Praise for Sweet Talk
“Beautifully written and insightful … Sweet Talk ignites a quiet series of explosions that will echo in a reader’s memory long after the book is closed.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Sweet Talk is beguiling all right, though never coy; it’s the debut of a writer with a style as engaging as her characters.”
—New York magazine
“They’re beautiful stories, some of the most honest and true stories about growing up and family life that I recall reading. ‘Able Baker Charlie Dog’ is one of my favorite stories —in the world. I’m delighted to see Stephanie Vaughn’s talent take flight in a whole book of stories.”
—Bobbie Ann Mason
“There is not a weak story in Sweet Talk, and few are less than spectacular. Hers is a wise, touching, extraordinary voice.”
—Mother Jones
“Excellent … In this smoothly crafted book, the story is rendered with insight, compassion, and humor.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Sweet Talk is a sensitive, fulfilling work by an author of extraordinary talent, one who writes with intimacy, intelligence, and great subtlety in detail.”
—Joseph Heller
“Her technical command and her style are remarkably assured: supple, elegant, adventurous, even funny.”
—Village Voice Literary Supplement
“There aren’t five writers in the United States who could have written these stories, and maybe not even five; maybe only one. The mix of perception, irony, and compassion is extraordinary, and she does it with such economy and sureness, and such apparent ease. Stephanie Vaughn is absolutely first-rate. She is not merely gifted, or talented, or promising.”
—Wallace Stegner
“Outstanding … Stephanie Vaughn’s matter-of-fact voice draws you right into Sweet Talk … Rarely have the perils of ‘sweet talk’ been rendered so tartly.”
—Glamour
“Seldom has a first book evoked such enthusiastic reaction as has this collection of short stories. The reason is simple—they are wonderful … as good as anything being written today. They are hilarious, poignant, and searingly true.”
—Dallas Morning News
“Stephanie Vaughn’s stories are all—collectively and individually—remarkable. The tone is extraordinary, simple, clear and defined like the ringing of a bell, and yet suggesting a world of the most difficult complexities—our world where there are no single, or even permanent, answers and where human beings veer toward and away from one another, never fully in reach. Each of these stories is aimed at that vanishing point where humor and irony can at any instant become a noticeable expression of pain. All in all, Sweet Talk is a wonderful achievement.”
—Scott Turow
Other Press edition 2012
Copyright © 1978, 1979, 1981, 1990 by Stephanie Vaughn
First published in the United States of America by Random House, Inc., 1990
Some stories in this work were originally published in The New Yorker and Redbook. “Sweet Talk,” “Other Women,” and “The Architecture of California” were originally published in Antaeus magazine.
Introduction copyright © 2012 by Tobias Wolff
Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Vaughn, Stephanie.
Sweet talk / Stephanie Vaughn; introduction by Tobias Wolff. —Other Press ed. 2012.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-59051-517-4
1. Families of military personnel—Fiction. 2. Marriage—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. 4. Short stories. I. Title.
PS3572.A955S94 2012
813’.54—dc22
2011035376
Publisher’s note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
v3.1
This book’s for Michael Claude Ignatius Koch
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction by Tobias Wolff
Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog
Sweet Talk
We’re on TV in the Universe
My Mother Breathing Light
Other Women
Kid MacArthur
The Architecture of California
The Battle of Fallen Timbers
Snow Angel
Dog Heaven
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Introduction
By Tobias Wolff
“Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again.”
So begins Stephanie Vaughn’s story “Dog Heaven,” one of the most surprising, stirring, beautiful stories in our literature. It takes place at an army base on the Niagara River, near the Falls, and is told by Gemma, a woman remembering her childhood there, and especially Duke, the magnificent dog who runs through these memories, and in some sense herds them together—as he herded Gemma’s family, bravely, improbably finding them when they were “lost.” For Duke is a responsible dog with a point of view (do dogs not have a point of view?), and his is honored here. Even as the family tells stories about Duke through the years, dreaming him up again, it comes to seem perfectly plausible that they owe some part of their existence to the dreams of his great soul.
Such is the world that Stephanie Vaughn herself has dreamed into life, story by story, and brought to completion in this singular gathering. I first encountered her work in the New Yorker in the late seventies, and all these years later I still feel the startled pleasure I experienced then at the freshness of her vision and voice, her effortless mastery of the form, her affectionate wit, her forgiving but clear-eyed view of the confused, fumbling, deceiving, self-deceived, mostly well-intended souls whose lives she observes.
