Eat A Peach: An Excerpt from Jen Michalski's THE COMPANY OF STRANGERS

Lynn always waits near the far end of the farmer’s market in West Hollywood, in the food court. That way, she can see the women before the women see her. If Lynn gets a bad vibe, or just a case of bad nerves, she can slip out to the parking lot and drive away. Her sister Lucy thinks it’s strange that Lynn treats these outings more like drug deals than the blind dates they actually are, but given Lynn’s bad luck, it’s the only way she can get herself (halfway) out there.
“She doesn’t sound like a catch,” Lucy said on the phone last night of Rachel, the woman who Lynn is meeting today. Lucy is married and lives in the Atlanta suburbs with her husband and children in a five-bedroom house, the kind you see on cable shows, clean but soulless, with quartz countertops and en suite master bathrooms.
Lucy is usually right about most things, and as Rachel enters the food court and navigates the maze of tables, both hands gripping the strap of her purse, eyes squinting, body closed, like a tourist in a Tunisian marketplace, Lynn presses her sandaled feet on the ground, ready to bail into the throng of Saturday shoppers. Rachel’s online profile was full of red flags—widower, young daughter, not necessarily ready to date but feeling like she should wade back in a little. But then again, Lynn’s own life on paper—massage therapist, maxed credit cards, barely affordable studio apartment in Echo Park—is nothing to crow about, either.
Lynn watches as Rachel scans the faces of those in her immediate area, her lips slightly parted, and something about her expression, the soft glassiness of her green eyes, the haphazard way her hair curls over her ears and a little in her face, makes Lynn stay a minute longer. She knows this is a mistake—but this private moment of Rachel’s vulnerability tugs at her. She lets Rachel find her, watches her face lock into a smile, one hand unattaching itself from her purse to give Lynn a quick, enthusiastic wave.
“I was just coming to meet you,” Lynn lies, standing up. She leans over and hugs Rachel with just her fingertips. “You look exactly like your picture.”
“You too.” Rachel holds onto Lynn’s forearms. She keeps her close for a second. “Your hair’s even redder in person.”
“It’s the sun,” Lynn says. The picture she used for her profile was taken indoors, her face shadowy, lit by candle. Her friend Michael said it made her look mysterious and artsy.
Then, she doesn’t know what to say. It’s been a long time since she’s let it get this far. There was Yuki, who she slipped out on, fearing she was too trendy and possibly shallow, and Kim, who had too many tattoos. And Sandra, who she simply stopped talking to on the dating site because she’d discovered a sixth degree of separation between Sandra and her ex.
“Something came up, by the way,” Lynn lies. Even when she lets it get this far, she always builds herself an out. “A last-minute appointment—so I only have about forty minutes. I hope that’s okay.” 
“Well, we’ll just have to make do,” Rachel says a little too brightly, and Lynn can’t tell whether she’s disappointed, whether she knows Lynn is lying. “So, do you have time to grab lunch, or just walk around?”
Rachel wears real perfume and not essential oils. Her makeup is so bare Lynn can see a light smattering of freckles, the faint lines of crow’s feet around her eyes. She’s definitely in her late thirties, as listed on her profile, five years older than Lynn. Her TOMS look like she’s walked a thousand miles in them, and Lynn gives her bonus points for thinking ratty canvas slip-ons were fine to wear on a first date.
“We can do both, I think,” Lynn reassures her. Maybe she should have given herself an hour. She has aborted so many trips to the Farmer’s Market she’s never actually shopped here. That, and Ralphs is more her price point. She puts on her straw hat and sunglasses and walks beside Rachel toward the Littlejohn English Toffee stand. The girl behind the counter offers them hard, flat, sample squares of toffee. As Lynn bites into hers, she watches Rachel wrap her sample in a napkin and slip it in her purse.
“For my daughter, Maggie,” she explains. “I always feel guilty, going out without her.”
“How old is she again?” Lynn asks. She hears Lucy, slightly nasal, on the phone. You’ve never wanted children, Lynn. You’re going to take care of someone else’s?
“She’s seven,” Rachel answers. Her skin is pale, like Lynn’s. She hides it under a faded denim button-up, her neck swaddled in a scarf. “She was five when Deborah passed away, and she still worries when I—I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be talking about this.”
“Why?” Lynn’s throat is still thick with sugary toffee. “It’s your life.”
“So, you’re a massage therapist?” Rachel glances at a text on her phone before dropping it into her purse. She smiles at Lynn. “You’re a healer.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Lynn laughs. “More like a body mechanic.”
She did a semester at community college in North Carolina, then massage therapy school in Studio City. She was surprised that she liked massage, touching stranger’s bodies, kneading their pressure points, freeing them from pain, their own self-imposed stresses. She was worried she’d have to offer words of comfort, of understanding, but most people don’t want her to talk at all, only listen. Most of the problems—cheating spouses, budget overruns at the studio, the actor who is a liability—she wouldn’t know how to solve, anyway. Her friend Michael, who she moved here with, says the only problems people have in LA are the ones they make for themselves.
“You’re the healer,” Lynn says after a moment. “Working in oncology.”
“I always thought I’d be a concert pianist,” Rachel answers. “But life took some detours. I would have never met my partner if I’d been a concert pianist.”
“Was she an oncologist, too?” Lucy is almost screaming into Lynn’s ear now. Run, don’t walk, away.
Rachel looks straight ahead. “She was my friend.”
“I’m sorry.” Lynn touches Rachel’s wrist lightly. She doesn’t have to date Rachel, she thinks, but she can be sympathetic. She understands loss. She understands things being ripped away from you.
“I knew she was terminal.” Rachel says the word ‘terminal’ like ‘left-handed.’ “And I thought at the time there was no way I would get involved. I mean, what did I think…but I wouldn’t have had Maggie if I hadn’t.”
Rachel stops in front of a produce stand.
“Want a peach?” She holds one in each hand. “First of the season.”

