ReviewDave EggersSan Francisco Chronicle Any lover of realistic narrative fiction in regards to actual and unglamorous people will be primarily rewarded by the work of Antonya Nelson.
Lynna Williams Chicago Tribune These are precise and acutely knowing stories, written by a woman who perceives the potential of both female trouble and the short story form.
Frederick Busch, The New York Times Book ReviewThese are severe stories, sensual and dark, with much at danger for the reader and, one imagines, the writer…Female Trouble is the work of a strong writer who sees both panoramically and with a powerfully close focus.
Carmela CiuraruNewsdayPrecise, perceptive, and exceedingly funny.
About the AuthorAntonya Nelson teaches originative writing at the University of Houston, and is the award-winning author of three novels and four short story collections. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Best American Short Stories. She divides her time amidst Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.Stitches
Mama?” she said. The word cut through each layer: the dark house, the late hour, the deep sleep, the gin still polluting her blood, the dream still spinning whimsically. All of it sliced away as if with a scalpel by her daughter’s voice on the telephone.
“Baby.” Ellen emerged from the murk: naked, conscious, attuned. “Baby?”
“I’m okay, Mama, but something happened, something happened here.” Here was in her college town, two hours away from her parents’ home, this her initial semester. Ellen felt her heart beating.
“But you’re okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“Not hurt?”
“I’m okay. I’m scared.”
Skeered, the children used to say, Tracy and Lonnie, Ellen’s girl and boy. “Scared of what?” Ellen’s house was lit only by the moon and a streetlamp, 3:30 in the morning, the worst of the witching hours. Without thinking she had brought the telephone from the hall to her son’s room, where he slept, safe. Ellen had been dreaming regarding her ex-lover, whom she had been missing now for longer than the kinship itself had endured; this longing now felt normal, a facet of who she was. On the telephone her daughter was closely crying, as if to inflict punishment on Ellen for her unfaithful dream: look what may occur if you aren’t paying attention, if your affections go wandering. “Scared of what?”
“What’s she frighted of?” asked Ellen’s husband, his breath bitter with sleep and age, his presence here at her elbow similar to his presence besides her in bed: she wanted to push him away, she wanted to pull him close. Sometimes she sunk her teeth into his shoulder and pretended it was erotic. He loved his daughter without hesitation, the way he loved his wife, his son. It was cloying, reassuring, inescapable, horrifying. Secure: like a safety belt or a prison sentence.
“Mama, I was raped.” Now Tracy started out to cry sincerely.
“What?” Ellen’s husband shouted. They went back to their own bedroom and he was dressing, muttering, lights were igniting, drawers were slammed as Ellen clutched the phone with both hands as even though it might leap through the air.
“Where are you?” she asked. “Where are you, darling?”
“In my…dorm,” said her daughter, and that building erected itself, proud and institutional, enclosing the girl on it is fourth floor, in her room full of posters and stuffed bears and empty beer cans.
“Police?” her husband asked, as he tried to extricate the phone.
“Not the police!” came Tracy’s voice over the line, “it was somebody I know.” Now Ellen’s husband was working pants over boxer shorts, the material bunching at his waist, storming from room to room in search of wallet and keys and eyeglasses and jacket, shirt flapping open like a flag.
“It was an individual she knows,” Ellen repeated for him.
“I heard,” he said grimly. “I’m on my way,” he added, tucking his shorts into his fly and zipping sharply. His decision had been made just as mechanically as pulling a zipper; or, rather, his thinking had cleared a path through the fog of the night: blinding, exact, preemptory. Ahead of himself he saw only his daughter. Ellen had to marvel. “You stay on the phone,” he told her. His hair was wild, his shoelaces trailing him as he slammed the door.
“Don’t let him come here,” her daughter had been saying, repeatedly. “Please don’t let him come here.” As if he could have been stopped.
“I’m going to talk to you, honey,” said Ellen to her seventeen year old. A young college student, she was a girl who’d always been in front of her years in a heap of ways and behind them in others. Smart yet sentimental, maternal yet childlike, she was rounded and soft, dark, vaguely furred on her upper lip and forearms, the nape of her neck. She bore an uncanny resemblance to her maternal grandmother. Ellen would never escape that peculiar blend of bossiness and naivete. They book-ended her, her mother and her daughter, dark stocky peasants. Practical, conscientious, good: they exerted strength from either side, like a flower press. Like a vise.
“Oh, why does he have to come here?” Tracy wailed rhetorically. And Ellen could effortlessly envision her daughter’s olive skin, wet with tears, as she wandered back into her son’s room. His skin was precisely the opposite — fair, almost hairless — and it covered a very different, knobby body. In his face you could see the child he’d been and the man he would become, lean and frail, charming and awkward. “Of course your father’s coming, and we’ll just talk until he gets there.” The hundred miles amid them appeared in Ellen’s mind, the desert, the bright moon, and the animals as they blindly scurried out of his trajectory. His trip would be a clear shot, simple as a bullet from a gun. He had raised the garage door with sufficient strength to make the lights in the house flicker.
