As I stare at my looming tower of short story collections I planned to highlight this month, I realize that several of them have been covered elsewhere. In an effort to give you something other, I'm focusing on a few unsung heroes. First up on the list is Lisa Glatt's The Apple's Bruise. I was first introduced to her collection through a joint Swink/Small Spiral Notebook party last year that featured readings by both Lisa Glatt and Maggie Nelson. (I know, I mention this party all the time, you'd think it was a seminal event in my life...in many ways it was, odd as that sounds.) Lisa read a story from this collection and blew me away. The story she read is "Soup" and I was so taken with the intensity of the situation she had created, the tension, the awkward moments...I left the party and bought her book that night. I read it straight through. Then I bought her novel, A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That, and devoured that too.
"Soup" is the story of a widow who ostensibly makes soup for her son's friends while they wait for him to finish getting ready so the boys can go out for the night. These friends have been awful to her son in the past. These friends have beat him up. These friends are changing her son. One friend in particular is a more headstrong & dangerous character (rumored to have raped a 14 year old girl) than the others and soon Glatt's widow finds herself both wishing to seem attractive to this young almost-man and wondering if he might make a forceful pass of his own. While the awkward, pointed, egotistical comments flow back and forth and the uncomfortable waiting for her son to appear in the kitchen extends and extends, Glatt's widow chops carrots, minces onions, stirs her soup and wrestles with her own desire to both protect her son and let him go. To desire and be desired:
"One boy -- and this surprises even me -- I give a special smile, one filled with all the tension I've been missing. His name is Foster, and he is tall, the tallest of the three, well over six feet. His big knees hit the bottom of my table. The table is small and round, and as Foster stretches out his legs and grunts slightly, the huge black boots appear on the other side, near me, and I am thinking: he could touch me with those filthy soles sitting down. He is that long.
'Small table,' he says.
'Big legs,' I say, immediately embarrassed by my inappropriate comment. There is blood in my face; I can feel it.
He grins, eyebrows raised."
I'm also quite fond of "The Body Shop" which begins:
"There are facts, certainly: that in April my husband carried the stripper off the stage and sobbed in her arms, that it's mid-May now and we're separated, and that months ago, just after her twentieth birthday, our daughter Tessa broke out of rehab with a man more than three times her age, drove with him across the country, and now lives with him in a shack in Maine -- no phone, no electricity, and no running water."
If you aren't familiar with Glatt's work, her short story collection is an excellent place to start. Her work has all the things I love -- quirky, funny, smart bits that are perfectly enmeshed with the bigger questions in life. Glatt teaches writing at Cal State Long Beach as well as private writing workshops. A local writer to boot!
