Elegies for Uncanny Girls

by Jennifer Colville

  Milo wants to go to Riley. When Riley was a healthy dog they shared a special bond. They were both the jesters of the family. Riley could lie on his back, neck arched, head tilted seductively and legs spread-eagle. It was the “centerfold pose” that made Winona laugh, and even made his mother smile. This is the way the family seems to like Milo as well, in his ability to be ridiculous.

  When Milo hears Winona enter the house and close the bathroom door he slips into her bedroom, kneels down in front of the dark mass that haunts the foot of the bed, and in the dim light tries to locate Riley’s head. He wonders, did he really see Winona naked? Her body was so white and there were leaf patterns like lace over it, cast by the pool lights. Her head was thrown back at first, but when it came up it was not like her, it was more animal, she looked hungry, and then it seemed that every muscle on her face relaxed and her mouth fell open, and then she wasn’t there at all.

  Riley is not there either. There’s no twitch to his nose, and the wrinkles of his forehead are slack. Riley’s eyes are dull as scuffed black marbles; his hair is matted and clumped. Milo can’t stand it. He wonders how Winona can bear to sleep with him. He wonders why his parents haven’t just put him down. He picks Riley up and a thin burp, similar to the sound that came from the dog toy, slips out of Riley’s mouth.

  He takes Riley to the swimming pool. He wants to hold him under and feel him struggle. But he can’t do that. And Riley might not struggle at all anyway, and that would be terrible too. He could drop him out of the tree house, but probably Riley would break all his bones and still not die. He could go get his father’s gun from the garage. That would be the quickest and most manly thing to do—to shoot Riley in the head. Milo sits down to think about it. He crumples over Riley and cries.

  9.

  The next afternoon, after the family has gone to church, Norm retreats to the garage to putter around with his compressor and airbrush contraption. But he feels a little guilty. Church. Sitting together with his family in the pews makes him notice things. He noticed how Milo sat, not next to Winona, as usual, but next to him, slumped inward. He noticed how he didn’t greet, smile, and talk to anyone who would listen. Norm was on the verge of thinking this a positive change when he started catching looks from Franny. In fact, he caught one as he stepped out the back door, headed to his sanctuary and his new project—a 1940 Ford convertible. So Norm hides his paints and new equipment, pats his car to reassure it, and hollers across the yard for Milo to come help him with the engine.

  Inside the garage Milo stares listlessly under the old car’s hood. Norm has instructed him to hold up a tube to funnel fluorescentgreen coolant. After Norm pours the liquid he pats the flank of the car and jokes, “Let’s tie up her tubes,” signaling Milo to pull the tube out of the reservoir. Norm hopes this is a clever metaphor about controlling the fruits of a woman’s sex drive. It’s also a test for Milo—a joke that conveys knowledge of women’s carnal power, for maybe Milo’s slumping about a girl? But Milo doesn’t seem to hear him. He runs his finger over a peeling decal on the inside of the car door—a mermaid with flowing hair and revealed breasts.

  “What’s this?” he asks.

  “What?” says Norm.

  “Aren’t you going to take this sticker off?” Milo asks. He’s really thinking it looks like a tattoo on shiny muscled skin.

  Norm sighs.

  “I think she’s kind of cute,” Norm says and winks.

  “I guess you don’t mind about Winona’s, then,” Milo says, surprised by the force of his voice. “I mean about her tattoo.”

  Norm doesn’t immediately catch on. Milo, with his absurd performances, seldom tries to make sense, and Winona and tattoo don’t go together. Winona is the best of Franny and himself. She’s the one who gets things done, who is practical and will know how to make a living. She sits by him quietly and reads the morning paper. Milo is the one who does strange things to impress others. He’s the one who sank his allowance into a pyramid scheme, who bought boxes of candy bars, not so he could make a profit, but so he could go door to door and get to know the neighbors.

  Norm is irritated with Milo. Standing there looking at him, he’s more irritated than usual with this son who is too big and friendly, and who is also, at least in these ways, too much like himself.

