Who Do You Love: Stories, by Jean Thompson
This year marks the twenty-third anniversary of the release of Thompson’s classic collection. Published to wide praise in 1999, many of the stories had already found esteemed homes in The New Yorker, Ontario Review, Story, and Ploughshares, and were reprinted in the Best American Short Stories, yet each still reads as though written today. There are no iPhones, no screens, no political or historical markers, but Thompson’s stories, like those of Flannery O’Connor, are driven purely by character.
In the story, “A Rich Man’s House,” a recently divorced woman is asked by her neighbor, the rich man of the title, to feed his cat while he goes on a fishing trip. She’s our point of view character, but she goes unnamed. The rich man has a name, Kenneth Dacey. So does his caretaker, Jesse. The unnamed female narrator is feeling a test of her worth in the wake of her divorce, and is portrayed with a clarity that eludes that of the rich man and his house full of stuff. When Dacey gives her a tour before his trip, she finds herself feeling bereft at the ranging, empty house filled with unused, expensive things:
When I got back to my house, it had a welcoming look to it. Your own unhappiness is always preferable to someone else’s, just as you sleep better in your own bed, even alone.
The feelings prompted by the rich man’s house make her wish her husband was still at home so she could tell him about it. “I imagined scenes like that more and more, and remembered less and less of the things that had happened between us. It was a different phase of loneliness, the one that came after the sharpest edges had worn off.” Anyone who’s undergone loss has felt that way, felt the sharp edges being worn away by memory, but luckily, we have Thompson who is able to say it.
A classic of the collection, “All Shall Love Me and Despair,” concerns Annie, and her love for Scout. They’re young, and to help beat Scout’s heroin habit, they’ve come to a seaside town in Oregon from Chicago, driving a stolen car. Because Scout was sick from withdrawal, Annie drove alone: “The trip from Chicago is something Annie can uncover like a scar on her body when she wants to remind herself that she can do anything. She drove every mile of the way. Even when Scout was well enough to sit up and look around him, she was the one who drove.”
There’s the skill of showing the reader what she knows but has never put into words, and in a way so clear, it’s instantly known. Thompson has that gift for defamiliarization, as here, in describing Scout’s drug paraphernalia:
The needle always looked clean, no matter where it had been. Nothing could be cleaner than its thin bright nakedness, its silver eye, its spike. Scout let it fall to the floor. His eyes rolled back in his head like heavy silver pinballs. A piece of indifferent Chicago sky hung in the window. The room smelled of gas and sugar, a closed wintertime smell.
In the best short stories, we watch the characters in extremis, subjected to so much ill fate, and that is where the heart of a story beats. The title in Who Do You Love, taken from the Bo Diddley song, centers on a suicidal social worker, Judy Applebee. The character, as Thompson describes, is one “who is crippled by her lack of self love.” Judy’s alienation runs deep, from her relationship with her mother, to her boyfriend, to her clients at the agency. One evening, she wanders into an expensive store in a shopping mall, caught up in imagining what her life might be like if only she could change its terms. Briefly, she wonders what it might be like to work in a place where people buy expensive things, rather than, as she does, counsel bereft people. Just then, Judy catches sight of her own face in a mirror:
Her hair was lank as if she’d sprayed it with a hose. Her face was bare, shiny, more unnatural somehow than the clerk’s layers of cosmetics. The flesh was spread unevenly over the bones, like cold butter on bread.
Thompson is gifted at putting her characters through dire straits, at the illumination of setting, and finding the barest, starkest undercurrents in the human experience. That makes her stories unforgettable. As bleak as the terms might be, there is a crazy amount of love in these stories, and not just between characters, but of a writer for the act of storytelling. With Valentine’s Day coming up, this would be the perfect gift.
—Lauren Alwan