SHORT STORIES: EILEEN BATTERSBYwrites Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want ItBy Maile Meloy Canongate, 219pp, £7.99
IT MUST HAVE been a bit of a shock for the narrator when he opened the front door that afternoon, to find his grandmother, “two months dead, standing on the stoop.” The dead woman smiled “a happy smile of self-welcome” and, according to the narrator, “She looked great for eighty-seven, let alone for being dead.” Well, the old woman, a former screen star who outlived five husbands as well as her only child, the narrator’s father, is very much alive and determined to get her fortune back from the charity that has prematurely claimed it. As for the body in the pool, that was the caretaker’s drunken wife. It was all a mistake. So, when the narrator’s little boy said of his great-granny, “didn’t she die?”, his father simply replied: “They made a mistake.”
One of the most talented US writers of the coming generation Maile Meloy, author of Liars and Saints, knows that humans are determined and usually know what we want, or think we want. In Travis, B., young Chet Moran who had grown up in “Logan, Montana, at a time when kids weren’t supposed to get polio anymore” got it, and recovered, “but his right hip never fit in the socket, and his mother always thought he was going to die.” Chet rarely gives up and takes to riding young, unbroken horses. “His father drove him to Great Falls, where the doctors put a steel rod in his good leg from hip to knee. From then on, he walked as though he were turning to himself to ask a question.”
The 11 stories included in this terrific collection offer Meloy, a wry and relaxed storyteller at her most shrewdly intuitive. The timing is perfect, her approach to comedy is subtle, and unlike Annie Proulx, she never pushes the joke too far. It is the measured restraint that makes Meloy so convincing and at times suggests an echo of Tobias Wolff.
Chet begins attending night classes which are conducted by a harassed young woman, the Travis, B. of the story’s title. After the first class she admits to Chet that she had taken the job without realising exactly where the town was. “It took me nine and a half hours to get here. And now I have to drive nine and a half hours back, and I have to work in the morning. I’ve never done anything so stupid in my life.” Their conversations consist of the young woman’s moaning and Chet’s sympathy. He becomes drawn to her. “He wondered how he might court a girl who was older, and a lawyer, a girl who lived clear across the state and couldn’t think about anything but that distance.” As love stories go, it is different and possibly one of the best in a fine collection.
Elsewhere, in Lovely Rita, Steven Kelly, “newly orphaned” when his dependent mother follows her husband to the grave, takes a building job, working on a new nuclear power plant of which he hates the idea, but he needs the work. Also employed on the project is his best friend from high school, Acey Rawlings.
Together, they drink their nights away in the local bar “until the hammering in their heads subsided enough for sleep.” Little had changed for the pair – but it did “It was on one of those nights that a girl showed up, hanging around.” Steven remembered the girl, or more accurately, he recalled her nasty drunkard of a father. Acey and the girl get together. It ends tragically, in unusual circumstances. Meloy manages to avoid the obvious. Steven quits the plant – and his home, and moves across the country, to Florida. “He didn’t want anything that felt like it had a history to it.”
TWO-STEP IS AN even tougher tale. Naomi sits and listens while her friend Alice, now married, settled in a renovated Victorian house and pregnant, weeps over her husband’s loss of interest in her. Alice has good reason; after all, he had left his previous wife when she was expecting. He seems like a dangerous guy, as Alice laments: “He missed his calling . . . He should have founded a cult. A big house full of barefoot girls sitting cross-legged at his feet . . .”. Naomi is still there when the husband returns and dances around the kitchen, celebrating his wife’s pregnancy. Then Naomi leaves, only to go outside and sit in his car, rolling the seat back as far as it would go “to sleep and wait” for him.
The final story, O Tannenbaum, which represented Meloy in the Granta Best of Young American Novelists (2007) takes her interest in danger that bit further. A couple, accompanied by their small daughter, steal a lopsided but interesting Christmas tree, "Everett dragged their quarry through the snow by the truck" and the little girl urges him, "faster, Daddy."
They meet another couple, carrying a broken ski. They are called Bonnie and Clyde. Everett experiences a pang of doubt as he gives them a ride back to their car. But there is no car. Back in Everett’s car, the tension mounts. Back at his house, he wondered “why he still wanted to go get the outlaws [the stranded couple] and put himself in the way of temptation”.
Throughout the daring, adventurous collection, characters consider the alternatives. Meloy consistently surprises because she is so aware that every story, as with life, has the potential for several different endings but only one defining shot.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
