maile meloy rules

just talking about one of my favorite stories

Hello friends—

As usual, I am going to remind you that The Late Americans comes out in nineteen days on May 23. I am going to have a book launch at St. Joseph’s hosted by Greenlight on May 24 with hot king Isaac Butler. Please register if you are in NYC. It will be fun to see you all.

The other tour dates can be found at the end of this post in a handy graphic.

Please preorder, etc. Or I will cry. If it incentivizes you, the book was selected as an Indie Next Pick by Booksellers.

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In my fiction workshop, I assign weekly readings and we spend the first half hour of class discussing these readings. I assign readings because I was not assigned readings in workshop, and I think that this was a mistake. I want to give my students access to things that I had to find on my own later and which I found helpful or interesting. Also because I feel that once element I missed from workshop was hearing my teachers talk deeply about some element of craft. I feel that this would have been very helpful. Also because I secretly really love talking about craft and stories. Anyway, I assign a mix of critical texts and fiction—we’ve read Peter Brooks, Stanislavski, Wharton, Mieke Bal, Trilling, and others. We’ve read screenplays and short stories and bits of novels. I think of it as a crucial aspect of teaching fiction. Helping the stories develop their discernment and critical acumen.

Last week, I assigned a story by one of my favorite writers, Maile Meloy. I had them read “O Tannenbaum” from her brilliant collection Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It. I have loved Meloy’s writing for years now, and whenever I’m confronted with a problem in my own writing be it spiritual, psychic, or technical, I turn to her stories in search of answers, yes, but also comfort. I think that word, comfort, is a perhaps a little misleading, conjuring as it does images of cozy bedsides and tidy morality, as world rendered more starkly simple than it could ever be in real life. I suppose comfort implies a kind of rote familiarity. But that is not what I mean when I say to turn her stories for comfort because the comfort, and the pleasure, I derive from reading Meloy is in the fact that she reminds me of a story’s very ability to discomfit and unsettle.

Meloy’s territory is that terrifying moral expanse between selfishness and selflessness as it plays out in ordinary human relationships. I always feel that Meloy’s characters have a keen sense of their circumstances and their desires, but what makes their lives difficult is the awareness that others want something from them. I mean something in that big, scary capacious way that Shakespeare uses it when Hamlet says, “But the fear of something after death.”

“O Tannenbaum,” first published in Granta and later collected in Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It,” is a strange little story, part Flannery O’Connor, part Raymond Carver, but an immensely delightful one. It opens in the Christmas season as a family drives back from cutting down a tree for the holidays. We find them in the midst of disagreement, “It was a fine tree, Everett's daughter agreed. His wife said it was lopsided and looked like a bush. But that was part of its fineness—it was a tall, lopsided Douglas fir, bare on one side where it had crowded out its neighbor. The branchless side could go against the living-room wall, the bushy side was for decorations, and now the crowded tree in the woods had room to grow.” After they’ve got the tree in the car, they’re on their way back home through the snow and the winding mountain roads of Montana. They sing carols and Everett tries to keep the mood light, but there’s a brittle peace in this family. And then they spot a stranded couple: “The two of them stood in the snow, under the branches of a big lodgepole pine. The man wore a blue parka and held up a broken cross-country ski. The woman wore red gaiters over wool trousers, a man's pea coat and a fur hat.” Things aren’t going so well for this couple either. Everett rolls the window down and tries to make banter.

'Nice day for a ski,' he said.

'It was,' the man said bitterly. He was about Everett's height and age, not yet pushing forty, with a day or two of bristle on his chin.

'I broke a ski and we're lost—' the woman began.

'We're not lost,' the man said.

'We are completely lost,' the woman said.

The encounter is an inflection point in the lives of the characters and in the story. It’s easy to imagine the bifurcation of fate: if they had not encountered this couple, Everett and his family would have gone home and put up their tree and gone on in whatever tense but unstated family drama is currently swirling around them, but they have met the couple and so we enter into another parallel fate, one that feels charged with possibility precisely because we can sense ourselves departing from what should have been. But the moment it occurs on first read, we are perhaps not thinking too much about all that. We are thinking that this family has stumbled upon another family in conflict and that the two will pass each other harmlessly by. That however is not to be because Everett decides to help them out:

'Your car must be close,' he said. 'You're on the road.'

'The car is on a different road,' the woman said.

'Well, we'll find it,' Everett said.

