A Compassionate Portrait: Leesa Cross-Smith's This Close to Okay

“Shattered energy seemed to pulse from him like sonar. Tight blips of loneliness. Tallie translated the echolocation easily. She was lonesome and blipping too.”

Leesa Cross-Smith is known for her beautiful imagery, lush and aromatic sentences that leave you breathless and pondering for days. Her two short story collections, Every Kiss, A War and So That We Can Glow and her debut novel, Whiskey and Ribbons have earned notable accolades from the literary establishment and praise from Roxane Gay. Her second novel, This Close To Okay, is less poetic, more straightforward, more accessible. It has all of the charm and anticipatory fizz of a rom-com but underlying all the quippy dialogue, shopping montages and rescuing of cats, Cross-Smith submits for our consideration a tableau of human frailty, the far reaching grasp of grief and mental illness, rendering a compassionate portrait of the sufferers and the caretakers.

The backdrop is Louisville, Kentucky. In the waning days of October, in a cold, driving rain, two broken people meet on a bridge, Emmett on the river side, “the suicide side” of the cold steel railing, Tallie on the other side, the safe side. Emmett staring down at the turbulent Ohio River. Tallie, the only person driving by, amidst a noisy shimmer of vehicles, to stop and inquire, to aid a stranger in need. With little more than words of care and musical offerings of Andrew Bird and Wilco playing on her cellphone, Tallie encourages Emmett to climb back over to safety. She takes him for a coffee and then offers him a place, her place, to stay for a few days. Over the course of a weekend, Emmett and Tallie construct a metaphorical bridge from the depths of despair to close to okay.  

This is a quiet novel. Cross-Smith acknowledges but doesn’t dwell in the unbearable. Most of the bad stuff has already happened off the page. Infertility, failed relationships, racial bigotry, mental illness, depression, PTSD. Suicidal ideation. Tallie and Emmett confront their demons through talk therapy. Conversation provides the driving force, propelling the plot forward. The details the characters choose to withhold from one another deliver the dramatic tension. Tallie confides her longing for children, her failed IVF treatments, her ex-husband’s affair but conceals that she is a professional therapist. Emmett confesses that he too used to be married although his true identity and source of pain remain a mystery throughout most of the book. He snoops around in her computer, her Facebook page. He secretly emails her ex. In his mind, he obsessively catalogues his surroundings. He never gives up the possibility of the bridge.

Told in alternating points of view, Tallie’s narrative offers a clinical assessment of Emmett’s emotional health noting his inability to regulate his body temperature, dimming, detached feelings, dizziness. She wonders if he’s confusing his exhaustion for hopelessness. Emmett’s narrative reveals that there is no straight path to wellness. His healing accordions in and out. Tears arrive without warning. At one point, he assesses, in detail, the damage his body will suffer should he jump off the bridge.

And yet, the relationship that blooms between Emmett and Tallie, from strangers to confidants, to friends to possibly more is both believable and aspirational. For the reader, their story serves as an emotional support manual. How to recognize the signs of emotional distress. How to help someone in need. How to reach out in very small but persistent ways.           

Talk, talk, talk, talking. Always talking and listening. Cups of tea, mugs of coffee. Food, eating, nibbling, snacking, cooking meals together, grabbing a bite at a diner. Sharing the intimacy and distraction of music, movies and baseball during The World Series. Discussions of the “big things, not little things.” Art, pop culture, literature, faith. Playing gin rummy. Reading Harry Potter out loud. Strolling through a shopping plaza. The gift of a fuzzy blue snow hat with flaps. A red one to match. Shopping for Halloween costumes. Choosing Mulder and Scully. Sharing a smoke. The ritual burning of emotional artifacts. Doing for one another, like fetching a glass of water or cleaning leaves out of a gutter. 

And then there’s hand-knitted chunky afghans and scented candles and the sound of rain thrumming on the roof. Clean fresh smells: soap and shampoo and lotions. The comfort of home. Hygge.

“Making things as comfy as possible…it’s what I do,” says Tallie to Emmett in response to his appreciation for the charms of her cultivated domesticity noting how her home quiets his anxiety.