---

Editor’s Note: “Eat a Peach” was originally published in Chicago Quarterly Review.

Blurring Lines, Fraying Edges: A Review of We Might As Well Light Something On Fire by Ron MacLean

“There is something particularly compelling about a detached foot, he says. Something sad. Almost Lonely.”

—from “Unfound”

Remember silly putty? Back in the day. When you kneaded the polymer dough into a pancake, pressed in headlines and comics from the Funny Pages. Doonesbury, Garfield, Peanuts. After you peeled away the newspaper revealing your new creation, you tugged and pulled, twisted the words, distorted the images. It was like having a fun house mirror in the palm of your hand. Then you rolled the political commentary, the cat’s ponderings and Charlie Brown, all that existential angst into a ball. If you pulled the sphere apart and peered inside, you could still see the essence, the infinite possibilities, amid the swirl of ink.

This is what it’s like to read Ron MacLean’s short story collection We Might As Well Light Something On Fire, published by Braddock Ave Books, where he stretches the boundaries of storytelling, plays with form, presses his thumb into the life of his imaginings, blurring lines, fraying edges, playing with time and space, following threads of energy, but always with the intention to question what it means to be human, to search for political and social justice, to expose our feelings of alienation, to illuminate the never ending quest for connection.

The sixteen stories divided into three sections are often off-kilter, zany and absurd. Consider: A quinceañera for a cat named Egg in “Quinceañera.” Or, dancing goats clad in tan raincoats, porkpie hats and Ray-Bans hiding in plain sight from their executioner, a theoretical physicist turned butcher in “Lesser Escape Artists.” Or disarticulated feet washing ashore in British Columbia, five in total, wearing size 12 running shoes in “Unfound.” Or a friendly haunting by turn of the century Wisconsin politicians in “What Remains” where a former Assistant US Attorney finds a father/son duo hiding in her bathtub. They hang around fixing her plumbing, cooking dinner, enjoying cable TV and facilitating the donation of food to Occupy Wall Street protestors while she battles the Lockport, NY police department over custody of her father’s ashes.

MacLean interlaces excerpts of recipes, musical refrains, travel guide books, historical anecdotes. He spins time in a blender, scrambles sentences like refrigerator poetry magnets. “River Song,” a prose poem like song lyrics, recounts again and again the saga of a dead girl, a doctor, a bridge, Blinky and Ray Ray and a freezer full of tinfoil wrapped money. With each retelling, the truth like memory becomes malleable, more elusive; it erodes away like the banks of a river.

Despite its unconventional underpinnings, the collection begins with and disperses throughout realistic straight forward narratives, in an earnest voice that’s like a conversation. A confessional. Grounded in the here and now — with keenly observed details — leaving head space for the surreal complexities to come. MacLean crafts dialogue and interior musings that are clipped and fragmented, proffered in inhospitable environs, highlighting an acute sense of dislocation.

In the opening story, “Toilet,” the narrator attends a birthday party for someone he doesn’t like enough because she has no need to shine. His thoughts ping pong off the concrete columns in the large industrial open space, a former toilet paper manufacturing concern, now an apartment. He’s not where he’d like to be in his career. He opines that he’s recently lost his context. Confides that he keeps a goat to clean his yard, to make conversation at parties, but mostly for the company. He’s connected to all of these people, he’s friends with them in one way or another, but feels alienated, disjointed. He’s so desperate, he’s willing to go home with a woman whether she’s “sexy or sick as a dog.” The partygoers are reduced to body parts in his mind: the mustache, the sexy clavicle, an ear. Everything is out of context. Even the party food doesn’t makes sense in this hipster Northeast enclave, in which the hosts serve biscuits and gravy.

