Mother of Three Drowns Children and Other Stories Laura L

University of Texas at El Paso DigitalCommons@UTEP Open Access Theses & Dissertations 2012-01-01 Mother of Three Drowns Children and Other Stories Laura L. Stubbins University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd Part of the American Literature Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Stubbins, Laura L., "Mother of Three Drowns Children and Other Stories" (2012). Open Access Theses & Dissertations. 2393. https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd/2393 This is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UTEP. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UTEP. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MOTHER OF THREE DROWNS CHILDREN AND OTHER STORIES LAURA L. STUBBINS Department of Creative Writing APPROVED: Lex Williford, MFA, Chair Dan Chacón, MFA Benjamin C. Flores, Ph.D. Interim Dean of the Graduate School Copyright © by Laura L. Stubbins 2012 Dedication For Polly, Geoffrey, Lisa, Robin, and of course, Mother and Dad. MOTHER OF THREE DROWNS CHILDREN AND OTHER STORIES by LAURA L. STUBBINS, B.A. THESIS Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at El Paso in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Department of Creative Writing THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO May 2012 Acknowledgements I offer my sincerest appreciation and thanks to my thesis director, Professor Lex Williford, whose tremendous knowledge and guidance made this thesis possible. Thanks to my thesis committee member, Professor Dan Chacón, for his generous support and assistance. Also, I want to express my gratitude to the inspiring faculty, staff, and fellow students at The University of Texas at El Paso’s Department of Creative Writing. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements ..........................................................................................................................v Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... vi Preface..............................................................................................................................................1 Mother of Three Drowns Children ................................................................................................25 Bullets and Bracelets......................................................................................................................42 The Bicycle ....................................................................................................................................47 Length of Stay: Transient...............................................................................................................51 The Drinking-Bird Universe ..........................................................................................................60 The Radio .......................................................................................................................................64 Sister Annunciation ........................................................................................................................67 The Other Girl in the Photo ...........................................................................................................70 Mop Buckets and Birthday Cards ..................................................................................................73 A Friend of Flipper ........................................................................................................................87 Nova ..............................................................................................................................................90 Mistakes .........................................................................................................................................95 Room for More ..............................................................................................................................96 Let Go ............................................................................................................................................99 Wedding Dress .............................................................................................................................101 Where we Went............................................................................................................................105 Toe Socks .....................................................................................................................................121 Lucille ..........................................................................................................................................123 Don’t Know No Better .................................................................................................................127 Vita .............................................................................................................................................137 vi Preface “Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterwards you ask, ‘Is it true?’ and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer” (O’Brien 82). Underpinnings I am an unreliable narrator. I came by my unreliability honestly, born to a couple of would-be beatnik apparitions, my words always lost in the din of their chain-rattling and moaning, spoon-feeding me secrets and teaching me never to ask why. “Loose lips sink ships,” warned my spirit keepers—both weaned on the U.S. propaganda of World War II. But unlike Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut’s protagonist in the anti-war story Slaughterhouse-Five, those two got stuck in time, not the other way around. My parents chose to be anchored in a narrative of their own making, with no beginning or ending, just despair and deadening routine—and they demanded that of me. A good southern ghost needs to stay put. Raise a family. Rattle her chains at the right time. I wasn’t a good little ghost girl, but you should know this already. With a childhood like that, how could I be anything but an unreliable narrator? Vonnegut is an unreliable narrator, too, beginning Slaughterhouse-Five with succinct perfection: “All this happened, more or less” (Vonnegut 1). Tim O’Brien’s short story, “How to Tell a True War Story” opens with a brief three-word statement, “This is true” (O’Brien 67). But we learn O’Brien isn’t a reliable narrator, either. Eventually, he reveals, “That’s a true story that never happened” (O’Brien 84). In these brief snippets both Vonnegut and O’Brien offer us an entire narrative, a whole short story to consider in less than ten words. Is the narrator in either story lying? If the narrators are not being untruthful, why are their perspectives so flawed? Why are Vonnegut and O’Brien compelled to distort their narrative perspective in the first place? Why do I? 1 Let me try to re-characterize my upbringing. I grew up in Beeville, Texas, the youngest of four children. My father was an orphan, an alcoholic, and a small-town newspaper linotype operator—a printer. A master of justification, he knew where to break lines, on the page and in life, right justification both literal and figurative. My mother was willingly trapped in a chaotic relationship with my father for almost fifty years, a marriage fueled by fist fights and Pearl beer. My parent’s marriage worsened when their oldest son died in a car accident at the age of sixteen, when I was only a year old. After my brother’s death, my father grew more invisible, disappearing after work to his own room, to be by himself. I was lucky for the time we shared at the Toot and Tote bar, where I developed distaste for orange juice in tin cans at an early age—a detail I share in my story “The Drinking-Bird Universe.” My mother spent her life preoccupied with her son’s death and the dead in general—obsessed with astrology, psychics, astral guides, and the occult. No way could I compete with my brother’s ghost, and my mother, the queen of competition, took pride in never letting her children win. I’m using pathos in an attempt to persuade you to empathize with me, but maybe I’m exaggerating, or I’m biased. Sure, I had a rough childhood. My childhood was like yours, for better or worse, and it’s in the past. Perhaps I’m just writing the preface to my thesis, trying to get inside my own head to explain the techniques I’ve learned, and why I write the way I do. In writing, I minimize the significance of events that happened and exaggerate ones that didn’t. I do this in part, to protect the living, but also to draw the reader closer to the narrative. As a child, I didn’t have a frame of reference for experiencing things simply as they were. My mother taught me to see things as she wished they were, or how they might have been. When I write, I create families like mine, and families I’ve known, families with secrets and ghosts. 2 When a writer is raised with compromised perceptions, under constant threats from a domineering mother who tells her children repeatedly never to write things on paper—that written words would destroy the entire family—it does make one wonder if ships would sink if a version of the truth was recorded? Being silenced as a child made me feel that I had no truth, that truth was dangerous, or even wrong. I was taught early to tell lies: Daddy was

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