But Lonnie hadn’t woken up, twelve years old, skinny, innocent, eyelids closely translucent; he was sleeping the ardent sleep of an early teenager.
“Is he mad?” Tracy asked.
“Frightened,” Ellen said. “Men get angry when they’re frightened. He’s crazy at whoever raped you.”
“Mama?” she sucked wetly in. “It wasn’t incisively rape?”
“Tracy.” Ellen pulled her bathrobe closer around her; the heater came on and the cat wandered to the floor vent besides Lonnie’s guitar stand. When had she draped herself in her bathrobe? What had she been thinking, a few minutes ago, standing naked in her son’s bedroom? She and her husband had had sex before going to sleep, she recalled now, which explained both her nudity and her dream of her ex-lover. “Trace. What do you mean, it wasn’t incisively rape?” She was applied to her daughter’s amendments: the extremity, and then the backpedaling.
“I mean, I knew him, I recognise him, and he invited me to his house, and I went there, and I knew we were going to have sex. Don’t keep saying my name,” she added, stepping out of her disaster for a moment to be irritated.
“There may still be rape — “
“I don’t think it was rape. I agreed, I wanted it. I mean, I wanted a good deal of of it. He’s my professor.”
Ellen’s heart hammered in a new kind of anger, the anger that comes after the fear, the anger that begins to tweak itself, take shape in more intricate ways, like lace, like coral, around any palliating circumstance. The worst thing, well, that wasn’t what had happened to Tracy. It wasn’t simple violence of the sort Ellen had envisioned. The man hadn’t been a stranger in an alley, or a burglar in the dorm. He hadn’t been a frat boy at a party, or one of a gang of drunks in a bar. Instead, it was a middle-aged man in a bed with a headboard, piles of books on the table besides it, floral sheets, prescription meds in the night table drawer, a room not not similar to the room Ellen shared with her husband, filled with the intimate objects of ease and respectable living, complicatedness and texture, history. Instantly that house formed in Ellen’s mind, growing swiftly from one fruitful word, professor, the divorced professor, the divided professor, the lecherous professor whose wife was out of town or instructing her own seminar, and Tracy there in that house, seduced by the older man’s flattering attention to her. “Tell me,” Ellen said to her daughter. “Tell me what happened.”
“He’s my motion teacher,” she began, and what followed was not surprising, not to Ellen, who’d likewise been to college, who’d also developed crushes on professors, who knew all regarding the liberal arts. What was surprising, what had always astonished Ellen in regards to this daughter of hers, was how she never failed to fetch her female business to her mother. Breasts, boys, menstruation, makeup, cat fights, betrayal. It was unnerving to be this girl’s mother. She was so forthcoming. So frankly healthful and unfucked-up. How had she gotten this way? Ellen felt someways excluded from the process; she wasn’t so healthful herself, still vaguely anorexic, still drinking too much and smoking occasionally, lying to her husband when it comes to her affections. She held mysteries — not in drawers or closets or diaries, but in her heart, behind her eyes, on her lips. Tracy’s admirable openness seemed not to have been inherited from Ellen, so it will have to have come from her father.
“How old is this professor?” Ellen asked suddenly. Something Tracy had said made the effigy of the man shift. The bed, it was a waterbed.
“He’s not in truth a professor, per se,” Tracy said. “He’s more like the TA.”
“Per se.”
“What?”
“How old is the TA?”
“I dunno. Twenty-five?”
Ellen sighed. Not so much younger than her ex-lover. Now the professor’s stately bedroom was devolving into her ex-lover’s ratty apartment. Mattress on the floor, stolen silverware, chairs festooned with duct tape, disposable razors, wine in a box.
“He raped you? Or you had sex when you didn’t want to? Or what?”
“Mama?”
“What, babe? What, Trace?”
“You recognise the most astounding thing? The awfullest-seeming thing, the thing that’s just actually really hard to handle?”
“What, doll?” Ellen played with the phone’s telescoping antenna, up and then down, goodnatured tolerance a tone of voice she put on like a hat.
“A man crying,” Tracy said. “I don’t recognise why, but I can’t take it.”
Ellen thought of her husband’s crying. When he had believed that their life together was over, he had wept. Tracy was right. It was an awful thing, it left her full of awe. Frightening, pathetic, to be patted on the head, to be avoided, shunned, locked out of the house. There was no good reaction to a man’s crying, not one that would work. Men didn’t recognise how to do it, how to modulate, how to breathe or minister to their own sudden emissions. Ellen thought that men would be inept at childbirth, as well: they were so ugly in pain, so bad at giving in to a strength larger than themselves. She was remembering her ex-lover’s contorted face, he’d been tearful a time or two, as well. “Baby,” she said.
“It may just with regards to kill you, observing a boy cry.”
“Why was he crying? Why?”
“Because he hurt me.”
Once more Ellen felt anger rise in her. Anger and empathy: these accompanied the guilt feelings and the love she felt toward her daughter and always would. She paced the house’s flowchart of a floor plan, hallway-kitchen-dining room-…
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