  “Winona does not have a tattoo!” Norm yells. His voice backs Milo out the door.

  Norm returns to the car, irritated, and confused at the force of his voice. But as he presses down the thought of the tattoo, an image of his mother pops up. His mother had one. Tiny, a heart on her shoulder blade. When he was little he thought it was there only for him because she called it her love button, and when he touched it she would turn around and give him a kiss.

  His mother was beautiful then; she used hot rollers in a case that looked like an engine block, fluttery eyelashes stored in a box, and red lipstick put on with a fine brush, which made her lips look carved into her skin. But once Norm started high school she went out most nights, and that’s mostly how he remembers her. His ideas of her exist in that time spent alone as a teenager, sitting at home waiting for his mom and thinking about girls. Once during this time, his mother brought a man home and he heard their muffled talk and music all night through his bedroom wall. And Norm saw his mother’s breasts once, by accident, passing by her door when she didn’t know he was home. She sat in front of her mirror, held them up, smiled, and ran her thumbs over her nipples.

  Norm walks out into the yard where Winona is standing at an easel in long pants with her hair billowing around her head. Stuck, he looks at her for a long time. Until she turns around abruptly.

  “Dad?” she says. He stands with his arms across his chest to level his look, to openly assess. He looks at her lips, which today carry a tinge of red, her hair, brushed out and full, her hips, her slight shoulders and fuller breasts. He looks at her in pieces.

  “Your brother says you have a tattoo,” he says. Winona puts her hands on the elastic band of her pants, to pull them down a notch, to show him. Norm yells, “Don’t!” He turns on his heel and walks quickly back into the garage.

  10.

  Norm doesn’t talk to Winona at the dinner table. He asks Milo to pass the butter, the salad, and the dressing, even though all these items sit in front of Winona, and Milo must stand and stretch his whole body across the table to deliver them. The first time his shirt smears along the butter. The second time he knocks over a decorative candlestick.

  “Milo!” Franny scolds.

  After dinner, when Winona sits down to watch TV, Norm gets up and leaves. Milo folds himself into the corner of the couch, looking at the television or his feet.

  Franny knows there’s something wrong. She watches Norm’s change carefully. She’s seen it before, this building up of pressure in his usually porous personality. She watches him with a feeling of dread and excitement, like the excitement over a novel’s impending crises and fallout. She watches as if her chance is coming, as if the tables are about to turn. Franny watches Winona too, but doesn’t dare approach. She knows Winona has begun to sense her neediness, her desire to be closer, although not like friends. She’s seen where this type of mother-daughter relationship leads—to daughters who push, negotiate, and become publicly critical of their mothers.

  It’s a setup, this motherhood business, she thinks.

  Franny puts the dishes away in the kitchen. They crash against each other. Usually, for Winona, this is the worst sound in the world. The brittle and tin clinks channel her mother’s frustration and the endless drudgery of doing dishes in the first place—the fact that once they’re all washed they’ll be dirtied and need to be washed again.

  But tonight she gets up to help, not out of guilt or a sense of duty, but to be close to her mother’s body. She’s felt a space open up around her mother lately, a space more like an unspoken need than an open invitation. This not being officially invited is the main reason she’s avoided it and suffered her mother’s small jabs in r
eturn. But now that her father is angry she needs her mom. Her dad has made her feel so full of something bad that she wouldn’t mind dissolving a bit, into the water, into her mom’s stiff and awkward welcome. She dips her hands in the hot water and her mother’s movements slow down. Franny softens and can feel Winona’s warmth. They stand this way, in the steam, until Norm enters the kitchen, at the usual time, for his fat-free pudding.

  When Norm reaches into the refrigerator he feels warmth too, even though it’s cold. He feels warmth from the refrigerator light and the fact of special food that is just for him. He’s a child again, at his mother’s house on shopping day, when once a month the refrigerator held two boxes of Moon Pies. He remembers the feeling of unwrapping the cellophane of the Moon Pie, and bringing it up to his mouth. It was always too intense, the pleasure too mixed with the knowledge of loss—knowing the boxes would last for two days and the rest of the food would only last two weeks. For the remaining two weeks they would eat out at the diner where his mother worked and sometimes negotiated free meals by flirting, if only a little, with the owner. As Norm closes the refrigerator door he notices the two women standing at the sink.

