I do like an author who can put a new twist on an old tale and Shirley Jackson is a dependably good writer when it comes to doing just that. Sometimes almost frighteningly so. This week's short story instalment from Sarah Weinman's Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives is Jackson's 1960 short story, "Louisa, Please Come Home" which originally appeared in The Ladies Home Journal.
I've been thinking about the year she wrote this--the beginning of the 60s when life was so bright and new in many ways. There were so many changes and so much optimism, yet I think, too, it was also the start of something a little darker in society and how we perceived the world. Not that bad things haven't always happened, but the days when Americans would leave their doors unlocked and let their children play alone in the neighborhood were beginning to be numbered. So in this domestic tale of a runaway, Jackson shifts the perspective from the outside to the inside. It's not a worried family wondering about their missing child. This story is told from the perspective of the young woman who has run away from her family.
Every year on the anniversary of the day she ran away, Louisa listens to her mother's voice on the radio pleading with her to come home. Her family misses her and wants her to be okay. Louisa would wait for this day as though it were her birthday. She had planned to run away, knew she always would eventually. If it hadn't all gone off without a hitch she would probably have given up on the idea, but it was so easy. The trick is to do everything as normal as possible.
"It's funny how no one pays any attention to you at all. There were hundreds of people who saw me that day, and even a sailor who tried to pick me up in the movie, and yet no one really saw me."
She doesn't even go very far from home. She becomes Lois Taylor. "Before I had been away from home for twenty-four hours I was an entirely new person." She finds a place to stay, a good job, and even toys with her landlady asking doesn't she think she looks an awful like that missing girl? For three years she lives this new life, relatively contented and happy. And then purely by chance, a one in a million chance she sees someone from her hometown. And he sees her. It was all so spontaneous.
"Maybe I did wan to go home. Maybe all that time I had been secretly waiting for a chance to get back; maybe that's why I recognized Paul on the street, in a coincidence that wouldn't have happened once in a million years--he had never even been to Chandler before, and was there for a few minutes between trains; he had stepped out of the station for a minute, and found me."
And he takes her home. But her reception is not at all what she had expected. In her introduction Sara Weinman remarks " . . . as Jackson shows with uncanny insight, myths often have a more powerful hold than the truth, and what you see if not necessarily what you believe." And so with the usual penetrating insight to the way we sometimes think and how society reacts in the way they are expected to react, the idea of a missing child and a family's desire to see her safe at home once again takes on a life all its own.
Shirley Jackson is really brilliant, I think. What she writes about is sometimes very uncomfortable, but there is much to be said for jarring our complacency sometimes.
Next week a story by a new to me writer, Barbara Callahan. Only a few stories in and I must say I am enjoying this collection very much.
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Just a mention of this week's, from the January 13th issue, New Yorker story. Dinaw Mengetsu is an Ethiopian-American writer who was previously unfamiliar to me. I see, though, a string of awards behind his name. He's written several books including a new book coming out this spring, All Our Names, from which this story is taken. The story is set in Kampala in the 1970s and has a political slant--two poor young men take their place at the university and try to find their place in the world.
"The hours we spent on campus followed us home at the end of the day. For weeks we were like visitors in our real lives, and even then we were terrible tourists, purposefully blind to the plainclothesmen who watched all the houses with notebooks in their hands, deaf to the evening shouts around us. I knew it wouldn't last wouldn't last long."
Unfortunately this week's story is not available online to read, but there is a short interview with the author here if you are curious. I'm waiting on my new issue and am curious what this week's story will bring me.