Tiny Pearls in a Big World

These people that litter Mary Miller’s stories in Big World are nearly broken and almost just as unlikable. Or that is to say they are living mostly unlikable lives, because Miller’s characters — the predominance of which are young, underachieving women — are not unlikable in the ways, say, Bret Easton Ellis or Jonathan Franzen characters are unlikable. These characters are unlikable in the secret ways we don’t like ourselves, hiding those things we try to hide in a big world: “I’m sort of horrified by the things I tell myself when I’m the only one around to hear them,” one aimless narrator confesses — to herself — in the untidy closing story, “Not All Who Wander Are Lost.” Untidy and aimless, these are apt descriptions. Miller’s characters often resist change and the stories themselves can teeter on plotlessness, like the wheels of a pick-up truck spinning endlessly in the Tennessee mud. One narrator scrubs her addict boyfriend’s camper in reaction to his half-hearted and ultimately unfulfilled promise to bring the thing to the state park. Another narrator attempts an affair with a co-worker in the absence of her alcoholic boyfriend, but that too does not stand to last. Oftentimes, we’re left simply to wait for sunrise.

But Miller is adroit in her storytelling, and where these stories are slight in their action they are larger in scope. The characters share a hopelessness that is often found in Raymond Carver’s characters, a certain grittiness, here removed from Carver’s lush Pacific Northwest and trapped in the honky-tonk and trailer park South where the landscape is pocked with beer bottles and cigarette butts; full of cheating lovers and surrounded by Ruby Tuesdays, Taco Bells, IHOPs and Dairy Queens. The stories of Lorrie Moore, too, come to mind. Miller’s characters make the stupid decisions that have been thrust upon them by all their stupid yesterdays, all of it soaked with death, with divorce, with loss.

Yes, these stories are tiny pearls, each one propelled by Miller’s pinballing language that is lyrical in its sudden turns: “We stayed in a house on the beach and ate seafood and went to the outlet malls, but my father wouldn’t let me go in the water because once I got caught by a riptide and almost drowned and after that I got stung by a jellyfish and after that my mother died.” It is clear Miller loves these characters: for all their misgivings, the author does not condescend to them. For all their hopelessness, Miller lovingly imbues the tiniest grain of hope into each character, and only Miller herself believes in the power of that grain to be polished to pearl. She understands the pressures that weigh down on these characters, how these characters are all, self-referentially, “fucked in the head.”

And not for nothing, but the artifact itself is wondrous too. A beautiful soft cover pocket book with moody watercolor cover art that somehow serves to reinforce the heart of this collection, as if the one thing these characters can hold on to, cradled in small hands, a curious logic of holding such a small book and calling it Big World.

What Makes These Five Chapbooks All Belong Under One Cover?

Early in his short story “The Black Cat,” Edgar Allan Poe has his unreliable narrator declare, “And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of Perverseness.”

“Who,” he asks, “has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?”

This spirit of perverseness -- this counter-intuitive yet irresistible impulse toward the icky, the ridiculous, the self-destructive -- is at least part of what cannot be contained in the collections that make up the anthology They Could No Longer Contain Themselves.

In each of the five chapbooks that comprise this book, various characters find themselves engaging in activities which might make the reader agree with Poe that “perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart -- one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.”

To wit: In John Jodzio’s Do Not Touch Me Not Now Not Ever, the narrator of “The Two Malls” says, “Sometimes at the expensive mall, I buy a cup of soda from the hot dog stand and then balance it on the aluminum railing.  I walk away to the other side of the mall and I wait until someone below is about to walk underneath the cup.  I hit the railing as hard as I can and the railing vibrates and the cup dumps onto the person below.”

In Mary Miller’s Paper and Tassels, the narrator of “My Old Lady” says, “Mama likes it when you slap her, I said, and his eyes narrowed like he didn’t remember mama liking that but he reared back and did it anyway.  My eyes leaked into her pillow.  Then it hit me: the pillowcase had been washed in Gain.  When he finished, he pulled out and said daddy didn’t really like that and I said mama didn’t really like it either, she just wanted to see what it felt like.”

In Elizabeth Colen’s Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake, the narrator of “Rule of Thirds” says “Today my girlfriend and I had sex while a man took pictures in the back yard, I start, in a letter to my mother. This letter is not really intended for her, though when I start I pretend it is.”

In Tim Jones-Yelvington’s Evan’s House and the Other Boys Who Live There, the narrator of “Slime Me” says “Abner was a child who wanted to get slimed. He hungered for the spread of slime across his skin, his favorite the viscous kind that crept to cover, coat, encase. He oozed homemade do-it-yourself Mad Scientist slime though his fingers and hoped someone would cover him in goop.”

