WHAT SHE LEFT ME
By Judy Doenges
University Press of New England, 173 pages, $22.95
A NIGHT AT THE Y
By Robert Garner McBrearty
John Daniel, 126 pages, $12 paper
The memorable characters in Judy Doenges’ collection “What She Left Me” include a lumbering gay butcher named Odin who works at a Jewel supermarket in Chicago during the politically polarized year of 1970, a young woman in Las Vegas being pressured by a slick cowboy lawyer to marry her boyfriend who has just inherited a scrubby parcel of desert land, a pregnant woman caught by a bounty hunter, and the drunken mayor of a small California town trying to tell a war story to a young couple who have wandered into his domain.
These characters and others are all refugees of a sort, or on the lam, often from their own identities and sense of belonging in the world. A number of the stories are from a gay perspective. These are not so much coming-out as peeking-out stories.
The novella “God of Gods” tells of the butcher Odin who, amidst the bigotry of his family and co-workers at Jewel, tries not to live a lie, and largely succeeds. Not only does he have to pass for straight in the social climate of early ’70s Chicago, but he also falls in love with George Zapata, the head of produce, who, like Odin, never married, but unlike him wants nothing more than to be left alone, denying all of his feelings.
Several other stories in the collection deal with characters trying to come to terms with their sexuality. In “Incognito,” Abby, who lives on Chicago’s Near North Side, doesn’t know “what rules to follow.” She’s involved in her first relationship of any kind with a neighbor named Theresa, a woman who brims with the kind of confidence Abby wishes she possessed. In fact, everyone Abby meets seems more self-assured than she. Not only is she afraid of getting close to others, but she’s equally terrified of understanding herself. She’s dismayed by a gay man named Steve whom she meets at a party, because Steve refers to everyone in the room as part of his family:
“When I looked out at the party I didn’t see people; all I saw were twenty or so complex, closed-off lives. Because intimacy made me so queasy I couldn’t see why anyone would yearn for it in such large quantities. It was as if Steve were happily driving a car into a brick wall, over and over again, too dense to feel the pain.”
Doenges’ stories that deal with sexual identity and politics fit into a larger context of stories with characters on the edge of identity, not sure of which way to topple. The title story, “What She Left Me,” is a powerful evocation (through the technique of cataloging, a la Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”) of the legacies left to a woman by her mother. Some of these inheritances are material (a large leather address book, a complete set of barware), others are not (her mother’s alcoholism, and her own).
Some of the collection’s strongest stories have a kind of nightmarish pace and intensity in which characters are brought down by a conflation of their own poor choices and the coercion of others. In “Crooks,” a smart suburban teenager tests her invincibility on an outing with her boyfriend to fence some stolen stereos to a motorcycle gang. In “The Money Stays, The People Go,” a woman winds up sleeping with the Las Vegas lawyer who has been urging her all night to settle down with her boyfriend.
The characters in virtually all of the short stories here are worriers, and with good reason. Often through no fault of their own, they find themselves trapped within the limitations of their choices against the confusing expectations of the world at large. None of them knows what rules to follow.
In Robert Garner McBrearty’s warm and engaging collection, “A Night at the Y,” the characters have perhaps a little more understanding of the rules to follow, but are still as apt to break them. These stories are not as varied in point of view as Doenges’ collection: Two of the 12 stories are from the perspective of a dishwasher, and all are from a male point of view. Nonetheless, these stories do not, for the most part, feel redundant–rather, as in any good collection, the tones and themes echo and complement one another from story to story.
What threads through McBrearty’s work is a humaneness toward his characters and a gentle, sometimes sad irony that pervades their world views. McBrearty’s typical protagonist is a family man straining against the loose but invidious bonds of middle-class angst and yearning. This is, of course, familiar territory, but McBrearty spices it up by altering the patterns with a characteristic dry absurdity.
And so we’re presented in “Back in Town” with a former outlaw, now settled down, who seeks to allay his wife’s concerns about his driving the wagon into town by pointing out that it has been a year since he gave up “drinking and whoring and looting and stealing horses and robbing banks and shooting up the town and using foul language.” Unfortunately, as he sits in a wagon traffic jam on Main Street, his old buddy, No-Nose Ed, spots him, and there commences a slide back into outlawdom–with our hero rationalizing all the way down the slippery slope.
In “The Hellraiser,” a bona fide, self-proclaimed hell-raiser tries to get his old buddies, who have settled down with families and jobs, to let loose a little on New Year’s Eve. The story starts out at a topless bar with the man, Scooter, and his two reluctant friends. Scooter tries to liven things up but makes an ass of himself: He jumps up onstage with the dancer and tries to take off his own clothes, stopping only at her insistence. Scooter is harmless and somewhat pathetic, but he seems more or less aware of this. He wants to play the fool in the lives of his friends. And his friends seem to tolerate him, or at least they can’t stay angry with him long. When Scooter returns to the house of his friend Leon, the anger of Leon’s wife, Beth, who has been waiting for her husband’s return, is exacerbated by Scooter’s letting slip that they’ve been at a strip club. But Scooter manages to get back in everyone’s good graces and winds up shooting bottle rockets happily and drunkenly from their roof.
McBrearty has a flair for the comic, and he uses first-person narration to great effect. “The Dishwasher,” which won a Pushcart Prize, starts with an inversion of the usual status of holding down a dishwashing job:
“I’m a dishwasher in a restaurant. I’m not trying to impress anybody. I’m not bragging. It’s just what I do. It’s not the glamorous job people make it out to be. Sure, you make a lot of dough and everybody looks up to you and respects you, but then again there’s a lot of responsibility. It weighs on you. It wears on you. Everybody wants to be a dishwasher these days, I guess, but they’ve got an idealistic view of it.”
The story “Improvising” is told in first person from the point of view of a soap-opera villain who chooses one day to mend his ways and act good, against the director’s wishes and machinations. Even in a work with a more traditional bent, the coming-of-age story “My Life as a Judo Master,” McBrearty starts out with a comical and slightly absurd premise: “When I was eight, though I had never taken a single lesson, I discovered that I was a judo master.”
Not all of McBrearty’s stories explore his themes in a comic manner. He is as adept at moving the reader with an understanding of life’s more poignant moments as he is at making one laugh. In the collection’s title story, a clerk at the YMCA comes to understand the quiet heroism of his harried life over the more grandiose heroism of his youth, when he saved a young boy in Mexico during the running of the bulls. In outline, this might sound maudlin, but this story neatly avoids sentimentality, as does the moving “The Things I Don’t Know About,” concerning a writer’s attempts to write something that his dying mother will appreciate, an ersatz family history concerning a pioneer great-great grandmother. Of course, he’s not able to write anything to her satisfaction, and she dies, his story unfinished, her story unfinished, and his young son left asking him questions he can’t answer.
Although “What She Left Me” and “A Night at the Y” are different in tone and subject matter, both manage nicely to convey a melange of characters who would like to misbehave but don’t quite have the wherewithal or the requisite confidence to carry it off.