In a triptych of stories “Prostate Frank Finds True Love,” “Bounce Goes Kissy-Kissy,” and “The Hemorrhoid Holds Court,” a group of mostly middle-aged men meet for their weekly Friday morning coffee klatch. Reduced to nicknames, Bounce, Max the Grabber, Hemorrhoid, Alter Boy, as if a person’s entire being can be summed up in a word or a phrase, they chat, each man assuming his roll, but no one is really listening.

MacLean’s musings of isolation are most profound in the “Night Bus” a travelogue of a tourist excursion to see the uppermost reaches of Northern Finland, the barren tundra, and the constellations. Initially the narrator is optimistic, energized by the crisp cold air.

“And the air. I can’t get enough of it, It’s so, I don’t know what. Cold. More than clean. Something that makes my pores sing Buddy Holly. Bjork. Like mountain air poured through a trumpet filled with lake water.”

He feels boundless love for the communion of parkas, mittens and boots, bib pants and balaclavas. He tries to communicate, practices in his head the sentences he parses together from his translation phrase book, but he never quite hits his mark. He tells a young woman she looks hot in her coat. A fellow traveler, “the Talker” is everywhere chatting everyone up from the bus driver to passengers, to the snack man. The Talker rhapsodizes: “I want to get closer and closer to unadorned yearning.”

There’s a disorientation that comes from long trips, the rhythm of miles lulling the brain to sleep. As the narrator clenches his frost bitten fingers (result of a failed college romance) he contemplates the polar night when the sun doesn’t rise above the horizon for 51 days. The Talker wants him to admit, “I have been lost in this night before.” The narrator refuses to voice the Talker’s directive but his despair is palpable.

I was frustrated at times with my inability to decipher the meaning, the author’s intent in some of these stories such as the madcap “Lesser Escape Artists.” I didn’t mind searching the dictionary or questioning the Googleverse. I desperately wanted to unlock the mystery of string theory and its connection to Mailer and Mahler and string cheese and goats shuffle stepping to what I presumed was Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science.” How was all that connected to the couple who bring a philosophizing rabbit of the wrong sex to a butcher shop to determine the state of the woman’s womb?

But perhaps that’s the point, the pondering and not knowing with certainty is what it’s all about.

Music and Connection: A Conversation with Ron MacLean

I first met Ron MacLean as a student in the year-long intensive Short Story Incubator program he teaches at Grub Street in Boston. His enthusiasm for the process of revision and the short story form proved inspiring and transformative in my own work.

Ron MacLean's short fiction has appeared widely in magazines including GQ, Narrative, and Fiction International.  He is the author of the novels Headlong and Blue Winnetka Skies, and the story collection Why the Long Face?. In his new story collection, We Might As Well Light Something on Fire no two stories are alike. These diverse narratives, from the traditional to the experimental, span a vast range of emotional experiences. What unites these stories is an expert rendering of the complexity and connotations of what it means to long for a connection with others.

Ron and I met in person to chat about We Might As Well Light Something on Fire, the intersection of music and language, the creative tension between tragedy and hope, and the role of longing in fiction. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.

*

Jennifer Marie Donahue: Music is everywhere in this collection and played an integral role in my reading experience. I would love to hear about the link between your writing and music. How do these musical choices and references create meaning and unity in this collection?

Ron MacLean: I was completely unaware of it as a theme or a thread until I started putting the collection together. Music is very important to me. I love music. This feels self-aggrandizing to say and I don't mean it in a highfalutin way, but I pay great attention to the music and rhythm of writing. I'm thinking about the sound, the patterns, and the rhythms that I'm creating and I think of it as music rather than as text. That's how I think about the language. When I started noticing all the music in the book, I was thinking about how music matters to each character. My ambitions were simple. I wanted to make sure it wasn't simply my love of music getting on the page but instead to say everywhere it comes up does it matter to the characters and the situation. I trusted that unconsciously whatever I knew and felt about music would make connections between stories.

JD: I think it was very successful. In the first story of the collection “Toilet” when a Michael Jackson song starts playing our narrator reveals: “I have expectations I can't escape. I want to eat my own flesh. I want to shout, “Run!”  This critical moment of the story reveals an emotional vulnerability that we felt but that had not yet been articulated. Then there is the juxtaposition of Michael Jackson's music, since he represents a music superstar, with the character of this story who in his own words says, “I have recently recognized I'm a failed actor.” To me, that was powerful. Was that organic? Did that come through revision?

