Title: After You've Gone
Author: Alice Adams
Where I Read It: Legal Fictions
An attorney attempts to bring some order to her feelings and thoughts after her boyfriend leaves her. She analyzes different areas of her life and assumes a dispassionate attitude about a deeply personal and emotional topic. In her letter to him, she even advocates for his new girlfriend, asking him to be kind to her. The story is worth reading for the performance the main character delivers.
Title: The Connor Girls
Author: Edna O'Brien
Where I Read It: The Love Object
The title refers to a pair of adult sisters who live with their father. In the area of Irish countryside they call home, they're the elites. However, a scandal breaks the family apart when one of the sisters falls in love with a man her father considers unsuitable; she's Protestant, and her lover is Catholic. She leaves home and returns only when her father passes away. The marriage she once hoped for never takes place. For a while she's in the grip of an intense grief and has a drinking problem. But eventually, she settles back into life with her sister. Her heart was broken, her hopes thwarted, but by the story's end she's healing and is also more open to the community around her. You wonder, as much pain as she went through, maybe marriage to the man of her choice would have put her in worse straits? Or maybe she would have been deeply happy. There's no way to know for sure.
The story's narrator is a neighbor of the Connor girls. Her family comes from a lower class, and she has always looked at the Connors from the outside. When she grows up, she chooses to marry outside her parents' wishes. After a period of estrangement, she visits home with her husband and young son. The visit highlights her husband's contempt for her parents, their rural way of life, and yes, for her too. The narrator is deeply alone, wrenched away from her parents' world but in a relationship that isn't loving. She also no longer has a community to call her own. Ultimately, the story doesn't portray marrying against parental wishes as an unquestioned good in all cases. Sometimes it might be the best choice, but the risks are serious, and one might lose a great deal. Should you take the risk then?
Title: The Country Husband
Author: John Cheever
Where I Read It: American Short Stories Since 1945
Cheever is good at writing about middle-aged, upper middle class suburbanites who possess the accepted trappings of an adult life - marriage, children, a job, a lovely home – but if you look more closely, you discover that they are profoundly immature. Something in them remains undeveloped. In this story, a man experiences a shock – he survives an airplane accident – and appears to spiral into a mid-life crisis that he doesn't have the wisdom or maturity to handle. For example, he feels lust for his kids' young babysitter (he thinks of it as love, but it doesn't come across as genuine love), and acts on his feelings in a selfish, nasty way that hurts other people.
Title: The Furnished Room
Author: O. Henry (William Sydney Porter)
Where I Read It: Manhattan Noir 2
A man searches through NYC for a woman he loves. He goes from one derelict boarding house to another in the hopes that someone knows where she is. She works in theater, and her fate is at first unknown. By the end we find out.
The visceral descriptions of miserable places are the most memorable parts of this story.
They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter.Human misery is imprinted on furniture and on the floors and walls. You can feel the presence of former occupants in depressing ways.
One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the little signs left by the furnished room's procession of guests developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser told that lovely women had marched in the throng. The tiny finger prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had splintered with its contents against the wall.
Title: Point of View
Author: Lucia Berlin
Where I Read It: A Manual for Cleaning Women
I'm a single woman in her late fifties. I work in a doctor's office. I ride home on the bus. Every Saturday I do my laundry and then I shop at Lucky's and buy the Sunday Chronicle and go home.The story is an exercise in writing choices and in self-revelation. The narrator talks about how a story told in first-person POV can make the main character sound pathetic and uninteresting. However, when told in a third-person POV, it can draw you in, even with its "compulsive, obsessive boring little details."
The story shows much of this woman's day, including the man she loves hopelessly and how she spends her time, also seemingly without hope. But the way the story is told can give her some dignity too, even if she's clutching at it, hopelessly.
Title: The Pomegranate Seed
Author: Edith Wharton
Where I Read It: 21 Essential American Short Stories
Charlotte Ashby is the second wife to a widower. Her relationship with her husband is a loving one, but when he begins receiving strange letters in gray envelopes, he lapses into episodes where he acts distant and disturbed.
The ending isn't entirely satisfying, but I still liked the story overall. It's suspenseful, and the emotions are portrayed vividly. I also enjoyed the allusion to Greek myth. It's not simply that the husband could be drawn into the underworld by the claims of his first wife. It's possible that Charlotte herself is like Persephone and will spend part of her life with her mother-in-law, and part of it with her husband in the regions of the netherworld where his mind is wandering.
Edith Wharton's descriptions are wonderful too. Here's one of Charlotte about to return to the home she shares with her husband, a place she initially thought of as a sanctuary.
She turned her back on it, standing for a moment in the old-fashioned, marble-flagged vestibule before she inserted her key in the lock. The sash curtains drawn across the panes of the inner door softened the light within to a warm blur through which no details showed... The contrast between the soulless roar of New York, its devouring blaze of lights, the oppression of its congested traffic, congested houses, lives, minds and this veiled sanctuary she called home, always stirred her profoundly.
Title: A Scandalous Woman
Author: Edna O'Brien
Where I Read It: The Love Object
The narrator is a younger girl who helps an older one, Eily, meet secretly with a man she naively assumes will love her back. He'll soon discard Eily, but because he gets her pregnant, they'll be forced into marriage (though there's no question of who's losing more – he's the sort to indulge in adultery without misgivings).
For a while after the marriage, there are reports that Eily has gone a little mad. Not surprising, as her notion of love has been crushed, and she's been forced to marry a man who despises her. Her wedding has more the feel of a funeral. The adults presiding over it think she would have been better off dead, and the wedding is a kind of death for her.
Years later, the narrator visits her and finds her changed. Eily seems to have forgotten the past, like something has been expunged from her mind or spirit. She comes across as paper thin. It's a contrast to years earlier, soon after her parents caught her, when she slipped the narrator a message: "Remembrance is all I ask, but if Remembrance should prove a task Forget me." By the end she forgets herself.
Title: The Telephone Game
Author: William Trevor
Where I Read It: The Hill Bachelors
An Englishman and a German woman are about to be married. The story is set during a party before their wedding day. After a bit of drinking, the man plays a telephone prank where he calls up a random stranger and tries to see how long he can keep them on the line. He winds up calling an old woman and convincing her to check a potential problem with her plumbing. The tension in the story ratchets up when the old woman doesn't return to the phone. There's a possibility she injured herself, or worse.
The prank, particularly the reactions to it, will send tendrils of disunity through the relationship. The way the man and woman react to the prank reveals to them how different they are in some fundamental ways. And now they can't treat each other with the same bright, unreserved openness as before.