Though the stories vary in time and place and dramatis personae, there is a sort of spine running through the collection, and that is the cumulative, evolving portrait of Gemma’s family. Her father is an army officer with duties related to our missile defense. To his daughter he is the very image of certainty and fearless resolve, of tough-loving, adamant character; the rock on which his wife and son and mother-in-law and Gemma herself build their sense of a secure life with a reliable future. This too proves a dream. Indeed, in story after story the confident adult world is revealed as a shaky edifice built not on rock but on sands yielding constantly to the influence of alcohol, war, bad luck, disease, and simple human frailty. It is, in other words, an adult world like the one we inhabit, and present as our legacy to those coming up behind us.
So much for the adult world. One of the pleasures of this collection for me is its evocation of the world of children, and in particular the world of children on military posts. I spent four years in the army, and while I was aware that some of our officers and NCOs had wives and therefore kids, kids who could occasionally be seen on a passing school bus or buying candy in the PX, I did not and could not imagine what their lives on base might be like. They composed, that is to say, a society, a culture, just a parade ground away, that migh
t for all I knew of it have been lived out in the Hindu Kush or Papua New Guinea. These are young people with their own language and lore, their own understandings born of frequent moves and apparently arbitrary changes in what appears to be a monolithic, unchanging world—the military life. Like immigrants yearning for full citizenship, they are forever outsiders to the communities that surround them, where they go to school and play sports and run for class president. They try to fit in, but don’t, can’t; they are a society unto themselves, biding their time until the next set of orders comes through.
These stories are often very funny. In “We’re on TV in the Universe” the narrator crashes her car into a sheriff’s cruiser while on her way to a party, a caged chicken on the seat beside her—she’s hoping the chicken will bring her notice as “an interesting person.” In a Stephanie Vaughn story, you don’t just get into an accident. No, when this car hits the ice, “(it) did a kind of simple dance step down the highway on its way to meet the sheriff’s car. It threw its hips to the left, it threw its hips to the right, left, right, left, right, then turned and slid, as if making a rock-and-roll move toward the arms of a partner.”
I have never read a more exact evocation of the movement of a car going its own way on ice, the suspension of time, the almost clownish sashaying of its body. How perfect, and perfectly droll, to make it a figure in a dance. And yet we know even as we smile that this dance could end very badly. Indeed, through all these stories, even at their most antic, runs the current of mortality, sometimes as evident as that which reached for Duke as he fetched sticks in the Niagara, and eventually claimed one of Gemma’s friends, but more often felt as a kind of pulse in the relations of husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters.
Children play on fields not far from those where missiles are buried. As they grow older they experience betrayal, see youthful promise blighted by war, watch their parents weaken and fail. Yet in Stephanie Vaughn’s stories the effect of these revelations is to make us feel the beauty, the dearness, of everything that has joined us despite our weaknesses, and given us occasion to love, and to remember with love.
Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog
When I was twelve years old, my father was tall and awesome. I can see him walking across the parade ground behind our quarters. The wind blew snow into the folds of his coat and made the hem swoop around his legs. He did not lower his head, he did not jam his hands into the pockets. He was coming home along a diagonal that would cut the parade ground into perfect triangles, and he was not going to be stopped by any snowstorm. I stood at the kitchen door and watched him through a hole I had rubbed in the steamy glass.
My grandmother and mother fidgeted with pans of food that had been kept warm too long. It was one o’clock on Saturday and he had been expected home at noon.
“You want to know what this chicken looks like?” said my grandmother. “It looks like it died last year.”
My mother looked into the pan but didn’t say anything.
My grandmother believed my mother should have married a minister, not an Army officer. Once my mother had gone out with a minister, and now he was on the radio every Sunday in Ohio. My grandmother thought my father had misrepresented himself as a religious man. There was a story my mother told about their first date. They went to a restaurant and my father told her that he was going to have twelve sons and name them Peter, James, John, et cetera. “And I thought, Twelve sons!” said my mother. “Boy, do I pity your poor wife.” My mother had two miscarriages and then she had me. My father named me Gemma, which my grandmother believed was not even a Christian name.
“You want to know what this squash looks like?” said my grandmother.
“It’ll be fine,” said my mother.
Just then the wind gusted on the parade ground, and my father veered to the left. He stopped and looked up. How is it possible you have caught me off guard, he seemed to ask. Exactly where have I miscalculated the velocities, how have I misjudged the vectors?
“It looks like somebody peed in it,” my grandmother said.
• • •
“Keep your voice low,” my father told me that day as we ate the ruined squash and chicken. “Keep your voice low and you can win any point.”
