Five Stories, Nine Selves

Sina Queyras

A Story by Alice Munro Is Recounted

It was the ear­lier ones I liked best. You could see her with pedal-pushers on, walk­ing the dusty road­sides. And her mother with the bibles in the trunk. That’s what I liked. A look­ing back that filled in details, like how she put the ice in the pitcher of lemon­ade; I could hear it clink all the way up in Grande Prairie, where I was read­ing the story. And those aunts! How they arrived, one fat­ter than the other. That’s what I like in a story: ice cubes, hot after­noons, women talk­ing around a kitchen table. That’s what mat­ters to me, these sto­ries, you kick them up in the dust and they get inside you. You go back to the farm, you’re walk­ing, and you have a bou­quet of stinkweed, and the night is sweet as cut hay, and you don’t have asthma, and there is no war — not here, not yet — and your hus­band is still alive, and, if you think real hard, if you slow it all down, you can hear your mother in the kitchen flip­ping cards. You might under­stand it’s tem­po­rary. It might have always been, but for a moment it was real. It was a place you could inhabit.

Colony Collapse

One morn­ing they woke up to find all the stores rav­aged: honey pots upturned and pawed out, flow­ers with the heads bit­ten off, anthills sculpted into elab­o­rate cen­tre­pieces, trees over­turned to dis­tin­guish one mosh pit from another, mil­lions of fish in heaps, flung across oceans and lakes, deer skins in piles, bat wings in piles, dogs in cor­rals, corals in jars, eye­balls in oil, all of it cat­a­logued, the sky, demar­cated, clouds in nets like poker chips lined up, elbows on the great green table, deal­ers off and on, bow ties, even the cat­a­loguers with bar-coded necks, them­selves the very next items to be scanned. 

A Difficult Moment

I didn’t know what to do, he said. I’ve never had to fol­low naked women but there they were, hav­ing just read an essay buff. It was a hard act to fol­low and I con­fess to feel­ing a lit­tle upstaged. Naked women are all very well in one’s head, but not on stage, not with words, not with full sen­tences and sentience.

Her Nine New York Selves

She is walk­ing under Macy’s big screen where the chil­dren of Belsen are being car­ried out on stretch­ers. We have come to, we are so, some of us, she thinks, turned around. The chil­dren hang in the bal­ance like shekels. She pauses, fish­ing in her bag while body­guards frisk. Overhead the red streaks of a Target ad and she thinks of that ket­tle, that ket­tle, the designer one, she meant to buy it on the week­end. She had been in the diner on Sixth, the one that Isaac Mizrahi fre­quents (blt no mayo). She hadn’t seen him, but had been scowled at (deli­ciously) by Fran Lebowitz. Men in cam­ou­flage, men in suits, there is an orange alert today and she has lost her lip­stick. Off to a cock­tail party in Gramercy Square, but not with­out lip­stick, into Macy’s, to the Mac counter for Miss Dish, or is it Mac Red? They are always chang­ing the name of her shade. Everything over­stocked, she can­not sell or save — but there is no tax this week to cel­e­brate the Grand Old Party doing its dirty in town. Please, she thinks, adjust your dial, tune out and tune in, the moment is a frieze of scent and cash­mere and the most deli­cious lips in the world, all here, smil­ing and lip­stick is not polit­i­cal … She is not con­vinc­ing her­self, cool as a bot­tle of spring water in Chelsea on a Saturday after­noon before she heads back down to her loft in the Meatpacking District next to Julianna’s. Or is it uptown to a tiny but per­fect apart­ment where she lives with her lawyer hus­band and they take danc­ing lessons with a lit­tle old man, wiry as a yogi, who kids with Liza, who winks at you too, as you both wrap your knees. Everything is lus­cious Hudson Valley greens and Tiffany blues in rooms the colour of Arctic char, that latte wait­ing for you around the cor­ner when you tire of your own com­pany (rarely …). But at that moment she remem­bers that she lives in Brooklyn and needs print car­tridges from Target, not a ket­tle, and will prob­a­bly buy some street meat from the ven­dor on Atlantic, where lithe tat­tooed boys in white tees sneak out with dvds, and oops, no, she is still at the bor­der wait­ing for paper­work, about to take a job at a state col­lege in New Jersey, a small one no one has ever heard of at which she will be of lit­tle use and make no mark, but think of Williams as she dri­ves through to the city for her weekly cul­ture fix. Or she is that per­son who eagerly attends poetry read­ings at the Ear Inn (where a bas­set hound pad­dles past her), and over the beer, her ear, over the bear, her ear, strains to hear some­thing off of Spring Street, some­thing a lit­tle more Soho, more like the Grand, where she sits of an after­noon work­ing on a screen­play, mod­est, with a role for Björk — a fea­ture art-avant-garde sort of MoMA thing, abstract, but still com­pletely com­mer­cially viable with mul­ti­ple sound­tracks depend­ing on the cin­ema you see the movie in … Or now, jerk­ing her­self into the street, not exactly into oncom­ing traf­fic but surf­ing a sea of New York taxis rid­ing the after­noon tide down Fifth Avenue bustling with so many ver­sions of her­self she feels them min­gling with other ver­sions of other peo­ple, small, com­pact pro­jec­tors flash­ing through the streets, end­less reels of selves and selves and selves and selves and selves …

A Story Filled With Unnecessary Tension

The train came to a stop mid-tunnel. She knew it was mid-tunnel because at a cer­tain point the energy of Manhattan begins to act as both mag­net and relax­ant, both buoy­ing and ener­giz­ing. They had just reached that moment. And stopped. Silence. Only the Verizon phones worked under the tun­nel. She had gone with another ser­vice and so could only cling to her cell and breathe, which she did. Which they all did. Several min­utes passed with only the sound of the man trad­ing stocks, he was wor­ried about devalu­ing. He should be, she thought, and won­dered, as she knew they all must be won­der­ing, if this was another attack, whether at any moment a ball of flame would shoot back­ward from the city, or whether, when they finally climbed back out of the sys­tem, there would be any­thing left of either side. And then, “I have no con­tact with either end,” came a voice, a lit­tle shaky. “I repeat. No con­tact with either end.” She thinks of the bod­ies falling, closes her eyes and walks back­ward in time to the island, where her golden retriever is wait­ing for her to throw a stick. The beach is deserted. It’s win­ter. The arbu­tus have shed their bark, the leaves glis­ten and the air is sweet. She can see fires across the strait, on Lasqueti. All is well in the world despite the sense of some­thing about to, about to … The woman beside her gets more anx­ious by the moment, the failed attempts to call her daugh­ter who waits at Penn Station (is there still a Penn Station?) and the mother with her two young sons who have been silent this whole time. “Check. Still no con­tact with either end.” Why, she thinks, as the dog stops and turns to see if she is still there, and sud­denly there is heavy cloud cover and a wind from the north, why won’t they reas­sure us?