Photo: Abalone shell by shipper trish on Deviant Art
I was busy looking at the college girls. High-tops were popular again, as were ripped jeans. Cutoffs. Crop tops. There was a group of six in front of me and I noted their similarities: three had on the exact same pair of tennis shoes. Five were wearing shorts so short you couldn’t tell they were wearing them. Two crop tops. Four had braids in their hair. They were all of varying degrees of very thin. The uniformity was mesmerizing. The girls were young and beautiful and proud to be young and beautiful in a way I’d never been at their age. Youth and beauty hadn’t seemed like anything special, and though I’d been young and pretty enough once, I had never been one of them. A few weeks ago, a group of girls had laughed at me from their car. It was clear they were laughing at me because they’d looked right at me and then one of them said something and the others opened their mouths and another pointed. But I hadn’t heard what they’d said. What could they have said? I was just a regular person in blue jeans, not fat or ugly or weird looking. I was plain. But being plain isn’t funny.
I was still disappointed I hadn’t given them the finger or told them to fuck off, hadn’t stuck a hand through an open window to touch a girl’s cheek or pluck a strand of her hair. I’d just stood there. It hadn’t occurred to me to do anything else.
At first, I was a little bored, wondering why I was reading this story. Then about halfway through, the beat dropped, and I realized everything preceding, and for that matter following, was a character study with particular relevance for the present moment.
Lauren and her husband are attending some kind of festival in their town: music, art vendors, that sort of thing. Through a series of small moments, we find out something about who Lauren is. Her husband announces he’s planning on wearing his gray shirt, so she shouldn’t wear hers, but she’s already planned to wear her gray shirt so she wears it anyway. Who are these people who put such forethought into what to wear to a casual event? Then there’s the incident with the teenagers, and it seems Lauren isn’t the type to call out rudeness on the part of others, but kind of wishes she were. Wearing the gray shirt anyway is about as much self-assertion as she’s able to do right now.
We find out she isn’t typically outgoing via an overly symbolic scene involving a snake in a neighbor’s yard. And she had a thing with one of the musicians playing the festival; whether that thing was before or after she was married isn’t clear.
She and her husband go to his office for beers. This varying level of detail is annoying to me, we have no idea what either of them does for a living, but later she references being well-off. She gets really excited by the free tampons in the ladies’ room, and wants to swipe a bunch, along with the magazines and candy lying around. Not that she needs any, but hey, it’s free stuff.
They return to the festival, and Lauren finds Jesse’s booth; her mother asked her to buy one of his seashell paintings, again for reasons that aren’t clear. Maybe she just likes them. He seems to be a family friend, until we find out Lauren’s sister had a “drunken, not-quite-consensual encounter” with him one night. Lauren seems to be the only one aware of this, but again, it’s all vague to the reader, to Lauren, and possibly to the sister. To Jesse, it’s beyond vague:
I wondered what he had done to my sister on that night so long ago and whether whatever had happened had been rape, but once you’ve been saved you’re forgiven, and there’s no need to think about any of the bad things you did in the past. That was the allure of the whole thing. You could just admit to being a sinner and let it all go while everyone else continued to suffer.
Religious salvation isn’t the only way to not think about it. Getting rich and going into politics also seem to work.
Lauren aims for a confrontation but doesn’t quite make it, recapitulating the earlier scene with the laughing girls. I see a lot of overconsumption: of free tampons and magazines, of excessively large wind chimes, of a cluttered house – “We were jamming it full” – which brought to mind bulimia, a frequent sequelae of sexual abuse. This made me wonder if it wasn’t just the sister who had a not-quite-consensual encounter. I kept thinking about who tries to scramble what’s written indelibly in the hippocampus, and who just magically erases it, and how that doesn’t seem fair.
The vagueness of it all, in the setting of explicit details about gray shirts and barbecue and paintings, seems to be an important element, but I found hard to work against. Maybe that’s the most eloquent thing about the story.
A Just Recompense 