Women and Children First by Alina Frances Grabowski Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt Univers
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Women and Children First By Alina Frances Grabowski Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS in Creative Writing August 9, 2019 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Lorrie Moore, M.F.A. Lorraine Lopez, Ph.D. Nancy Reisman, M.F.A. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 Aftermath .................................................................................................................................. 11 Fraternal .................................................................................................................................... 34 DesignFuture ............................................................................................................................. 60 Meninges ................................................................................................................................... 87 Relapse .................................................................................................................................... 108 A Girl Walks Into a Bar ............................................................................................................ 134 The Losers............................................................................................................................... 155 Confirmation ........................................................................................................................... 180 ii Introduction The stories in Women and Children First take place in Mayfield, a thinly veiled version of Scituate, Massachusetts, the town where I grew up. When I was in high school, my classmates loved to riff on its name as though it were a nonsense word: Skit-you-watty, Skitch-ee-wit, Satch-what? This was when I entered private school, and my new friends came from towns with crisp, easy-to- swallow names: Newton, Belmont, Arlington. Stuffy names, names that didn’t imply adventure, as Scituate’s apparently did. My private school friends were obsessed with my town; its distance from Boston, coupled with its combination of beaches and forest (“Trees!” one of my friends cried upon stepping off the train), proved endlessly exotic in their eyes. My friends from home, however, called our town something else: Shit-You-Ate. To them the town was stifling, entertaining during the summer but boring otherwise, little more than a collection of parking lots where we idled late at night, seeking privacy from our parents. This penchant for distorting the town’s name was a legacy of sorts—the word Scituate is already the product of multiple reinterpretations and manipulations. Our town was originally christened Satuit, the Wampanoag word for cold brook, but white settlers renamed the town Scituate in 1640. Locals refer to it as Scitown, some ironically, some not. This is what drew me to Scituate in my fiction—the multiplicity of identities it inhabits. The town’s gorgeous but also brutal, depending on the season, and there’s a certain darkness that shadows the natural beauty. Many of the stories draw on real events that occurred in town. A girl did impale herself after jumping off a house during an illegal party, though she lived. Cancer affected a suspicious amount of people, especially children. You were never more than three degrees away from opiate addiction—a friend’s brother, a coworker, a niece. Heavy drinking was more than commonplace. As Nick Flynn, the poet who also grew up in Scituate, wrote in his memoir, Another 1 Bullshit Night in Suck City: “The morning ritual in Scituate becomes learning who totaled their car over the weekend—wrapped around what tree, driven off which pier.” And then there were the men. My mother referred to them as “Neanderthals”, though I understood I wasn’t to share this nickname with anyone. Since I had grown up in town I wasn’t sure what other men she was comparing the Scituate ones to, but I did notice that my father was different than most of them (quieter, softer), and he certainly treated my mother differently than the other husbands treated their wives. There was a certain aggressive confidence among Scituate men, like my friend Michaela’s father, who looked my mother up and down at a Christmas party, or Jules’ dad, who argued with Mom about the relevance of contemporary art at dinner, claiming she didn’t know what she was talking about, though she’s an artist with an MFA. When I was younger, I wasn’t sure why my mother shared these things with me—it made me nervous, the prospect of not being able to trust my friends’ fathers. But as I grew up, I saw this strange authority firsthand, and the way it could quickly turn to anger. John, my friend Sarah’s brother, pounded a hammer against her door when we wouldn’t let him inside, and her parents were infamous for their shouting matches. They argued unselfconsciously in front of guests, shouting insults across the kitchen counter as we watched television in the attached room. I wasn’t allowed to go over Michaela’s anymore after her mother sported a mysterious bruise on her collarbone. For some time, I wondered if my mother and I were crazy. My friends, whose opinions I trusted deeply, didn’t raise an eyebrow at any of this domestic hostility. Maybe we were overreacting. I eventually realized that the conflict was clearer to us because we weren’t townies. We moved to Scituate when I was three, which meant we didn’t belong to the group of families who had been rooted there for decades. To us, the status quo was strange. For the twenty years that we lived in Scituate, we occupied a strange space between insider and outsider. It’s from this position that I wrote these stories. 