BASS 2022: Claire Luchette, “Sugar Island” from Ploughshares #147

It is the simplest kind of story – two lovers picking up a couch for an apartment – but there is a telescoping of time within the story, and especially at the end, that allows it to be told both in the moment of romantic doubt and pleasure and in a future memory of pain. And isn’t this how we really look on the past? Both with the purity of how we felt colored by how we feel now?

Andrew Sean Greer, Introduction, BASS 2022

How do you tell an end-of-love story? With a really big symbolic couch, of course. Open it like this:

Maggie and Joan took the two o’clock boat to Sugar Island. A man was supposed to show them his camelback sofa, green velvet upholstery, scrolled arms, feet like talons. Seven hundred. The ad said it dated back to 1908. This struck Maggie as disgusting – a hundred years of butts – But Joan loved old things, and she wanted to buy Maggie a sofa, somewhere they could sit together and read when Joan visited. Joan’s love language was gift-giving. Maggie’s was gift-receiving.

The skill of gift-receiving is underappreciated. What is there to it, you ask: you smile, say “Thank you” with as much enthusiasm as the gift, and the relationship, calls for, and move on. And that’s fine for the casual friend or the cousin you see at Christmas and every five years at the family reunion. But what about when your spouse brings home, time and again, elaborately jewel-encrusted silver jewelry when you’ve only ever worn a plain gold chain and almost-invisible gold ball studs? Or when at an office event you make an idle comment about a teapot displayed on a shelf just for the sake of having something to say and suddenly it shows up at your plate, courtesy of your boss who’s trying to impress his high-end colleagues with his magnanimity?

Or, more relevantly to the story, when your girlfriend wants to sit closer to you when you read together, so she drags you a few hundred miles and a ferry ride to buy a century of butts?

We get the backstory of the relationship intermingled with the saga of the trip to the guy with the camelback. They met over blood, literally; Maggie was a phlebotomist, Joan needed a blood test. Notice the language and imagery. A camelback: sure, it’s a sofa, but there’s some extraneous feel to it, like a deformity or an unfamiliar means of travel. It has “feet like talons”: the better to grab on to you my dear? Then there’s Sugar Island: what a sweet place that must be! Google tells me, “From thrilling boat rides to sweeping views and extreme relaxation in your own secluded paradise, Sugar Island truly has it all.” Well, ok, if everything you want is on that list. Apparently there’s also at least one antique store. Phlebotomy: the story points out how even that initial encounter was give-and-receive. “It was convenient to sleep with a woman whose bodily fluids she’d already handled.” Ok, convenient, but also weird. All of this is weird, but in a playful, rather than a creepy, way. Oddball, then, rather than weird.

The relationship was initially a good one, it seems, though Maggie seems to have just accepted it rather than it being something she craved. Even when Joan moved 445 miles away, she continued via a kind of inertia. But inertia doesn’t last forever in a universe full of friction:

They took turns making 445-mile trip, and with each trip, it took Maggie longer and longer to get there. She would park at the rest stop in Ceylon, get a car wash, do a crossword. One time, she pulled off the turnpike to play eighteen holes of mini-golf. She could not identify the exact moment at which her love for Joan folded in on itself. But somewhere on the turnpike, when she was going to the minimum speed in the rightmost lane, she found she could not make it sit up straight.
… The last time Maggie tried to end things, she practiced what she would say during the 445-mile drive to Sandusky. She decided to tell Joan the truth. “The trouble is,” she would say, “I don’t care what you have to say about anything at all.”

Yeah, that sounds pretty out-of-love. Yet here they are buying the couch. To Joan, it’s a great find. The owner is an artist of sorts, as is Joan, and they have a great time while Maggie stands around idly.

Maggie’s decision to take the couch, to literally carry it back rather than wait for the offered white-glove delivery, is part of her effort to “take and active interest in the events of her life.” Nothing displays her any-way-the-wind- blows attitude better than an art piece Joan made for her the day after their first night together:

Joan had attached a long tube of ripstop to a fan. The tube inflated and seemed to sway, like an air dancer, and Maggie saw that Joan had painted the tube to look like her. The ripstop woman was wearing the same striped shirt she wore the day before. Maggie watched her nylon self lean one way, then the other. Her arms swung by wide, and when the wind blew, she kinked at the waist and bent low, then stood up again. It was so startling, so moving, but even now, years on, Maggie pulse still quickens when she drives past a car worship.

Which brings me to another feature of this story: the occasional narratorial shift into present tense. The narrator has a powerful voice. I found it distracting. It’s almost as if there’s an observer narrator, but no one’s there. I suspect there’s some writerly reason for this – you don’t go through all the rounds of edits involved to get to BASS without someone saying, Hey, what’s this here – but I’m not perceptive enough to get it. Maybe some day I’ll run into something that will clarify it, so I document it here for future insight. Note: Some day will come sooner than expected. Before the end of this post, in fact.