RM: Almost everything good in the book came through revision. That came through revision. The presence of the Michael Jackson music in the story ended up giving me the space to work in the narrator's revelations.  “Wanting to be Starting Something” is the first song. I chose that consciously because it's the beginning of something and for the narrator, the juxtaposition is the narrator beginning to own who and where he is in his life.  The trigger is this Michael Jackson music. Who doesn't love dancing to Michael Jackson music, pre-scandal? That factor, that I bring out later at the end of the story, is part of what allowed me to have the narrator reveal himself.  Here's this song, it's just a party song, except, oh no, it's more than that. It gave unconscious permission for the narrator to say: here's the truth – “I want to eat my own flesh. “

JD: I felt like music also informed my reading of the next story in the book, “Lesser Escape Artists.” The bridge sections callback to musical structure but subverts my expectation because in songs bridges reflect back on earlier material. These sections seem to open up the story world. And then we have Mahler and his Symphony #6!  How much of these story elements are meant to guide the reader?

RM:  What you say you read, in terms of the bridges opening up rather than providing callbacks was exactly what I intended.  I did not start out with those as part of the original structure of the story. The structure of the story came pretty late. What I had initially was a story that embodied chaos theory,  fractals, and some esoteric stuff that felt like an interesting intellectual exercise. So, it took me a few drafts to pry my fingers off of how proud I was of having a brilliant idea. There's emotional material happening here and while the chaos theory is really interesting it's not the heart of things.

JD: It's just one layer but a compelling one.

RM: Thank you. It is definitely there. The butcher makes it pretty explicit. The way the bridges came up was I had material I felt belonged in the story but kept landing on the cutting floor. I trust my intuition a lot as a writer. I would try to shoe-horn this material somewhere and my writing group would say, the story is getting better but what the hell is this? Why is Dorothy Dietrich catching a 22 bullet in her teeth? I knew it belonged in the story.

JD: So, rather than slip it in, you decided to call it out?

RM: After a bunch of failed drafts, I stepped back and thought about the story as a symphony. Because Mahler was one of the pieces that was not making it into the story but I knew I wanted. That started, I will admit, from the sheer joy it gave me to throw Norman Mailer and Gustav Mahler into a conversation together, inadvertently. Most of the time for me, those things are draft delights that I think, okay, I've had my fun now it's time to go away. But that one I felt like it was speaking to the story in a larger way. It doesn't directly relate to the rabbit who is trying to get off the chopping block at the butcher shop, nor does it relate necessarily to the couple. But then I started to think about one of the Mahler lines, “I want it to fall like an ax.” I realized late in the story that it absolutely does relate to what the couple is going through and what the rabbit is going through. That was when I stepped back and said, what if I think about it as a Mahler symphony?  That didn't work directly, so then it was: what if I think about structuring it as a piece of music? That is when the bridge idea occurred to me. I will also confess, I was also thinking of my mentor and his question he often asked: “How do you build a bridge to readers?” I decided I was going to build a bridge.  It was a goofy and literal idea in a story I was lost in and it became a way to open it up and create connections that wouldn't have been there without it.

JD:  The first line of this story “There is blood in the end. I'm not going to toy with your emotions by keeping you in the dark about that” is ominous.  While we are reading the story we are striving against that darkness, looking for that victory or win. Rooting for the blind rabbit, the couple, the narrator to push against the idea that “desire fractures us all.”  The final line of the story leaves us in a complicated emotional place: “In a world this chaotic, I choose to believe.”  Can you talk about the inherent narrative tension between the tragic and hopeful? 

RM: I think for me, the tension between the tragic and hopeful, or between the dark and the light is a pretty central thread in everything I write. I don't experience simplistic victories in my life nor simplistic defeats. When I think back on some of my best days, they are punctuated with some awful moments. Maybe not awful moments, but the good and the bad it's all there at once. Most of us don't get to choose ecstasy alone. That to me is really important to reflect in what I write.

JD: This calls to mind the quote by John O'Donoghue that I shared with you not long ago, “the human heart is a theater of longings.” This idea crystallized for me why I'm drawn to certain stories.  Many of the stories in your collection evoked this sense of longing, the permutations of this feeling and all the ways it can manifest in life. You render this longing so beautifully on the page.  How are you able to tap into this emotion so successfully?

RM:  The easiest answer is, how am I able to recognize it and tap in, I am filled with longing in my own self.  It's a pattern that I recognize in my life and its one of my obsessions in fiction writing as a result. Whenever somebody asks me -- what's your subject in fiction?, my answer is the attempts we make as humans to connect with one another and the imperfection that is inherent in that.  To me that is very tied to desire.  I have a really deep longing for connection with other humans and I'm fortunate enough to have a lot of connections but it is always imperfect. I think that the relationship of desire and fulfillment, partial fulfillment, occasional fulfillment – the slippage of good intentions that don't quite connect because of the various pressures on us is something I'm endlessly interested in. I have massive compassion for it. Because I think we are all looking for it, in one way or another, even if we are building walls so we can hide from it.