Pam, Everett’s wife, suspects an ulterior motive for his generosity:

In the rear-view mirror, he saw Pam's eyes widen at him from the back seat. She was slight and dark-haired, and accused him of favoring the kind of blonde who held sorority car washes. It was a joke, but it was partly true. With a bucket and sponge, this girl would fit right in. But arguing over giving them a ride would make everyone uncomfortable, and Pam would agree in the end.

Soon enough, our gang is on the way. Everett reflects on Pam’s relative lack of altruistic impulse, “It made no sense for Pam to be angry. This wasn't country where you left people in the snow. The man looked strong but not too strong; Everett could take him, if he needed to.” This is where Meloy gets the reader feeling that little tingle of paranoia. The idea that oh yeah, these are strangers collected from a road in far-flung snowy Montana. That of course Pam might be thinking that here they are with their young daughter far from anyone who could help them picking up two strangers who very well might turn out to be murderers, all because her husband had a weakness for blondes. We are closest to Everett’s perspective, and so Pam’s fears are perceived but downplayed. People don’t do that here! People don’t abandon their neighbors to the snow and the wolves and the cold and what not. People don’t go around tying up people and bludgeoning them with implements used to fell Christmas trees, surely! Right? Right? Right?

But once the thought sneaks in, it shifts the register of the story into one of anticipation—for what, exactly, violence? Harm? Calamity? Friendly banter? We are waiting for something, but we don’t know what that something is. Meloy modulates that anticipatory tension. Anne Marie, the daughter, in classic child fashion pipes up:

His daughter turned around in her seat, as well as she could with her seat belt on, and announced to the new passengers, 'We have a CB radio.'

The warning tone in her voice came straight from Pam. It was identical in some technical, musical way to Pam's We're going to be late and her I'm not going to tell you again.

I am most intrigued by that word: warning. On the one hand, it’s a bit funny, this kid basically telling the adults “I’ve got my eye on you.” But on the other hand, it’s a deft way to put the reader on alert. Why is she warning the strangers? Is she responding to some unseen element the way animals sometimes sense coming storms or natural disasters? We do not know because Everett does not know and while he seems to come down on the side of her behaving in a way her mother would behave, the introduction of the word warning sends a shiver through the story. The stranger asks what their handle is and Anne Marie, returning to her status as child, blushes as she says that their handle is Batgirl. Incredible.

Everett is so moved by the sight of his daughter blushing that we get a truly wild stream of interiority:

There had been a rocky time when Pam was pregnant, when he had felt panicked and young and trapped, and slept with the wife of a friend. It had only been once, in 1974, after many beers at a co-ed softball game, but the girl had gone and told Pam. She said she needed to clear her conscience, which didn't make any sense to Everett. He'd ended up driving Pam to the emergency room after a screaming fight, when she threw a shoe at him and started to have shooting pains in her abdomen. The doctors were worried: Pam was anemic, and if she lost the baby she might bleed to death. Everett spent the night in her hospital room, frozen with grief. The baby decided to stay put, and came along fine two months later, but the night in the hospital had scared him. He would never put his wife and child in danger again. He hadn't put them in danger now, and he resented Pam's eye-widened implication that he had.

In one tight paragraph, we get all of the context that we need to understand Pam’s mistrust, Everett’s resentment of their mistrust, and why picking up the stranded couple was probably a bad idea. Not because they might murder our family exactly but because they represent Everett’s willingness to steer himself and his loved ones toward danger. What’s even more impressive is that we understand what Everett understands about Pam’s feelings. This is a truly complicated thing to bring off in a story, situating the POV such that we don’t get simply the information that Pam is wary of strangers and dangers, but that we get Everett’s feelings about Pam’s wariness of strangers, or his perception of her wariness about strangers that may or may not be real. We also get that information right alongside actual evidence of Everett’s propensity for selfish action, and a sense of his perception of his actions as selfish. He is kind to himself, perhaps kinder than we imagine he deserves, but that is also interesting at the level of craft. How Meloy uses her character to tell us not just what happened, but to do so in a way that tells us what it means for it to have happened.

After that we get another critical exchange in which Meloy once again modulates the tension:

'You got a handle?' he asked the hitchhikers in back.

'I'm Clyde,' the man said.

'Bonnie,' the woman said.

Everyone was silent for a moment.

'That's really funny,' Everett finally said-though between his shoulder blades he felt a prick of worry. 'You must have a CB, too.'

'No, those are our names,' the man said.

