Sharon Harrigan

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Valentine’s Dance

For the second year in a row, my husband James took our seven-year-old daughter Ella to the Father-Daughter Valentine’s Day dance, sponsored by the Charlottesville Parks and Recreation Department. It’s a popular affair, with room for only the first 200 couples, and it sells out quickly. For $10 a couple, you can twirl your girl on the heart-bedecked dance floor to the rhythms of Justin Bieber, the Hokie Pokie, the chicken dance, and the Macarena, plus feast on cupcakes, pretzels and drinks. Each girl goes home with a box of chocolates and a red carnation.

There is no dress code, but even the men go formal. Almost every dad wears a tie, and a few are in tuxedos. The girls decorate themselves in dresses as red as the red velvet cupcakes, some with hair in pink ribbons, swirled on top of their heads like frosting.

But what’s remarkable about the event is how racially and economically integrated it is. Or rather, what’s remarkable about most events we go to here is how much they are not.

Social segregation is still a problem all over the country, including in Brooklyn, where we lived until a couple years ago (all you have to do is watch a Spike Lee film to prove that point.) But here in the South, where school integration is something of recent memory, it has a different emotional resonance.

Charlottesville is a progressive college town, and 80 percent of us voted for Barack Obama. But we are surrounded by the remnants of our history. Only an hour to the east is the capitol of the Confederacy during the Civil War, and our downtown showcases a park named after Robert E. Lee and a statue of Stonewall Jackson. You don’t have to drive far, maybe fifteen minutes south to Scottsville, to see Confederate flags on grand old porches.

Partly it’s our fault when we mainly see people like us. My daughter’s dance and French classes are expensive, as are my son’s saxophone lessons and the live music and theater performances we love. But everything we do doesn’t have to be like that.

Our family has choices, so we have chosen to put our daughter on the city municipal swim team, whose negligible entry fee makes it open to all, instead of a team at a fancy swim club. We send her to a public school with an award-winning black principal. We transferred our son from a mostly white private school to the public city high school, which is about half black and half white.

If we’re really lucky, our children will grow up–with a black president, principal, school board members, neighbors, and friends—in a much more integrated society than previous generations. We’ll reserve our daughter’s Valentine’s Dance tickets early every year and hope that the only colors she’ll be concerned about are red and pink.

Photo: Ella in her homemade updo ready for the dance

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AWP Conference 2011

This year, for the first time, I joined 2,000 other MFA students and 4,000 MFA instructors and writers in Washington, DC for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Annual Conference. It was huge, literary, star-studded, overwhelming, dizzying, validating, and energizing. It was artsy, esoteric, and intellectual. It was also oddly trade-show-like, its exhibit halls overflowing with hundreds of booths marketing their wares in dozens of rooms.

Many of my fellow students from Pacific University’s MFA program came from all over the country. Pacific faculty were also well represented. Tayari Jones’s panel on Algonquin writers was riveting, both because of the readings and the discussion of what it means to be a Southern writer (and what it doesn’t for Jones, i.e. nostalgia for a pre-Civil Rights era). Pam Houston’s panel on the intersection of fiction and nonfiction attracted hundreds of attendees (even though it was competing with a reading by National Book Critic Circle finalists). As usual, Houston’s comments created controversy and the most heated and engaged questions from the audience.  Ben Percy’s reading of his celebrated new novel, The Wilding, part of “America Reimagined: Four Contemporary Voices” filled the auditorium with more than 1,500 people, even though there were 21 other competing events.

Quite a few fellow Charlottesvillians and members of WriterHouse (www.writerhouse.org, my home away from home) also attended, and some–including Cliff Garstang (whose panel on linked stories was so popular the audience overflowed into the hallway) and Kristen-Paige Madonia–participated in readings and panels. WriterHouse president Rachel Unkefer invited a slew of authors and editors to give readings and talks in Charlottesville, and she also managed to snag free subscriptions to literary journals for the WriterHouse library (an extra incentive to stop by, locals).