Then there’s the highly symbolic couch with its years of butts. As they carry it to the ferry, Joan at the lead end is walking backwards. “’You have to be my eyes,’ Joan said, stepping backward. ‘Tell me if I’m going to walk into something.’” Oh, honey, you are. But Maggie’s not gonna warn you.

From Maggie’s POV:

Past Joan, Maggie saw fields of rushes and creeping thistle. There was so much nothing. The street was flat and seemed deserted, but then Joan said, “Hello,” and a boy in big jeans pulled up next to them on a bike, no helmet. He nodded as he glided past them, and peddled with lassitude, knees wide, aimless. The only sound was his bike chain slipping over the sprocket.

So much nothing, except the kid only Joan sees. Maybe it’s Maggie who’s going to need the warning.

When they finally get to the ferry, Maggie can’t manage any more. She puts her end of the couch down and one of the ferry staff comes over to help. She watches how easily they manage: “She wished she hadn’t given up so quickly.”

The whole relationship is right there in those three moments of the camelback.

Ah, but then the final act opens:

The boat left Sugar Island with a lurch, and Joan put an arm around Maggie. Joan smelled like sweat and Bagley’s wine. They sat on the camelback, looking out over Lake Michigan, and it was nice, after hauling the couch, to be held by Joan. More than the material goods and the attention and the eye contact during sex, Maggie expected she would miss this the most: the way Joan clung, close as plum to pit.
She expected, too, that only she was capable of ending things.

I wish the story had ended here, with all that last sentence implies. I think that’s my main complaint about the story. I want it to be Carvered-down, leave me something to contribute. It’s not that the final page isn’t interesting; it is. The final paragraph is pretty cool, in fact, showing what we hold on to and what we let go, how we often want, reject, and regret no matter which wins out. But that line above about expectation is so eloquent, I just wish it had room to resonate more.

But we get the guided tour of what happens next, complete with all of Maggie’s feelings about it. And I notice here the mixture of past, present, and future: when they get the couch home, when they break up, long after they break up, many years after in fact, and the intent implied by the last sentence of the piece.

Here’s where some day happens. I read Jake’s post on the story: he refers to it as lyric, rather than narrative. Feelings, rather than events. That reminded me of something I’d encountered in a story last year:

I listened to a podcast that explained the difference between narrative and lyric. Narrative proceeds along a time line: one event, then the next, with connections that might be lyric or explicit, but time moves and the story changes with it. Lyric occurs in a moment of time. That’s what this final paragraph does: it encompasses the narrator’s experience, both leading up to her trip and as the manager of the crying rooms, it embraces her confusion, her sorrow, even her medical training. But it stays in that one moment, happening all at once.

Post on Pushcart 2022’s story, “The Crying Room” by Lucas Southworth

Maybe this is why present tense shows up, why in the final paragraph it all blends together, and when I wrote about all of Maggie’s feelings and the shifting time frame, I was describing this lyric moment, just as Jake and Justin St. Germain describe. Which is why Carvering it down would not be a good idea, why it’s right the way it is.

In her Contributor Note, Luchette writes, “I wanted to explore the consequences of receiving – gifts, kindness, love.” That’s the kind of thing authors often write in these notes, how the story “explores” something. It’s a concept I don’t understand, this idea of a story written to explore something. When I want to explore something, I want to write about it, not make up characters and situations and plots and narrators and pretend they have lives and wills of their own. Fiction writers tend to be adamant about this. I remember someone at Zoetrope, back in the day, saying she had been writing a short story but then the character did something so unexpected, she had to write a novel about it. I don’t think this is any form of rationalization or self-deception; a lot of fiction writers feel this way, they are following the character’s lead, at least when they do their best work. I’ve been reading stories for twelve years now, trying to understand this, and I still think everything that comes out of a writer’s head was in the writer’s head to begin with, and if a character does something unexpected, it’s because the writer chose that path. That’s why I was such a crappy fiction writer.

Insights about lyric structure aside, this story felt overly written to me, which is more about me than about the story. I’m surprised at my reaction. I’ve never thought I was much of a minimalist, but maybe I’m shifting in that direction.

I was quite fond of Luchette’s Pushcart 2020 story “New Bees” and have her novel Agatha of Little Neon on my TBR list.  

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• Jake Weber focuses on the lyric aspects of the story in his post at Workshop Heretic.  
• The podcast I’ll Find Myself When I’m Dead, S4E6, explaining narrative and lyric can be found here; the passage is at about the 1:08 mark.