2 * When I read my thesis, I see the fingerprint of many authors I admire. Perhaps the most obvious are Elizabeth Strout and Jennifer Egan, because Olive Kittredge and A Visit from the Goon Squad were the story collections I most referred to when writing my own, due to their linked nature. I didn’t want to write a novel in stories (which I think of as a narrative more closely connected through plot and time), but a series of stories that mimic the experience of entering a new town— you begin to draw connections between the other people you’ve met, and slowly become acquainted with the town’s culture and rhythms. I found A Visit from the Goon Squad so engaging during my first read because of the way Egan draws peripheral characters from past stories into the spotlight, such as La Doll. She appears briefly in “A to B” as the blunt, fast-talking boss of the protagonist. She’s present for no more than half a page, but in the next story, “Selling the General,” she’s the main character. Time has passed, and La Doll’s fallen from grace, now forced to manage a dictator’s publicity in order to stay afloat. A character that was almost a cliché in the last story blooms into something full and complicated, despite the fact that Egan isn’t adhering to a continuous timeline or circling her characters around some catalytic event. Strout’s book is more tightly trained on a single character, the eponymous Olive, but she’s not at the center of every story; sometimes she’s a supporting character, sometimes only her name is dropped. Like in A Visit from the Goon Squad, different characters show up in different contexts, such as Olive’s son, who we see as both a boy and a man. But there’s another component connecting these stories; the town of Crosby, Maine, which Strout describes with exacting beauty. The story “Incoming Tide” begins like this: 3 The bay had small whitecaps and the tide was coming in, so the smaller rocks could be heard moving as the water shifted them. Also, there was the twanging sound of the cables hitting the masts of the sailboats moored. A few seagulls gave squawking cries as they dove down to pick up the fish heads and tails and shining insides that the boy was tossing from the dock as he cleaned the mackerel. Strout doesn’t use any metaphorical or symbolic language here; instead she’s painstakingly precise about the physical world, and she uses sound as well as sight to make these docks all the more vivid. The authority in the way she describes the landscape does more than set the scene; it tells us that our protagonist, Kevin, will be a close and careful observer. I also turned to Alice Munro as I worked on these stories. Though Munro is often lauded for her nimbleness with time, I’m also impressed by the meta-fictional quality of her work, her ability to comment on why we tell ourselves the stories we do. In “Fiction,” which spans thirty years, a woman becomes convinced that a young writer she encounters wrote a book about her own childhood. When the woman goes to the book signing, it becomes obvious that this is untrue—the book is a work of fiction—and she leaves ashamed, embarrassed that she could have been so self- centered. In my day-to-day reading life, I tend to lean towards books critics call “voice-driven”; I’ve recently been impressed by Catherine Lacey and Claire-Louise Benett’s work, and I return to Jeffrey Eugenides’ and George Saunders’ books again and again. But I look to Otessa Moshfegh when I want to study bold, uncompromising voices. I admire her story collection, Homesick for Another World, for its unflinching eye; Moshfegh refuses to turn away from the grotesque. And yet, she’s not all shock and outlandish strangeness; she can make a character delusional, difficult, and generous all 4 at once. Here’s a brief excerpt from one of my favorite stories, “Bettering Myself,” where she does just that: But Popliasti and his incessant interruptions, a few times I lost my cool. "I cannot teach you if you act like animals!" I screamed. "We cannot learn if you are crazy like this, screaming, with your hair messy," said Popliasti, running around the room, flipping books off window ledges. I could have done without him. But my seniors were all very respectful. She seamlessly navigates between her narrrator’s frustration with her student, her dismissal of him, and her gratitude for her seniors, just in six sentences.