Hygge (pronounced HOO-gah) is the Danish word for cozy, a contentment achieved by enjoying the simple things in life. Highlighted in The New York Times a few years back amidst a spate of books, websites and online venders, Hygge celebrates homespun pleasures: fuzzy wool socks, raglan sweaters, a wooden mixing spoon with a burnt handle, handmade quilts and fresh baked pies. Hygge captures the essence of a crackling fire and a mug of hot cocoa — the kind made with milk and miniature marshmallows foaming on top.

In This Close to Okay, what could be more hygge than sharing a late autumn weekend, pumpkin spiced latte, old fashioned donuts, kids bobbing for apples, mums — bursts of yellow, and orange and purple. Rain giving way to crisp clear skies, the promise of a Halloween party.

In addition to promoting the healing powers of hygge, Cross-Smith champions a new feminism with her elevation of home life and the purposeful cultivation of a nurturing space. Domesticity, long seen as a negative, demoralizing tug with demands that diminish women slavish to their homes and broods, toiling in the kitchen and the laundry room, mop and dust rag. Unless of course these chores are monetized into celebrity empires a la Martha Stewart, Rachel Ray or Marie Kondo or the latest HGTV renovation stars. 

Now, the battle of the stay-at-home moms in mom jeans vs the suit wearing professionals, where one set of duties cancelled the value of the others, have come full circle. Tallie is a professional who owns her own house, makes her own way in the world. And yet aspires, and finds comfort in knitting, making her home cozy and beautiful and doing things for others. A woman showcased as both healer and provider while allowing for the possibilities of good men, men and women working together as a team.

Ultimately, This Close to Okay is a buoyant instructive for living in a loud, loud world. It maps a course of action for reaching out to those in need. A guide for navigating social and emotional isolation. A reminder that in the midst of hopelessness and heartache, it’s the simple things that can life raft optimism and revive the weary.

The Complexity of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience: A Review of Nancy Au's Spider Love Song and Other Stories

““After a long frigid winter, she’d been craving jasmine blossoms, which is the scent of dragons in love.””

— "Anatomy of a Cloud"

Longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, Nancy Au’s remarkable debut collection, Spider Love Song and Other Stories, explores the Asian American diaspora. Simultaneously modern and ancient, quirky and compelling, the seventeen short stories, flash and fables reveal the complexity of the immigrant and refugee experience. How that experience changes and morphs with each successive generation and yet carries the ancestral DNA, threads of culture and tradition, legend and mythology. Dynasties insisting to be sewn into the fabric of the now.

In this collection, Au humanizes the newcomer. In so doing, she invites us to sumptuous feasts and day-long meal preparations. Oven baked frog thighs, “pearlescent moon slivers with pungent garlic, tiny onions” served on a bed of arugula.  Appreciated with loud croaking burps. Plates of “gingery fish and scallops, pickled duck web and salted squid, and a bowl of steaming rice.” Slurping of fish-ball soup. Serving the duck head to the honored guest. 

Au reveals their struggles, from finding friends and community to finding employment consistent with education and background. Making do, making ends meet. The hard work, the physical and emotional toiling of non-white America. Where families labor in an orchard hand dusting blossoms with pollen sticks in “Lincoln Chan: Pear King” and a former veterinarian is reduced to dispensing meds at a nursing home in “Odonata at Rest.”

The stories are told mostly from a youthful point of view. Ten, eleven, twelve-year-olds, young enough to believe in dragons and damselflies, young enough to believe the stories their elders tell. But this is an age of constant observation. Because the world is still a wonder, they take it all in. They are at the dawn of understanding. They puzzle together white lies and omissions. They see, for the first time, their parents’ deficiencies. They feel acutely their displacement, their otherness.

In “The Richmond,” a daughter wins a lottery to attend a private school. The new school, the mean girls, the other side of town complicates her relationship with parents’ history and her new divergent path. She tries to understand the pain of fleeing Communist China– the cruelty and sacrifice it took to survive, but she can no longer tolerate the neighborhood in which they live. A place that’s not Chinatown. A place that’s not white suburbia. She tells her parents that she is not like them. She is not an immigrant. Why are they punishing her?