And finally, in Sean Lovelace’s How Some People Like Their Eggs, the narrator of “Wal-Mart” says “‘I don’t know a girl named Kristen!’ I shout. (I do.) ‘I never touched her!’ I shout. (I did.)”

The pleasure of reading each section of this book is inextricable from the pleasure of knowing what’s good and choosing what’s bad, of knowing the right thing and doing the wrong one. Poe called this compulsion “the imp of the perverse” and the characters in these stories are certainly driven by this demon. But in the hands of Jodzio, Miller, Colen, Jones-Yelvington and Lovelace, this impulse is revealed to be an inseparable piece of what makes humans so human.

Story Focus: "Watermelon" by Mary Miller

I was a choir geek in high school. Our show uniforms luckily bore no sequins (I'm not as partial to wearing sequins as Tim Jones-Yelvington), but none the less, every year the show tuxedo, the bright red and black stripes of the vest shimmering, the jazz hands, the choreography. It was really nothing like you see on Glee, and for that, I'm glad.

My choir teacher was the stereotypical effeminate male choir teacher. He was not afraid to get involved in the lives of his students, to care about them, to invite them over for voice coaching. In high school, my shoes tended to be on the shaggy side. I would wear Chuck Taylors until the canvas was in tatters. Not because I was poor (though we were), but because that shit was punk rawk in the mid-late 90s. I remember once my teacher, we'll call him Mac since his last name was particularly Scottish, quietly took me aside one day after class and asked me if I needed new shoes.

"Oh. No," I said, "I actually have a new pair at home. I just like these."

Mac looked doubtful, so I wore them the next day to prove the point, and promptly returned to the old and tattered pair until they completely fell apart.

That's just the kind of guy Mac was. But of course, when you have that kind of guy teaching at a high school, you get the stories. I was once told buy someone that they'd gone over to Mac's house for something and saw him in the pool implicatingly close with a boy. I was told by another someone to keep my guard up during my conversations with Mac in an independent study class I had with him for music theory.

You get stories like Mary Miller's "Watermelon" in They Could No Longer Contain Themselves, that begins:

Mr. Fuller was the new choir teacher. He had a round face and a love of boys.Before we sang, he had us lie on our backs and breathe in the icy waters.Feel the waves lick your neck, he’d say, the sting of peppermint in theback of your throat. Your boat’s collapsed and you didn’t think you’dneed a life preserver. Feel the pressure build. It builds and builds, likewhen you love someone so much your heart could burst, your heart could fucking burst under the weight of it.

After he drowned us, he’d make us form a train and rub each other’s shoulders. This went on for months and nobody saying anything.

Miller never goes so far as to say any concrete details about Mr. Fuller, and the story takes a turn to focus more on the relationship between the narrator and another troubled boy. But it's the implication in that last line that brings back all these memories of high school and Mac and how he straddled the teacher/student relationship. "Straddled" was probably a bad choice of wording there.

Mac saw my mother's obituary in the paper a couple days after she died. He made the hour drive to the parlor where her body was shown. He hugged me. He hugged me then, and he hugged me in high school--important moments like after not placing with a solo at Regionals, my breakdown in the hallway after, like after graduation. I never thought anything of it then, and I don't now. Before he left the showing, he extended his hand to shake, and when I took it, there was a $50 bill in it.

"Don't spend this on bills," he said. "Don't spend it on groceries or tuition or anything responsible. Spend it on something that'll help you forget for awhile."

He hugged me again, gave again his condolences, and left the parlor. That's the last time I saw Mac. With the money, I did what you'd expect me to do, what he probably expected me to do. I got to forget everything for a night, and I'll always thank Mac for that.

I know you're probably thinking it. You're probably thinking I'm going to turn this post on its head and tell you next how I saw him in the news a year or 2 later, accused of sexual misconduct or something of the sort. But that's not what happened. Mac is still alive, and perhaps retired now. I could pay him a visit. I probably should. Mac meant a lot to me when I needed a mentor to mean a lot to me.

I'm not sure why we were so cruel in high school, to ourselves or to those who truly want to help us become more than who we were then. I'm sure if Mac is still teaching, he still gets all the same stories told about him in hushed tones. I hope he never hears of those stories. I hope he never finds this post. I hope he stays the way he is, and continues to affect the lives of students like he affected my life, students willing to believe in him more than in the cruelty of classmates.