BASS 2021: Vanessa Cuti, “Our Children” from West Branch #94

I wanted to explore and exaggerate the idea of a flawed parent and how it becomes especially unacceptable to be flawed if the parent in question happens to be a mother. From the start, from the way the very first line appeared to me, the story had the feeling of a fairy tale. So I kind of leaned into that as I went through it – cold stepfamily, little cabin, survival in the woods. Even though there is this heavy sense of the magical, I wanted the reader to feel like this scenario was only just outside of reality. If that.

Vanessa Cuti, Contributor Note

Cuti was wildly successful in this goal she stated, as I had no idea, over several readings, where the story drifted off into – fantasy? Dream? – and where it came back to reality. If it ever drifted off at all. But that’s ridiculous, of course it drifted from reality… didn’t it?

The story begins fully grounded in a somewhat messy, but very concrete, domestic reality: our narrator is the wife of a married couple who fell in love with the husband of another married couple, resulting in divorces and child custody agreements as is quite common. This is told with such a breezy nonchalance as to give the impression that the narrator doesn’t see anything, from weekly child swaps to her new husband, as any big deal. It’s not that she’s icy; she just skates above it all.

As this was one of the stories Ward included in her “transformation of place” category, I paid particular attention to that aspect. While the most significant transformation occurs later in the story, we are introduced to a more typical transformation right away:

Every other weekend our house swelled with them: a new population. They congregated. They organized. They became fresh in the breakfast nook where I said we had pancakes but not waffles. They sat for hours in the living room, bare feet leaving heat marks on the glass of the coffee table, juice cooling, crumbs everywhere you could imagine. They hooted at the chug of machine guns and grenades in the games they played. I knew they pointed their controllers at my back when I turned to walk out, arms full of plates, crumpled napkins….
When they left, when the house was empty again, even the fabric of the area rugs became cooler to the touch. I heard the high frequency hum of electronics and the tumble of the dryer, the soft lap, lack of hand towels one onto another, floors down. I stood in the doorway to the living room and it appeared to me as a glacier: cold and empty and white.

Notice how many senses Cuti involves in this transformation: not just an influx of children, but there’s mess, and heat, and sound that goes from presumably cool to hot to cool again as they leave. While the narrator doesn’t really state a preference for either state, I get the sense that she’s more about cold and empty and white than messy and hot and noisy. So much is inference in this story.

Anyone who’s ever studied writing is familiar with the phrase “show, don’t tell.” I felt that was incorporated into the character herself: she tells us a lot, but doesn’t show much. In the above quoted scene, we aren’t shown annoyance at the children or relief at the return of order; it’s all in the telling, the language, the tone. But for all we know, she feels lonely hearing the electronic hum and the rhythm of the dryers, and wishes for her children back again. In fact, it could be my reading that affixes values to the two spots, whereas she is merely reporting and feels little about it.

This telling becomes particularly acute in one sentence in particular:

I did sometimes wonder. Wish. That we had met when we were young, before everything. Before we made our lives. But the children, your children, something always chided. This thing that chided, by the way, was not My Best Self. Not my voice. It was choral, all altos. The moan of disappointed mothers. Then you would not have your beautiful children, the mothers said. And this is true. But I would have made and met other children. I would have loved these other children just the same because I am capable of so much love.

I can almost see “Looks directly at the camera” printed over this, the irony is so heavy. Or maybe it’s me who is thinking, it’s because she doesn’t love her children that she could see them replaced with other children. The love she considers herself so capable of is more of a distance, a kind of judgment-free acceptance without attachment. I’m re-watching The Crown at the moment, and it seems to be the Queen Elizabeth way of parenting. Yet there is a moment of judgment: when her children are packing for a week in a cabin in the woods, they take books, while the husband’s children take videogames. This is the most worked up she gets in the story, outside of the dream state.

I’m still not exactly sure what happens during what I’m calling the dream state during their week in the woods. There is clearly a transformation of place:

But when I woke up in the night something had happened. It was that black tail of smoke from the fire. It was the rot from between the beams in the walls, seeping. It was that chipmunk being eaten, limb by limb, by a raccoon under the deck. I heard the chew and crunch. I didn’t know what to do. I lifted my hands to brush back my hair, but they were heavy. Too heavy. Laden with hate, anger, sleep, something.

She tells her husband they have to leave the children. That’s exactly what she says: “We have to leave them here…Not forever. Maybe we come back for them. When they’ve grown a little, found their way.” Interesting how she makes it sound like it’s for their sake they must leave them, not for her sake. There’s no sense of guiilt, as in “I’m ruining them, they’re better off without me”; there’s really no sense of anything other than she wants to get away from them. While that is fine as part of the character, I’m confused about her husband going along with it, and for that reason, I assume we’re in dreamland, or fantasyland, or something. She seems rather surprised at his acquiescence, too.

They leave the children, collapsed in exhaustion in the living room (following a day of hard play calculated to wear them out) and go back home to do adult things like drink wine and smoke weed and screw on the kitchen floor (seriously, I get the novelty, but isn’t a bed so much more comfortable?). then she starts thinking about the children, and here’s where the real fantasy comes into play: the children do, indeed, grow up. Her vision is quite specific, and, while disturbing at times, isn’t completely out of line with the typical raised-by-wolves mythology.

The couple returns the next morning to the same scene of kids sprawled on the living room floor, still asleep. And I’m confused. Did they actually leave their children overnight in a cabin in the woods? Or was that part of the dream? I’m not a parent; is that something parents would do, leave their four five-to-seven-year-old sleeping children overnight in a cabin in the woods? I suspect my confusion is the point, the effect the story wants to have. In that case, it worked great, but it’s not an approach I enjoyed as a reader.

In the end, I had such a hard time pinning down the story, all that stays with me is that one Looking Directly  At the Camera moment, that moment of declaring the lack of love to be loving, which is essentially what happens when she wants to abandon them to grow up on their own, for their own sake. And I’m struck by the distance between what she shows, and what she tells.

* * *

Rhiannon Morgan-Jones, in her blog post on Notes From This Pretty Sight, takes a mothers-eye view of the story, and finds significance in the title, and naming conventions.

Jake Weber’s post on Workshop Heretic is a master class on character motivation – or, in this case, the lack of it: “This isn’t the kind of story that’s going to beat us over the head with explanations of motivation. But maybe we can think of what makes choices three and four different from choices one and two.”