Other highlights were a reading by Josh Weil (whose trio of novellas, The New Valley, is one of the best books I read this year) reading from an unpublished historical novel set in Egypt and a panel with directors of literary centers around the country, who are actually thriving. I went to an off-site small press reading and missed Junot Diaz, a literary rock star who deserves the reputation, since I had heard him before. But I’m sorry I didn’t get to see the sign language interpreter trying to keep up with his rapid-fire mix of Spanglish, obscenity, and verbal pyrotechnics.

The thrill of being in the front row  in a packed hall seating 3,200 people waiting to hear Jhumpa Lahiri was worth the price of admission (actually, I would pay more than the $40 student discount for that). A few days later, when I joined millions of viewers watching the Superbowl on TV, I remembered that huge crowd assembled not for football, not even for pop music, but for literary fiction! I am not alone, the legions of fans in the rows behind me, said. We writers and readers are a crowd to be reckoned with.

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Money


“How much money do we have?” my seven-year-old daughter Ella asked, off-handedly, the way she just said, “What’s for breakfast?”

“None of your business,” I said, something I vowed I’d never tell my kids before I became a mom but find myself doing all the time.

My husband James was more diplomatic. “That’s grown-up information,” he said. “All you need to know is we have enough.”

“Do we have a million dollars?” Ella persisted. “How much is our house worth? How much do we have in the bank?

“That’s not something you need to worry about,” James said.

“Are we rich?”

“No,” he said. “But we’re not poor, either.”

I slid her bowl of oatmeal onto the place mat, and that was the end of the conversation—for now.

I’ve always been struck by the secrecy about money in our society. In middle and upper-middle class circles, anyway.

When I was a kid, I knew exactly how much money our family had–how much our house was worth, my mother’s salary as a secretary,  our only income for a family of four. I knew how much money we had in the bank, too, which is why I took a job at A&W Rootbeer Stand when I was fourteen. When I got to college, at Columbia, I was shocked that none of my fellow students knew anything about their parents’ finances. I vowed that wouldn’t happen when I had kids, but it just did.

Ella is savvy about money, though, in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I was seven. As the daughter of an economist, she takes part in conversations about currency exchange at the dinner table. She uses the phrase “opportunity cost” when deciding whether to take a dance class.

And the other night, when we strolled on the Downtown Mall after dinner, she begged for a bag of flavored popcorn from an almost empty store. When I said no, she laid our her argument: “We need to shop there to keep the store in business. It will boost the economy.” I didn’t believe it, but I gave in anyway.

Photo: Pingo 1968 via Flickr

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Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr

Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr. New York: Scribner, 2010. Review by Sharon Harrigan

In Anthony Doerr’s fiction, magic happens.  In the title story, a doctor offers a 74-year-old woman surgery to restore memories. Years later, doctors can “harvest memories from wealthy people and print them on cartridges.” People in nursing homes start  “using memory machines like drugs.” But there is also magic in the style, the way Doerr merges the natural and the man-made, his rhythms as massive and resonant as a redwood forest being felled with a chain saw. A suburb of Cape Town is “a place of warm rains, big-windowed lofts, and silent, predatory automobiles” where “a thousand city lights wink and gutter behind sheets of fog like candleflames.”

My favorite story in the collection, “Procreate, Generate,” has many of the mythic and fairy tale qualities I loved so much in the Doerr’s first story collection, The Shell Collector. This story is about problem familiar in fairy tales, from Cinderella to Rapunzel: the quest to have a baby.

The story is colloquial and fresh, fluid and modern, but it’s also archetypal. Imogene and Herb are introduced in the first paragraphs with heroic language: Imogene is described as a kind of queen, and she works for a company called Cyclops. She has “spun-sugar hair” but (surprisingly) also a black spider web tattooed on her left biceps. Herb is an anti-prince, described as “medium-sized, bald, and of no special courage.” They live among “a graveyard of abandoned tires” and “whole bevies of quail that sometimes sprint across the driveway.”

Imogene has twenty-two bird feeders, which she refills every evening. There is something magical about this precise, excessive number. Her obsession with nurturing also gives us a clue on the first page that the story is going to be about longing for parenthood.

Imogene’s back story has the severe edges and grand sweep of myth, too. “When she was twenty-one, her parents were killed simultaneously when their Buick LeSabre skidded off Route 506 and flipped into a ditch.” She graduated from college two weeks later, then moved to Morocco, writing Herb cryptic letters about pigeons, then joined the Peace Corps to work with blind women.

