You Know When the Men Are Gone

I find myself torn about the relationship between the "real world" and fiction, sometimes. There can be an odd overlap, sometimes, when a fictional work tries to hard to convince you that it is reality. I saw the new Matt Damon movie, last week, "The Adjustment Bureau". In the movie (this won't give anything away) Matt Damon plays a young politician and to establish his character early on they show a montage of him appearing on TV, talking with real-life news anchors and appearing on "The Daily Show". But the world of "The Adjustment Bureau" is not the world of "The Daily Show" and that stuck with me, for the rest of the movie.  I want to recognize the backdrop as reality, not treat it as if it actually is. The reality of fiction is a tricky place. Jon Stewart treating fictional-politician-Matt-Damon as if they both exist in the same reality punctures the joy of the story, for me, reminds me that ultimately this is all made up.

It's a weird complaint, maybe, this desire not to be reminded that the fiction I'm reading is fiction, but there you go. My high school English teachers knew what they were talking about when they preached that suspension of disbelief. (It works better when done unconsciously.)

This is not a problem in Siobhan Fallon's You Know When the Men Are Gone. The set of linked short stories take place on or near Fort Hood, Texas during the employments to and return of soldiers from Iraq. It is very much a real place and is connected in visceral ways not only to the setting, but also to the timing and the high emotional stakes that come from the combination of the two. This Fort Hood is a fictional place that is laying so close to the reality of Fort Hood it could bleed over and I would not, for even a single moment, question it.

Drawing on her own experiences living on base during her husband's deployments, Fallon's stories follow the lives of those living in the military. A woman waits for her husband to return and fills her days by watching a mysterious neighbor. A wounded soldier returns home to a wife different from the one he left. A wife, scared for her husband's safety opens his e-mail to find more than she hoped for. The stories are tied together by absence and longing and by the sense that everyone is reaching for everyone else, and yet often finding nobody.

My experience of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has been a removed, civilian one. I imagine it's the same for most people I know. It has been political. I've talked about it myself, argued against it. I've seen coverage on TV. I've seen photos. I've heard politicians defend, deride, denounce and commend the wars. People wrap themselves in the flag in metaphors and yellow ribbon bumperstickers. Fallon broke this open, for me. Whatever my personal politics, her sharp prose and deeply felt, complicated characters let me glimpse the personal experience of the wars.

And I know this, because this week happened to be the week This American Life had a show about the after effects of the Iraq war, "Will They Know Me Back Home?" It is one of the best episodes I've heard on TAL this year. It struck me, as I listened, that these undeniably true stories, felt almost exactly like those in Fallon's collection, the realities mirroring each other so closely, there was never any doubt about that both were equally as real.

That's good fiction.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

(Though I read this book back in September and wrote a little review, I never posted it. Here it is, now.)

Somewhere in the middle of Robin Black’s debut short story collection If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This: Stories I found myself staring at one of the half blank pages between stories and thinking of Stephen Dunn’s poem, “A Secret Life.” This happens to me, occasionally. A phrase or mood invoked by the book in my hands will catch on some old bit of reading stuck in my head, like a sleeve caught on a protruding nail and I’ll be called out of the moment, forced to pause and free myself. I thought of the lines that finish the poem. “It’s why your silence if a kind of truth. / Even when you speak to your best friend, / the one who’ll never betray you, / you always leave out one thing; / a secret life is that important.” It wasn’t until I paused long enough to recall the poem that I felt the thread being pulled through the collection, and saw how carefully each story examined the secret life. Do we each truly have one? Can we protect it? How do we keep from letting it swallow us whole? 

In the acknowledgements of the book, Black notes that it took her eight years to write the ten stories that comprise the collection. It seems both surprising and fitting, given how effortless each story feels. It is easy to forget that a great deal of hard work goes into writing stories that are nearly faultless. Written in clear and concise prose that has been compared to Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore, the stories in If I loved You, I Would Tell You This push at the secret lives of a variety of characters. In “The Guide” a father faces his blind daughter’s impending departure from home alongside what this will mean for the identity he has built for himself. In “Immortalizing John Parker” an elderly painter is forced to examine a dying man sitting for his portrait at the same moment she must also examine a loss of her own. Each of these characters stands apart from the others, skirting around their inner lives or looking for ways to bring divergent threads together again.

The collection is home to a myriad of different characters, each telling their stories from different points of view. Some seem guilty and some less so, some are observing while others are acting and despite these differences, it is impossible not to feel pulled down to the page. This is never more true than in the title story, narrated by a terminally ill woman speaking to a neighbor intent on erecting a tall fence between their properties.

“If I loved you, I would invite you in, sit you down in our kitchen, and I would say to you: You just never know. You, the yeti. You don’t know why this matters so much to is, why we care. You don’t know what secret pains we have that we haven’t share with you. You don’t know us.

But then I would have to admit that I don’t know everything either, wouldn’t I? Like I don’t know why it matters so much to you to build that fence exactly there.

What happened in your life that makes a property line mean so much?”

Each truth in If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This is unsteady and fragile. In the particularly elegant story, “Harriet Elliot” two fourth graders grapple with the very adult hurts and betrayals that have leaked into their lives. In a scene that resonates throughout the collection one girl tells the other how to perform a ritual with the words, “’Start by writing: This is the wish that is dearest to my heart.’” In so many ways, reading Black’s writing is being invited into these moments when we all must look at our own silences, our own kinds of truth and write down what is dearest to our own hearts.

Twinsburg

We knew this year would be different because we bought bikinis. We had never worn bikinis before. Our swimsuits had always been shiny one-pieces with stripes, or polka dots, or tiny yellow fish. Not this year.

It was a hot summer and the department store was overly air-conditioned, so when we stood in front of the dressing room mirrors tiny goose bumps appeared on our arms and legs. We looked good anyway. The bottoms were cut like little boy shorts. The tops tied at the back of our necks and were slightly thick, lending us a little shape in front where we were sorely lacking it. Our mother hovered behind us and bit her lip. We pretended not to notice so that when she said, “Are you sure, girls?” we could nod and grin and she had to sigh, had to agree. The suits were red, one tiny white flower blooming on the left hip. At the register the woman behind the counter held the swimsuits up and raised her eyebrows at us.

“You’re really getting the same ones?” she asked. We said yes, of course, we have to match. We were going to Twinsburg.

You can read the rest of my story, "Twinsburg" at Mason's Road. It is included in Issue Two, which the editors are devoting to setting, to "pieces that evoke a particular place or time." Although my story is set in and named for an actual place I think there are multiple ways "setting" can be interpreted in this story.

This is one of my favorites. It was a fun challenge to write and it was the story I read at the final MFA reading. I also have a very clear memory of getting the idea for this story and can tell you exactly where I was when I first told a friend the idea and she said, "That sounds great. Write it!"

So, big thanks to that friend! Thanks as well to Chris Belden for his careful, thoughtful reading and edits on the final version. He and Lisa Calderone smoothed out some rough edges, so I'm confident you're getting the best version of "Twinsburg". A shout-out of appreciation to Laura Maylene Walter, whose story "How to Speak Czech" introduced me to the journal and made me want to submit as well.

Most of all, thanks to you for reading!