The stories in Aimee Bender’s first collection of short stories, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, published in 1998, contain, to varying degrees, surrealism and sarcasm. In her best stories, these are not mere affectations but are pathways to deeper, troubling truths that her female protagonists face. Her stories are not edgy just to be edgy.
In “What You Left In The Ditch,” a woman tries to cope with deforming injury that her husband has brought home from war.
Steven returned from the war without lips.
This is quite a shock, said his wife Mary who had spent the last six months knitting sweaters and avoiding a certain grocery story where a certain young man worked and looked at her in a certain way. I expected lips. Dead or alive, but with lips.
Her disappointment, delivered with biting sarcasm, is tempered by the image of the faithful wife knitting and avoiding suitors while her husband is away at war, reminiscent of Penelope weaving and waiting for Odysseus. For the entire story, his missing lips are the only reference to what must have been a massively disfiguring injury. No other injury is mentioned, and Mary remains fixated on Steven’s missing lips. The snark continues with:
Steven went into the living room where his old favorite chair stood, neatly dusted and unused. I-can-eat-like-normal, he said in a strange halting clacking tone due to the plastic disk that covered and what protected what was left of his mouth like the end of a pacifier. The-doctors-are-going-to-put-new-skin-on-in-a-few-weeks-anyway. Skin-from-my-palm. That-will-work, I-guess, he said. It-just-won’t-be-quite-the-same.
This passage borders on cruelty, and we wonder how Mary could even think these things and reduce Steven’s attempts to mitigate the situation to hyphentated stock phrases. This is a setup for the next paragraph, a devastating and heartbreaking revealing the pain and grief that Mary must now live with:
No, said Mary, it won’t. That bomb, she said, standing on the other side of the chair, you know it took the last real kiss from you forever, and as far as I can remember, that kiss was supposed to be mine.
Still grieving feeling ashamed of her selfishness, she blames Steven:
She kept her back to him and shoved tin cans into the cupboard. Maybe, she was thinking, if you’d concentrated better you’d still have lips. Maybe you’re not supposed to think of your wife at the market while people are throwing bombs at you. Maybe you’re supposed to protect certain body parts so she’ll be happy when you come back.
Mary resumes shopping at the grocery store and begins falling into a flirting relationship with the teenage boy who had looked at her “in a certain way.” She goes into their yard and buries the sweaters that she had knitted for Steven, attempting to bury the past.
When Mary and the young man from the grocery store finally kiss, Mary experiences it as the last kiss from Steven that she never had:
He stepped down to a lower plain so he was suddenly her height and she went into his face and kissed those lips, reminded herself. They were so soft. She kissed him for a moment, and then she had to move away; they were too soft, the softness was murdering her.
She has an epiphany:
She thought about Steven and the disc and about pressing her lips down on those plastic curves, pushing hard on them until she pressed her face into his. Pushed past his skin and through his bone and into the quiet warm space underneath, her eyes shut, cell to cell, both unarmed. In there, she thought, inside his mind and flooded with blood, without windows or doors or her knitting or his chair, maybe in there she could hold their faces in her hands and consider something like forgiveness.
In Quiet Please, a woman cycles through grief in a different way:
The woman is a librarian and today her father has died. She got a phone call from her weeping mother in the morning, threw up and then dressed for work. Sitting at her desk with her back very straight, she asks the young man very politely, the one who always comes to the library to check out bestsellers, asks him when it was he last got laid. He let’s out a weird sound and she says shhh, this is a library. She has her hair back and the glasses on but everyone has a librarian fantasy, and she is truly a babe underneath.
All day long, she seduces all the male patrons of the library, taking them to a back room for their torrid trysts. It’s extreme behavior, outrageous and,outside the world of adult magazines, not particularly plausible. It is, however, a mask for the inner turmoil that she is feeling, we see that she is sublimating the guilt she is feeling. It is the extremity, the unreality of her actions that makes the revelation more powerful than it otherwise would be:
They meet in the back and she pulls the shade down on the little window. This is the sex that she wishes would split her open and murder her because she can’t deal with a dead father.; she’s wished him dead so many times that now it’s hard to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Is it true? Is he really gone? She didn’t really want him to die, that is not what she meant when she faced him and imagined knives sticking into his body.
The outrageousness peaks when after lunch a muscleman from a traveling circus enters the library. During their session, he lifts up the librarian and the couch she is sitting on and balances them over his head, so high, that the librarian is able to alter the painting on the ceiling in the library. The epiphany occurs the next day, and in this story, it points to trauma from the librarian’s distant past.
She doesn’t notice until the next day when she comes to work to clean up the books an hour befor her father is put in the ground, that the circle of fairies is altered now. That the laughing ones now pull along one fairy with purple eyes, who is clearly dancing against her will, dragged along with the circle, her mouth wide open and screaming.
“The Bowl” is one of the most unconventional in a collection of unconventional stories. It is written in second-person, present tense, which gives it an immediate, in the moment feel, where none of the action can be anticipated or predicted. The subject of the story (“you”) receives a mysterious gift-wrapped package:
There’s a gift in your lap, and it’s beautifully wrapped, and it’s not your birthday. You feel wonderful, you feel like somebody knows you’re alive, you feel fear because it could be a bomb because you think you’re important.
The package contains a green bowl that proves to be a catalyst for a stream of consciousness excursion in thought to determine if somebody really does know you’re alive and if you really are important:
This is when you think about the last lover you had and feel bad about yourself. This is when you stand with your pencil poised over the crossword puzzle and stare at the wall. This is when you laugh out loud, alon, to yourself, at something funny he said once about crossword puzzles and feel ridiculous for still being able to be entertained by this lover of yore who slept facing the wall and wanted less than you wanted.
A morning shower reminds the subject that her boss died of a heart attack in the shower the day before. At work, how will she know what to do without her boss? What are the rules? The thought of the heart attack causes the subject to have steamed vegetables for lunch and think about hear heart and to be thankful that it keeps beating for her. This leads the subject to visit her brother who wonders if you could have saved her boss because he knows CPR.
And so on.
All of these seemingly random connects have a common theme to them. The express an unarticulated longing in the subject for confirmation of the two needs expressed in that opening paragraph: for someone to know she’s alive and to feel important. That confirmation is dashed, however, when a man shows up to take the bowl which had been delivered to her by mistake. The final image of the story reflects the pointlessness, repetitiveness, and anomie that the subject feels:
You go to the sidewalk to look down the street, but he’s gone. All you can see are three kids on bicycles, circling their driveways, seven years old, turning tight circles in their driveways because they’re too scared to go where there might be cars.
In this collection, Bender eschews realism for surrealism, magic realism, and edgy, quirky characters to illuminate and to focus on her characters’ deepest and unsettling emotions: fear, anger, guilt, trauma, loss, loneliness.
© 2018 – 2024, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.