  “Slut,” he mumbles under his breath.

  Franny gets confused. She’s not sure to whom Norm is talking. She stops washing and looks at Winona who keeps working with rigid arms, scrubbing, scrubbing, straight posture, face carved in stone. She’s a girl who will turn into a real taskmaster, a real bitch. Bitches and sluts, Franny thinks, the two great options. Why not give in, she thinks, why not embrace them both!

  Franny moves toward Norm, raises her hand, and slaps him so hard his head jerks to the side and his pudding tumbles to the floor.

  Winona turns in time to see her mother’s hand hit. She hears it crack across the kitchen like the opening of thunder, and it changes her inside—it evaporates some of the shame that’s been accumulating from her father’s look, some of the feeling that’s been welling and surging, tempting to come pouring out of her eyes. And the slap happens so fast that “slut” doesn’t have a chance to travel across the room and attach itself to her—it hovers midair. It retreats back to her father, so she hears the teenage boy in him, the lust and the hurt that’s required to say this word in that way, the low grumble of it.

  Her mother has become her hero.

  But Milo, standing in the kitchen doorway, sees the slap too, and feels as if it were for him. It’s his fault he had the erection. He was spying when he saw Winona naked. He told her secret to his dad.

  Milo runs to find Riley for comfort as he usually does. In fact, the whole family looks to Riley for comfort when they sit awkward and wordless at the dinner table. They look to the dog. And Riley will drool and cock his head in glee at the mention of his name, assuming every act of attention an act of love. Milo gathers Riley in his arms and carries him into the kitchen. He sets him, a mangled centerpiece, on the lazy Susan where he rotates slowly between the two candlesticks.

  They look at him expectantly: Winona, Franny, Milo, and Norm. They wait for him to roll over, spread his legs, wiggle. Instead, Riley lies there motionless, bouncing the family’s stillness back out to them.

  “He’s dead!” Milo yells angrily, as if it’s his mother’s, his father’s, Winona’s fault.

  And Norm believes him.

  “Oh,” Norm says, in a moan that they all feel in their stomachs. It’s a moan that causes Franny to believe he’s dead as well, to put her hand over her mouth and tremble, and to remember her mother, hooked up to tubes in the nursing home. Her mother, whom she must visit.

  Winona feels her father’s moan but knows that Riley died a long time ago, knows that what is sitting on the kitchen table is just a living emptiness, a container.

  She looks at Riley. She observes him intently, focuses down to his molecules. He’s where everything that should exist gets sucked down. He’s where her father says, “I’m sorry,” understands the anger in her mother’s slap, and has not yet looked at her in that terrible way—in pieces. Riley is where Milo gets a girlfriend. He is where Winona is now turning and touching her mother’s skin. He is where there’s a trickle of water from Franny, a light spurting, a gush, and then a flood. Franny is squeezing Winona so tightly that Winona sees it must really be happening.

  Franny says, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry about Riley”—she is folding her, cinching her in. Riley is where Winona is beginning to see that it’s her mother she is bound to, even though it feels as if Franny is breaking Winona’s bones.

  Credits

  Some of these stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Literary Review Web, The Northwestern Review, The Mississippi Review, Connu, Prompt, DIAGRAM, and The Iowa Review.

  Book Club Guide

  1.

  The endings of several stories in Elegies for Uncanny Girls rest on slight shifts in the narrators’ perspectives. In “Other Mothers” the narrator sees a woman in a café as alternately a French feminist, an overwhelmed mother, and finally something in between those extremes. What is the effect of these shifts in perspective? Do they make the narrator less reliable? More real? How did you experience them?

  2.

  “Center” is another story in which the resolution rests on a grounding of the narrator’s perspective. By the end of the story Susan is able to “come out of memory” into the present moment with her brother. What role does memory play in the story? Do you think Susan’s memories are entirely reliable? How might Susan’s return to memories help or hinder her ability to find peace in her relationship with her brother and mother?