“I wanted to say that I understood Baba’s crude jokes with the Wans, about how they escaped genocide by pointing to their neighbors then playing dead. But at eleven, I couldn’t interpret their birdsong and thought it a sweet uselessness. I couldn’t grasp my parents’ twisted refugee humor or that their laughter was a sparrow song of sorrow, of disloyalty, of survival—a savage happiness. I couldn’t picture Mama’s childhood friend on her knees, hands tied behind her back, hair spilling over her shoulders, tears pouring from her eyes as a soldier towered over her. I could not picture the explosion of a bullet fired from the rifle, the pierced skin, the shattering skull, or Mama’s grief.”

Throughout the collection, Au underscores the tradition of Chinese storytelling. Au finds stories everywhere: in math and science, in trashy romance novels, in death. Where people can “stand next to each other on the slippery wet edge of their story, holding up each other’s glossy dime-store dreams.” 

In “Wearing My Skin,” a single mother Cynthia earns a living as a phone sex worker, spinning erotic tales while she shuffles around her apartment in airplane slippers. 

In “How to Become Your Own Odyssey or the Land of Indigestion,” a father recounts nighttime travels after he is found sleeping on top of the family’s old station wagon or sprawled on the kitchen floor amongst the remains of his sleepwalk-gorging: tofu blocks, raw cabbages, sesame oil. He tells glamorous sleepwalking stories where his dreams take him to grand forests with golden-winged creatures resembling seahorses and prisons, churches and schools “built out of bright vermillion pomegranate skins.”

There is a hopefulness embedded in this collection. Throughout, spiders and spider webs, pear trees, peaches and peach pits, the color red, and ducks, symbols of good omens, prosperity, abundance and luck, signal an optimism for the future, long and happy marriages and cures to relationship problems.

In the laugh out loud, riotous “Louise,” a married couple, wife and wife, May Zhou and Lai, both accountants, are having their traditional Friday picnic lunch when a mangled, one-eyed, one-toed, bald-headed duck wanders over. Lai scoops up the duck in delight, names it Louise and insists on adopting it. She tucks Louise into their lunch cooler, using a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich as a duck mattress. She’s already picturing the domestic scene, Louise greeting them at the front door after work, nipping at their pant legs, wiggling her feathery tail until they pet her bald spot. They’d be a family. “You don’t know love ’til you have a duck.” They are arguing over the practicalities of having a duck (it can’t bury its own poop, duck-proofing the house) when a ranger enters the scene commanding Lai to hand over the bird. A melee ensues. Lai believes the duck will bring magic into their lives, she refuses to give up hope.

Despite the psychological hold of the past, Au challenges stereotypes and traditions. Women marry women. Daughters are adored. A mother refuses to honor the birth spirits that would have diminished her daughter. “Math is an asshole.” An eighty-year-old woman, “in her own true myth,” is not “a corny grandmother.” “She is useful poison.” Women are the breadwinners, holding their families together with their wages while husbands/fathers are left behind, lose jobs, or disappear.

And with a slight of hand, Au uses an ancient tale, a retelling of Chinese mythology to comment on the future. Her lush poetic prose illuminates the truth of climate change and the truth of building a new life in an inhospitable land. In “Anatomy of a Cloud,” a story of love, ingenuity and grief, Fei tends to last dragon god of rain.

“Fei uses the chicken claw to comb YingLong’s coarse beard, and recites stories of the afterworld, a place not deadened by drought, with oil slicks for oceans, black and mystery deep. Fei shakes the sand dollar to hear inside. She puts it to her ear and listens to grains slide over themselves, washing over rocks and sea ledges the way water once washed over the long dead sharks and penguins, seaweed and jellyfish. The sand dollar lets her see underneath the beach. And there she finds millennia before the Anthropocene dried up the planet. She finds buried treasure, gold booty and purple gemstones, lost eyepatches of pirates. She finds the footsteps of every creature that has ever walked the beach, every bird, every warrior. She finds every seal and every whale and dragon skeleton. She finds broken kite strings, lost tennis balls. She finds the ocean that was once glacier and once in Africa and on the cap of the earth.”

It is difficult to sum up the experience of reading this collection, a journey through time, a dance with people you may have seen from a distance but never bothered to get to know or understand. In a place as vivid and inviting as your own backyard. These stories linger long after the last word is read. Like an ornamental shawl embroidered with the finest silk thread.