plastic frame in front of the orange juice.
Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry Page 1
