BookStalking

This is a guest post by Christie C.

I was having one of those evenings. For the knots in my shoulders and back, I contemplated getting a massage from the Chinese folks who used to be next to the Dollar Store in Springfield Mall. (Because… well, they’re within my budget.) I quickly nixed the idea of goin’ boozin’, although that one was darkly alluring. I thought I’d maybe eat a cupcake. Or just sleep until morning, my ears plugged with conical wads of foam and the white noise of a fan drowning out the world. You know, one of those evenings.

But instead, I went out and picked up the latest issue of the New Yorker. It was more just something to look at while I, okay, ate a freakin’ cupcake. I idly skimmed the table of contents to see what this week’s short fiction was. It was a piece by someone named Allegra Goodman [she has a new novel, "The Cookbook Collector," coming out in July 2010]. Somewhere in my brain there was a flicker of recognition, but I’d never read anything by her. I gave her story a chance. I’m so glad I did.

Her story, “La Vita Nuova,” was exactly what I needed. Here was a beautiful story about someone who was sad but who lived her dismal little life with perceptiveness, occasional bursts of imaginative magic, and her own private brand of black humor. Here was a story that was spare, uncluttered, cleaned to the bone, with only what’s necessary remaining. Every sentence seemed to shimmer with poignancy.

It’s just this small-scale, short, slice-of-life, almost mundane piece, but it reminded me why I get so evangelical about short fiction. In the space of an hour, in one evening, in just a few pages–just the right words took me away from my life and into someone else’s. After I read it, it left a sort of emotional echo, melancholy but lovely.

Insomnia and stress have lately scattered my concentration; it sometimes feels as if I can only give something my rapt attention for a moment, then I’m gone. I blink, and I’m off to something else. A heartbeat, and I’m off to something else. It feels as if there’s little coherence. Reading a novel feels out of the question. That’s only one reason I’m grateful for writers who create worlds in these brilliant flashes. I could go on about short stories, but I’m off to something else–I want to share the beginning of “La Vita Nuova,” and a part from the middle:

“The day her fiance left, Amanda went walking in the Colonial cemetery off Garden Street. The gravestones were so worn that she could hardly read them. They were melting away into the weedy grass. You are a very dark person, her fiance had said.

She walked home and sat in her half-empty closet. Her vintage nineteen-fifties wedding dress hung in clear asphyxiating plastic printed ‘NOT A TOY.’

She took the dress to work. She hooked the hanger onto a grab bar on the T and the dress rustled and swayed. When she got out at Harvard Square, the guy who played guitar near the turnstiles called, ‘Congratulations.’

Work was at the Garden School, where Amanda taught art, including theatre, puppets, storytelling, drumming, dance, and now fabric painting. She spread the white satin gown on the art-room floor. Two girls glued pink feathers all along the hem. Others brushed the skirt with green and purple. A boy named Nathaniel dipped his hand in red paint and left his little handprint on the bodice as though the dress were an Indian pony. At lunchtime, the principal asked Amanda to step into her office.”

(I could pretty much go on quoting the whole story, but here’s another part I liked, from the middle.)

” ‘La Vita Nuova’ explained how to become a great poet. The secret was to fall in love with the perfect girl but never speak to her. You should weep instead. You should pretend that you love someone else. You should write sonnets in three parts. Your perfect girl should die.”

(And another… mostly because I don’t want to end on that note!)

“They went to a store called Little Russia and looked at the lacquered dolls there. ‘See, they come apart,’ Amanda told Nathaniel. ‘You pop open this lady, and inside there’s another, and another, and another.’

‘Do not touch, please,’ the saleslady told them.”