Doerr makes even medical terminology sound magical. After Imogene takes her last birth control pill and smashes the packet, she and Herb have sex and “a zygote like a tiny question mark drifts into her womb.” He also mixes esoteric terms with scenes of animals and plants, giving us a jarring intersection of man-made medicine and nature. On the drive home from the fertility clinic, Imogene thinks: “IUI, ICSI, HCG, IVF” while looking at a herd of antelope standing in scraps of snow off the Interstate. As the fertility treatments do their work on Imogene’s body, the biological processes are described in poetic terms: Imogene’s ovaries “become water balloons, dandelion heads, swollen peonies.”

The intersection of science and magic is made more meaningful because Herb is a biology professor. Despondent after a failed IVF procedure, in the middle of a lecture he stops and imagines “doctors scrabbling between Imogene’s legs, dragging golf ball-size eggs from her ovaries.” A girl—dressed in “something like a knight might wear under his armor”—snickers at his spacing out.

When they are both diagnosed as infertile, Imogene decides, like a pre-Enlightenment fairy tale queen would, that it is all preordained. She is “Imogene the Ice Queen. Imogene the Pipe Dream. Too petite, too pale, too pretty.” Herb engages in his own magical thinking: “It’s the tires in the yard.”

The infertility-treatment pills make Imogene prettier. Which princess does this sound like: “Her lips are almost crimson, her hair is a big opalescent crown”?

As befits a fairy tale, this is told in the third person omniscient point of view, a rarity in modern short stories. (Or, more specifically, it is told from Imogene and Herb’s point of view, since they are the only two characters. It often seems like a unified point of view, because the story is about their shared obsession.)

As the story recounts the quest to become pregnant, the obstacles mount like the trials of Hercules or the threats Odysseus faces on his return to Ithaca. Imogene’s boss chides her for taking too much time off for doctor’s visits. How sick can a person be? he asks. Insensitive friends and co-workers tease and joke, admonishing them to be fruitful and multiply. The undergraduate dressed like a knight sends a sexually provocative e-mail to Herb. The hormones fail. The IVF doesn’t take.

But the story does not end in despair. Our hero, the baby-in-waiting, will conquer the Cyclops and Sirens and all the other monsters of the amniotic fluid sea. Imogene is at the hospital with three good embryos in her womb. She decides to keep all of them. On the final page, the couple is waiting ten days to see how many of the embryos will stay attached. “Tell me it’s going to be okay,” Herb whispers in the last paragraph. “Tell me you love me.”

Imogene’s reaction mirrors our own. She “starts to tremble. She shuts her eyes and says she does.” And, I suspect, she cried. As I did. As I imagine anyone else would, reading this gorgeous story about the most primal pain and joy there is.

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Waltzing the Cat by Pam Houston


Waltzing the Cat by Pam Houston. New York: Washington Square Press, 1999. Review by Sharon Harrigan

Part of what I love about this book—which is also true of Cowboys Are My Weakness—is the frank and funny depiction of sex.  In “Then You Get Up and Have Breakfast,” we get two stories of love and sex running on parallel tracks: the new relationship with Eric and the back story of the old relationship with Carter, leading to its break-up.

Eric, who can’t get an erection because of anti-depressants, touches Lucy “like a blind man who had just one night to learn what is woman,” and kisses her “like it is some kind of world-class competition.” His penis “reawakens”  miraculously, when they are lying under the big, blue sky, looking up at the stars. (The stars, moon, and constellations are such a recurring theme in the book, it seems fitting that they would perform sexual magic.)

Sex with Carter is “every now and then, most often out of doors, in public places and fully clothed.” Once they get home, he stays up and Lucy conks out on the couch. When they break up, they have not had sex for eight months, which Lucy tells him was “like trying to tap dance with one leg tied up behind [her] back.”

Lucy’s lover in the first story, “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had” becomes her stalker. In the second story, “Cataract,” the most interesting sex is the kind that is just talked about, between Lucy and Thea. They do have metaphorical sex together, going down the cataract and almost drowning. The intimacy they gain from the experience is far greater than what they have with their men.