It’s at this moment that Everett starts to feel the slightest bit of apprehension about what they’ve done. Not because these two people are named Bonnie and Clyde, but because they are insisting that they are called Bonnie and Clyde. Two names that seem like aliases. You can almost feel Everett’s mind starting to whirr. Why would two strangers insist upon aliases after being picked up on a snowy evening while pretending that their car is missing?

There was a place at the trailhead to park cars, but there were no cars. Just snow and trees, and the creek running under the ice. Everett didn't look back at his wife. He scanned the empty turnout and hoped this was not one of those times you look back on and wish you had done one thing different, though it had seemed perfectly natural to do what you did at the time.

'Where's the car?' Bonnie asked.

'This is where we parked,' Clyde said.

They were genuinely surprised, and Everett almost laughed with relief. There was no con, no ambush. He untied the rope, and the couple climbed out and walked to where their car had been. The girl's arm brushed against Everett's when she passed, but he didn't think she meant it. She was thinking about the missing car. He got in the Jimmy to let them discuss it. Pam reached into the way back to pull the saw and the axe from under the boughs Clyde and Bonnie had been sitting on, and she tucked the tools under her feet.

Notice how Meloy plays with tension in this passage. After raising our hackles with that Bonnie and Clyde name reveal, she glides back down by showing us that they are in fact just two stranded people with a broken ski whose car is now missing. Everett is certain of it. How quickly he is made happy and content. Phew. No murderer here. But when then, Bonnie’s arm brushes him, and a new kind of danger appears in the story, and we realize that our family is not so safe after all and that the real danger is just getting started.

'What are we doing with these people in our car?' she asked.

'Can't leave people in the snow.'

'We have a child, Everett.'

'And,' he said, with the confidence he had just now recovered, 'we're showing her that you don't leave people in the snow. Right, Anne Marie?'

'Right,' Anne Marie said, but she watched them both.

Pam gave Everett a dark, unforgiving stare. He turned back in his seat and looked out at the hitchhikers. The girl, Bonnie, stamped her foot on the ground, her bare hands in fists. He liked the pea coat and fur hat combination a lot. He guessed Pam knew that. But he didn't like to be glowered at.

'I just worry,' he said, trying to adopt a musing tone, 'that someday I could roll all your things into a ditch, or take up with your sister, and you wouldn't have any looks left to give me. You'd have used them all up.'

Pam conceals her distrust of Everett beneath a fear that these people will kill them. Or so that’s how Everett feels. But since he’s already convinced they aren’t murderers, he feels that she is being unreasonable and petty. She is taking her frustration with him out on these poor innocent people and look at what kind of example that’s setting for little Anne Marie! Think of the children, Pam! Then Everett gets that incredible line in response to her glowering. It’s all too much.

Everett elects to get the couple to the police station so they drive on and as they drive on, Bonnie and Clyde reveal their own marital woes.

'He came up here to find himself,' Bonnie said. 'From Arizona, where we live, and he met this woman. She reminds me of you, actually.'

Pam glanced at the woman in surprise.

'You're totally his type,' Bonnie said.

'Bonnie,' Clyde said.

Note the subtle parallel—Pam was suspicious of Everett wanting something with Bonnie because she was his type, and now Pam has been accused of Bonnie of being Clyde’s type. But it doesn’t end there. We get the whole thing about Clyde’s new paramour. He’s found this new soulmate, which prompted Bonnie to come up from Arizona to collect her husband.

'But we're married,' Bonnie said, like she was telling a funny joke. 'And have a child. So I have this crazy feeling that I'm supposed to be his soulmate. So I leave our son with my parents and come up here, too. And we go to a party where people get naked in a hot rub and roll around in the snow. And I meet the woman, his perfect woman, and the first thing she does is proposition me.'

[….]

'So I told Clyde about it,' Bonnie said, 'thinking he'd defend my honor. And he said it was a good idea. He thought we might just move into his soulmate's cabin and get along.' She seemed to think about this for a second, about the right way to sum it up. 'So we tried to go for a mind-clearing ski,' she said finally, 'and the karmic gods stole our fucking car.' She started to laugh again, the throaty start and then the giggle.

At one level, this is backstory. It’s just more information. But at another level, it introduces another geometry into the story. Bonnie has just described a polyamorous situation. She’s described a sexually free congress among partners. And she’s just brought that up in a car with a married couple actively in a state of conflict due to perceived sexual wandering. The image of propositioning the wife of the man you’re sleeping with zips like a bolt of lightning through all their minds, leaving a ghostly after image. The bell cannot be unrung so to speak.

