Reading this, the Take 30 interviewer’s comments from 1977 circled in my mind: an unrealised conversation, where declaration replaces exploration.

The interviewer said the stories filled her with sadness, all those rotten situations and dismal romantic relationships; however, she mentioned no details and referenced just one story dedicated to other themes.

Did she not discuss details because she did not wish to scrutinise the work, wasn’t familiar with it, or knew interpretation was a factor? These elements are part of her job.

Did she not discuss them because they do not exist in the work? Anyone with a copy of Dancing Girls can assess this possibility. I decided to read this story with HG’s criticisms and accusations in mind.

It was originally published in Ms Magazine and opens with a young woman’s thoughts about shopping in Filene’s Basement, searching for bargains on higher-end brands that will allow her to present herself as a woman of quality in the world. “No one went there who did not aspire to a shape-change, a transformation, a new life; but the things never did quite fit.

That Boston basement is smelly and noisy, with “dank…anxious armpits and harassed feet” and the sounds of “heavy breathing” and “sticking zippers”. Her purchases are ill-fitting and it’s all, “in its own way, tragic”. One stroke in the Sad column.

The twenty-one-year-old narrator wears one of her bargains—a coat—to meet the man she imagines will be her lover. But, how and when? Both have roommates, neither has a car, and no hotel nearby rents rooms to single women or unmarried couples. The lack of opportunity for intimacy, repressed or restricted sexuality: another stroke for sad.

Her later memory of dumping the coat into a metal, parking-lot donation bin has a snake-shedding-its-skin vibe, a tinge of regret or sorrow, even though the story begins with the power of clothing to revitalise, even “resurrect”. The narrator views herself as “an Egyptian mummy, a mysteriously wrapped object that might or might not fall into dust if uncovered” and that allusion to decay, the vulnerability of revelation, are sad, too.

That coat was with her when she’d travelled to Salem, where she fantasised about her unrequited and unconsummated love. Even the Nathanial Hawthorne House of Seven Gables house was disappointing; it was the model for the story, but had no connection to the author, “[n]o genuine author’s sweat on the banisters.” Not inspiring, not authentic: sad.

Salem’s highlight was the library display of Victorian hair jewellery, brooches or rings containing the deceased’s hair, distributed to funeral mourners. Was the hair was cut off before or after the person’s death, the narrator asks the librarian, who’s dismissive and dismayed. Worn at the neck it would feel like a noose, the narrator observes, which recalls for readers the scene with a man’s hand at her throat.). Funereal musings and a joke about The Boston Strangler masquerading as seduction: sad.

Returning home, she and the man meet: there’s the coat, there’s snow, there’s a sense of possibility. “I felt as if I was walking along the edge of a high bridge. It seemed to us –at least it seemed to me—that we were actually happy.” But this scene hinges on “seemed” and I know this feeling like I know that basement scrounge for a solution: if you just try hard enough, maybe you can make a relationship work even if the other person in the relationship doesn’t want it as much (or in the same way): sad.

New York City offers a solution: anonymity and a hotel. But, when she arrives, he doesn’t answer the phone and our narrator gets lost. “I did not want to ask anyone: the expressions of blank despair or active malice made me nervous and I had passed several people who were talking out loud to themselves. New York, like Salem, appeared to be falling to pieces.” Here, again, “appeared” and, still, sad.

MARM 2023 PLANS

Each week I’ll share links to some online sources, so that anyone with a few minutes can join in the celebrations. Some poetry and flash fiction, some interviews and reviews, some fresh reads and rereads: mostly reading with a little viewing and, in particular, short stories.

Launch (November 1)
Dancing Girls, “Rape Fantasies” (November 3)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 8)
Dancing Girls, “Hair Jewellery” (November 10)
Old Babes in the Wood, “First Aid” (November 12)
Dancing Girls, “A Travel Piece” (November 17)
Margaret Atwood’s 84th Birthday (November 18)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Two Scorched Men” (November 19)
Dancing Girls, “The Resplendent Quetzel” (November 24)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Morte de Smudgie” (November 26)
Wrap-Up (November 29-30)

In one sense, the story ends with the relationship unresolved. But, in another sense, the story ends with the narrator imagining a way in which the story might have been resolved. They do meet many years later, after each has had other relationships and children, even: “We wished each other well; we were both disappointed. You had wanted me, I saw now, to die young of consumption or some equally operatic disease. Underneath it all you too were a romantic.”

A romantic. The narrator affords the man the same possibility afforded to her younger self; she allows that he might have had fantasies and imagined other futures than what actually transpired. She affords the possibility that he might have been just as disappointed as she. She considers a death from consumption romantic—rather than, what? Painful? Bloody?

One might view this acknowledgement, that both parties suffered and lost, as a way of balancing the sadness that readers felt from the woman’s perspective alone: all were sad and all survived.

One might view the narrator’s dual perspective as evidence of growth: younger-narrator felt sad but older-narrator recognises you cannot shed selves as easily as you shed clothing and relates differently now.

But after that description of NYC where our narrator is lost, she acknowledges that someone else might have experienced it differently, that a “rich person might have seen it as potential urban renewal, but the buildings with chunks missing, the holes in the sidewalks” didn’t reassure her.  It’s this capacity, the capacity to imagine another’s perspective, that holds the magic.

It’s magical, how we distinguish between “falling to pieces” and “potential urban renewal” isn’t it? Because although this story ends in stagnancy, with the narrator and the memory of her man unmoving, there’s also that imagined ending. How much better would it have been, to have died young, suffering from an operatic disease?

But what if we call it ‘romantic’ instead? Where is the line between ‘liberated abandon’ and ‘hysteria’? What if a choking hand is viewed as stroking, soothing even?

What if stories don’t make us feel anything and we are simply sad? Whose fault is that, the fault of a man whose cigarette ashes once burnt a hole into a bargain-basement brown sweater or the fault of an author?

What if stories could make us feel everything, so we could simply choose another word, like uncertain or uneasy, like charged or heady, like uplifting or invigorating?

What happens when feelings are more important than what’s real?