In “Three Lessons in Amazonian Biology,” an old boyfriend, Tony, convinces Lucy to fly seventeen hours to Ann Arbor to try to reignite their flame. When she arrives, five days after his persuasive phone call, he announces that he has a new girlfriend and Lucy has to sleep on the couch, her birthday-eve sex now out of reach (and she is turning 33, the age when Tony had said all things would be revealed to her). At the end of “Then You Get Up and Have Breakfast,” Lucy sums up what she’s learned about sex: “It’s very simple. . . You have it, then you have it again, then you have it again; and then you get up and have breakfast.” The last story before the epilogue opens with a funny scene of Lucy shopping for a dildo in Provincetown, and her adventures in this sexually liberated town —toying with the idea of a lesbian relationship and finally achieving euphoria with a man, until she discovers he is still married —round out her survey of erotic experiences in the book.

All the idiosyncratic, whimsical, sad, or just unexpected kinds of sex are not just entertaining and titillating (though they are that, too). They are a metaphor for Lucy’s journey, her continuously abortive attempts to make connections, to no longer be a loner.

In the interview in the back of Waltzing the Cat, Houston talks about trying to make stories that get close enough to the truth of their metaphors. The metaphors in this book are funny, moving, and surprising. For instance, in “Then You Get Up and Have Breakfast,” the need to rebuild Lucy’s grandmother’s cottage, which is falling into the river, is a metaphor for Lucy’s need to rebuild her life, either to construct a new foundation or “let it float.”

In “Three Lessons in Amazonian Biology,” the metaphors—comparing Lucy’s quest for love, meaning, and mating to behaviors of animals in the Amazon—are both whimsical and poignant. (For example: “Lesson #3: . . . The screaming pehah . . . spends over seventy-five percent of his life looking for a mate” reminds us of someone we know. ) “Goodness Under Your Feet,” has two parallel stories, and they are each a metaphor for the other–the story about Ellie the dog in the present, and the one about Ellie the best friend who died.  The more I think about Houston’s process—making the central metaphor reveal the story’s truth—the more this seems like a powerful way to write fiction.

Something else I admire about these stories is the way they abound with sentiment without ever falling into sentimentality. Part of how this happens is the skillful use of banter. The characters talk about deep subjects, like love and death, but they often add a punch line or a dark twist at the end. For example, in “Then You Get Up and Have Breakfast,” Lucy says, “I’m crazy about you” and Eric responds, “Crazy, period.” Houston explodes clichés by having characters call each other on them. When Lucy says, “All our worldly possessions are on this boat,” Henry replies, “And where are your nonworldly possessions? In Cleveland?” (His banter leavens a moment of terror and emotional intensity, when they might be about to drown, and keeps it from becoming sentimental.) When Lucy says her mother was “loyal to [her] father like a tick on a hound,” the emotion is clear and poignant, but the choice of analogy is so unexpected, it’s fresh.

Although most of the men Lucy chooses are bad news, they are never stock characters. The precise and unexpected details make me believe in Lucy’s reactions to them, though another writer might make the same men caricatures of masculine insensitivity. When Lucy falls for Erik, a “huge, lumbering Clydesdale,” who makes “miniature replicas of grand Tudor houses, fourteen thousand miniature bricks in one of them” in “Then You Get Up and Have Breakfast,” we fall for him, too, through his stories about penguins and finger-eating power tools.When Lucy tells us why she is over Carter—because he started strutting like a chicken onstage at a reggae concert and because he practiced his smiles before she took his picture—Lucy’s conclusions are also ours.

Although all the men Lucy chooses turn out to be crazy in some way, we don’t judge her. Gloria, in “Then You Get Up and Have Breakfast,” sums up our reaction: “The trouble with loving the crazy ones. . . is when you get tired, and need to rest, the normal guys just don’t interest you anymore.” I would add: The trouble with loving the crazy, funny, sexy, sad, extreme-adventure-of-the-heart stories in this collection . . . is when you get tired, and need to rest, the normal stories just don’t interest you anymore, either. Even after the epilogue, you want to read another.