So yes, Meloy is letting Bonnie deliver the tale of her marital woe with Clyde, but also she is further revealing the face of the actual danger of the story. Not of death, but the threat to marital boundaries. This seems more or less confirmed when they drop the couple off at the police station and Everett offers to come back for them later. Meloy writes:

Two things happened at once, as in a movie, one close up and one in deep focus. Bonnie broke into a brilliant, tear-sparkled smile, and Pam's leaning form stiffened and she half turned her head. Then she looked away again and occupied herself more fiercely with Anne Marie. Bonnie clambered out of the back and kissed the side of Everett's mouth, her wool-bundled breasts pressing against him for a long second. 'Thank you,' she said.

Later, after he returns for the couple, there is a parallel moment:

She looked at Everett and seemed about to say something, and then she was in his arms. He gathered her up as well as he could, given her thick coat and the awkward position, and kissed her sweet face. Her cheeks were cold but her lips were warm, and she was trembling. The pea coat was unbuttoned and he reached inside to feel the curve of her breast through her sweater.

Another secret kiss, this one without subtle hint or implication. These are two people who want each other. Likely for similar reasons. They are attracted to one another, most simply, and then broadly, they both seem to feel constrained and trapped in their marriages. They are unhappy—Bonnie desperately so, Everett more quietly so—and seem unable to make their partners understand the tenor of their unhappiness. And so they are drawn to each other like oppositely charged particles. A voltage exists between them, this highly potentiated state that can only be resolved in this exact way at this exact moment. They kiss and cling to each other. He touches her. Feels jolted. It only takes a moment, just a moment, and they are bonded in this secret little thing that is perhaps not so secret because Pam suspected it all along. Indeed, she sent him to the police station to collect them probably because she wanted him to understand something about his own nature, his own restless desire and how it hasn’t left them alone despite his pretending to be behaving. Look how at the first opportunity he runs off and kisses another woman, and why? Why? Here is the danger consummated. Here is the potential fulfilled. He’s done the awful thing that he’s been threatening to do all along ever since they picked that couple up, and what’s more, he didn’t even realize it until Bonnie’s arm brushed him when she climbed out of the car. But Pam knew. Anne Marie knew. And he resented their knowing somewhere deep deep deep in his own heart, he probably knew too, and resented them.

Then a moment later, the concluding paragraph of the story:

A second later they pulled apart-the rime required to sign papers measured somewhere in both their minds-and Bonnie smoothed her hair. The lighted glass door of the police station opened, and Clyde walked with his long stride towards them and got in the back seat. Everett thought there must be a smell in the car from the kiss, an electricity. But the husband said nothing, and Everett drove the outlaws back to his house. They talked about the stolen car, and the cold, and the tree. All the while, Everett felt both the threat of disorder and the steady, thrumming promise of having everything he wanted, all at once.

Yes, Everett gets everything he wants. But what I love about this paragraph is that it completes the chiasmus of the story. We open with a pair of people driving along with a relative innocent—Everett, Pam and Anne Marie. We conclude with two people driving along with a relative innocent—Everett, Bonnie, and Clyde. We had two outlaws in the beginning, Bonnie and Clyde, and we have two outlaws in the end, Bonnie and Everett. We had two people connected by a secret—Everett’s affair concealed from Anne Marie—and we conclude with two people connected by a secret—Everett and Bonnie. We began with a threat to the family—Bonnie and Clyde. And we end with another threat to the family—Bonnie and Everett. The story is lashed with parallelism and the culmination of this is a great chiasmus that comes from the structure btu also from the themes, from the dramatic action, from the emotional questions. The whole thing assumes a terrifyingly elegant aesthetic unity.

I think sometimes, when we discuss a story that is formally very interesting or radical, we have something much…louder in mind. Something perhaps more obviously pyrotechnic. A story like this would perhaps not register. But I mean, just look at everything Meloy accomplishes. Without once disrupting the pristine narrative surface of her story. By which I mean that she never sacrifices feeling or human drama for the sake of making something chime in just the right way. The chiasmus comes about as a result of the innate properties of the story she was telling. The chains of fate that bind these characters. But what drives the story is Everett and his foolishness, his selfishness, is terrible and utterly believable humanness.

Maile Meloy fucking rules.

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