  3.

  Mothers play a large role in this collection. How would you characterize some of the mother-daughter relationships in it?

  4.

  In “Costume,” “Center,” and “Audra” mothers are positioned by the young narrators as subtle adversaries. In “Costume,” when Meredith insists on designing her own Halloween costume, she feels her mother regard her as suspicious, “slippery, like a piece of unstitchable satin.” In “Center” Susan feels that her mother gives her brother more encouragement for his efforts. And in “Audra” Molly feels confined by her mother’s platitudes about good behavior.

  On the other hand, the mothers are simply acting in line with cultural dictates—they are protecting, molding, and instilling values. In what way might these mothers, or mothers in general, serve as scapegoats for larger cultural problems regarding gender roles?

  In “Winona,” Franny characterizes motherhood as a setup. Why do you think Franny feels this way? What about American culture may set mothers up to feel trapped, lonely, or like failures?

  5.

  The voices of mothers are only heard at the beginning and the end of this collection. First is the young bewildered mother of “Other Mothers.” At the end is the jaded Franny, of “Winona.” What is the effect of bracketing the collection in this way?

  6.

  Some of the stories in Elegies show the narrators in the act of storytelling. In “Details” and “When Maggie Thinks of Matt” we get to witness both narrators piecing narratives together, gathering details, dismissing certain experiences as unwritable. In the case of “Details,” the narrator gets to the end of her story and decides to start over with a new beginning. Does this discount what she’s already told us? What might this story tell us about our desire or need to tell stories? What role do stories play in our lives?

  7.

  In “When Maggie Thinks of Matt,” the narrator constructs an elegy or remembrance of her relationship with Matt. At different points she tells us that she’s writing down what she would have wanted him to be thinking or saying, or what she would have liked to have said herself. How does this avowal strike you? Does it add anything to the emotional impact of the story? Have you ever found yourself narrating your own experiences in this way?

  8.

  Many of the stories suspend narrative, or plot, to capture moments, or to carefully distill an experience. “Caroline” starts with a memor
y of a childhood game under pomegranate trees, and threads many other lyrical moments through the action of the story. How do you experience the lyrical moments in “Caroline,” or in other stories? What do the lyrical moments do for the stories that more traditional narration can’t do? How might the lyrical moments serve the purpose of elegizing?

  9.

  A few of these stories deal with friendships between girls. How are the friendships in “Audra” and “Caroline” different? In both stories the girls experience their identities as deeply tied to their relationships with friends. The narrator of “Caroline” wants to blend into Caroline. Why? As a way to erase the differences in their bodies? To deny the onset of puberty, or entry into a world where male and female are established hierarchical categories?

  In “Audra,” a ghostly girl is a welcome wedge in a friendship that Molly feels is based on her inferiority and Cindy’s superiority. Is this kind of interdependence of identity a staple of female friendship, or is it characteristic of other kinds of relationships as well?

  “When Maggie Thinks of Matt” may also be read as a story of female friendship, though Matt is nominally and physically a man. How is Maggie and Matt’s relationship similar to some of the female friendships in the collection?

  10.

  The narrator in “Caroline” is writing a memory of a personal experience, and the narrator of “Audra” speaks from a third-person perspective, which sometimes dips into the future tense. How would you describe the effect of these different narrative styles? What do the different authorial perspectives allow, or open up, within the emotional body of each story?

  11.

  Freud described the experience of the uncanny as a series of three or more appearances of seemingly linked odd, unreal, or unfamiliar phenomena—as a kind of multiple déjà vu that fills us with foreboding or unease. In Elegies for Uncanny Girls, Audra appears five times. The narrator of “Other Mothers” is haunted by the repeated appearance of vulnerable babies. What other stories capture this sense of the uncanny? Did you notice other uncanny “pop-up” images or phenomena throughout the collection? In what ways do the girls and women in the book experience themselves, or their bodies, as odd, unreal, or unfamiliar?