A Review of Paula Coomer's Somebody Should Have Scolded the Girl
Paula Coomer adopts a unique approach to character in her magnificent collection of short stories, Somebody Should Have Scolded The Girl (Fawkes Press, 2019). Anyone familiar, or even those unfamiliar, with the stoic and unapologetic nature of the Midwesterner will appreciate the attitude of these folks. They don’t walk around walls; they don’t climb over them; they just push straight on through.
Setting most of her stories in small-town Indiana, in places “where Petty’s Fork meets Cabin Branch at the Granite Boulder betw. A Black Oak and a Sugar Tree apart from the Sugar Bush,” the geography is almost as colorful as the people themselves. These outsiders make no excuses for their behavior.
The time is the 1970s, and the issues, ironically, are not at all distant from the issues of today. There is a failed war, women are second-class citizens, inflation is high, and poverty and racism rule the majority of this country. In spite of all of this, Mercy Grace discovers that the bunkhouse she wishes to build can be built by women. Her old friend E-Z returns to town just in time to help her. Mercy Grace tells E-Z, “At first I thought I’d do it for hired hands, for the boys who right now are coming back from overseas in droves, but just about the moment I saw you had driven up, I decided I want women to build it.” And E-Z replies, “What’s the big deal about that? It’s not like no women in this country never built a building. How many chicken coops you build in your life? How many you seen built?”
Coomer’s women can do anything they set their minds to do, and they often do it with a skillful turn of phrase. Their self-esteem, however, as Coomer recognizes is true for many women, often does not match their capabilities. A young girl considers a sexual rendevous with a stranger and reflects, “An ache lower in her belly rises in an instant, tries to tell her that what she feels is small, inferior, like she’s a blank page and Stetson’s a walking dictionary.”
Chipper is an adolescent boy of mixed race. His father has told him that he “should be proud of his parents’ inter-racial marriage, and particularly of his mother. It was brave in the 1970s to marry someone from another race in the United States, especially since some states had only recently made it legal.” Trying to discover who he is after the unfortunate death of his Black father, and looking for some adventure before attending college, Chipper joins a friend to ride out west to pick grapefruit. When he extends his trip on his own, riding the rails and exposing himself to the other side of life, Chipper is thrust into a new reality around the campfire.
In the title story, Marlette’s day begins at 4:30. “Cows to milk, eggs to fry, sack lunches to make.” The fact that Marlette’s life is filled with keeping a house for her husband and children, along with the daily tasks of a farm with animals, does not mean that her intelligent, albeit uneducated mind is not always thinking. When she hears on the news that a famous woman poet has committed suicide, “Marlette guesses somebody should have scolded the girl early on for expecting too much of herself and of life.” But Marlette isn’t finished. She goes to some interesting lengths to find out about this woman poet who has piqued her curiosity.
The final story in Coomer’s collection traces the incredible couple of years in the life of Charlotte Dodge. This woman gives new meaning to spirit and tenacity. She wastes no time complaining about the misfortunes in her life. Although she does wonder about them in the diary she writes that no one will ever read. With a husband in prison for statutory rape, a newborn daughter in the ICU, a farm and home to support, no one could blame Charlotte for complaining. Instead she writes, “The priest said that I need to see a counselor, that I have too much, too much, too much on my plate for any one human. I hate the idea of that. It makes me feel weak.” And we begin to believe that no matter what befalls Charlotte Dodge, she will prevail.
These characters all have important life lessons to teach us, if we will only listen to them. As Coomer comments wisely in her acknowledgements, “Next time you feel inclined to make fun of a hillbilly woman, don’t. Give her a bouquet of flowers instead.”