We were living in Fort Niagara, a little Army post at the juncture of the Niagara River and Lake Ontario. We had been there through the fall and into the winter, as my father, who was second in command, waited for his next promotion. It began to snow in October. The arctic winds swept across the lake from Canada and shook the windows of our house. Snow drifted across the parade ground, and floes of ice piled up against each other in the river, so that if a person were courageous enough, or foolhardy enough, and also lucky, he could walk the mile across the river to Canada.
“And always speak in sentences,” he told me. “You have developed a junior-high habit of speaking in fragments. Learn to come to a full stop when you complete an idea. Use semicolons and periods in your speech.”
My mother put down her fork and knife. Her hands were so thin and light they seemed to pass through the table as she dropped them in her lap. “Zachary, perhaps we could save some of the lecture for dessert?” she said.
My grandmother leaned back into her own heaviness. “The poor kid never gets to eat a hot meal,” she said. She was referring to the rule that said I could not cut my food or eat while I was speaking or being spoken to. My father used mealtimes to lecture on the mechanics of life, the how-tos of a civilized world. Normally I was receptive to his advice, but that day I was angry with him.
“You know, Dad,” I said, “I don’t think my friends are going to notice a missing semicolon.”
I thought he would give me a fierce look, but instead he winked. “And don’t say ‘you know,’ ” he said.
He never said “you know,” never spoke in fragments, never slurred his speech, even years later when he had just put away a fifth of scotch and was trying to describe the Eskimo custom of chewing up the meat before it was given to the elders, who had no teeth. He spoke with such calculation and precision that his sentences hung over us like high vaulted ceilings, or rolled across the table like ornaments sculptured from stone. It was a huge cathedral of a voice, full of volume and complexity.
He taught me the alphabet. Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog. It was the alphabet the military used to keep b’s separate from v’s and i’s separate from y’s. He liked the music of it, the way it sounded on his fine voice. I was four years old and my grandmother had not come to live with us yet. We were stationed in Manila, and living in a house the Army had built on squat stilts to protect us from the insects. There was a typhoon sweeping inland, and we could hear the hoarse sound of metal scraping across the Army’s paved street. It was the corrugated roof of the house next door.
“Don’t you think it’s time we went under the house?” my mother said. She was sitting on a duffel bag that contained our tarps and food rations. The house had a loose plank in the living-room floor, so that if the roof blew away, or the walls caved in, we could escape through the opening and sit in the low space between the reinforced floor and the ground until the military rescue bus came.
My father looked at me and said, “Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog. Can you say it, Gemma?”
I looked up at the dark slope of our own metal roof.
“Can you say it?”
“Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog,” I said.
The metal rumbled on the road outside. My mother lifted the plank.
“We will be all right,” he said. “Easy, Fox, George, How.”
“Anybody want to join me?” said my mother.
“Easy.”
“Rachel, please put that plank back.”
“Easy, Fox, George, How,” I said.
My mother replaced the plank and sat on the floor beside me. The storm grew louder, the rain fell against the roof like handfuls of gravel.
“Item, Jig, King.” My father’s voice grew lower, fuller. We sat under the sound of it
and felt safe. “Love, Mike, Nan.”
But then we heard another sound—something that went whap-whap, softly, between the gusts of rain. We tilted our heads toward the shuttered windows.
“Well,” said my father, standing up to stretch. “I think we are losing a board or two off the side of the house.”
“Where are you going?” said my mother. “Just where do you think you’re going?”
He put on his rain slicker and went into the next room. When he returned, he was carrying a bucket of nails and a hammer. “Obviously,” he said, “I am going fishing.”
We moved back to the States when I was six, and he taught me how to play Parcheesi, checkers, chess, cribbage, dominoes, and twenty questions. “When you lose,” he told me, “don’t cry. When you win, don’t gloat.”
He taught me how to plant tomatoes and load a shotgun shell. He showed me how to gut a dove, turning it inside out as the Europeans do, using the flexible breastbone for a pivot. He read a great many books and never forgot a fact or a technical description. He explained the principles of crop rotation and the flying buttress. He discussed the Defenestration of Prague.
When I was in elementary school, he was sent abroad twice on year-long tours—once to Turkey and once to Greenland, both strategic outposts for America’s Early Warning System. I wanted to, but I could not write him letters. His came to me every week, but without the rhythms of his voice the words seemed pale and flat, like the transparent shapes of cells under a microscope. He did not write about his work, because his work was secret. He did not send advice, because that he left to my mother and grandmother in his absence. He wrote about small things—the smooth white rocks he found on a mountainside in Turkey, the first fresh egg he ate in Greenland. When I reread the letters after he died, I was struck by their grace and invention. But when I read them as a child, I looked through the words—“eggs … shipment … frozen”—and there was nothing on the other side but the great vacuum of his missing voice.
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