While flying home after my father's funeral on September 8, 2001, I sat next to a grief counselor from Nova Scotia who told me that when we're in our teens and twenties we often have a brush with optimism and immortality, but beginning in our thirties and continuing when we're in our forties and thereafter, the predominant emotional tide inevitably shifts to grief and loss, increasingly so as we grow older.
On September 8, 2001, I let that grief counselor open my eyes to the truth. I have kept them open in order to appreciate the human condition that we are all subject to, beginning with the national tragedy that started just three days later, at 8:42 a.m. Central Time.
There can be no more fitting and significant theme a writer can choose to shoulder than grief and loss. That is the task that a great short story writer among us has set herself to. I do not take the word great lightly. And neither should you.
[This is my review of Amina Gautier's third book The Loss of All Lost Things, a collection of fifteen short stories published by Elixir Press, Denver, CO, 2016. Note: Her first book, At Risk, won the Flannery O'Connor Award, the First Horizon Award and the Eric Hoffer Legacy Fiction award; her second, Now We Will Be Happy was awarded the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction and the Florida Authors and Publishers Association President's Book Award. This current collection was awarded the Elixir Press Award in Fiction.]
The title of the collection, The Loss of All Lost Things, is apt because each story treats another kind of loss.
In "What's best for you," it's the loss of an attraction, the bare beginnings of one, think a flickering candle, between Bernice, a highly observant, sensitive and educated young woman working in a library who is attracted to an uneducated janitor, Harold, who sings "sweet" popular songs while he works. Today he sings "This Song's for You," while unbeknownst to him, she overhears him through the library stacks:
"As Harold sings about acting out his love in stages, his hands, gentle with the books, are telling Bernice, telling her, telling her just how it could be.
'Harold?'
'He turns, looking sheepish. 'Don't quit my day job, right?'
'She has not meant to say his name or speak at all. Now she feels she should say something, ask him questions, tell him there is a spill that needs attention. 'No, she says, 'It's lovely.'
He smiles revealing capped white teeth. 'Thanks.' Bernice doesn't notice the smile or the way it takes years off his face. Her eyes are riveted to his hand, which remains on the book, fingers idly caressing."
Notice: The poignancy that comes about as a result of what she does notice and what she does not.
He asks her for lunch but she turns him down, saying, she brings her lunch because she's on a diet. The rest of the story concerns her regret over that and her desire to invite him to lunch. In the end, though, he turns her down, saying, "You see, a woman like you and man like me, I knew there was nothing there. I mean it wouldn't be what's best for you. You didn't have to use the diet as an excuse. I understand, you know. You want to date somebody more your type. Somebody that's been to school.'
'That had nothing to do with it,' Bernice says. 'I'm not like that.' She doesn't know what she means by this, but it seems appropriately the thing to say.'"
The story ends with the janitor, replying, "'Everybody is like that,'"
There are many other wonderful stories in this collection:
"A cup of my time," where two twins inside their mother's womb fight "like Jacob and Esau inside Rebekah." One might ask, "Where's the loss and grief?" There isn't any until the mother learns from her doctor that if a procedure fails, "You'll have to choose which one you want to live."
"Resident Lover" where, after a graduate student loses his wife when she leaves him for another student after attending a two-month artist's residency, the wronged male fraudulently applies for an artist's residency of his own, and once there makes a perfect fool of himself—Gautier in that story showing us how pitifully emotionally dependent he is on judgments his ex-wife made about him years earlier. His major moral stance to life? His belief that he deserves a "do-over."
"Disturbance" is a fantasy story about how the town of Togetherness, where everybody is happy in their sameness the wife of a teacher, Everett, at the town school runs off with her child, disturbing the sameness. This story is very powerful and has the eerie horror reminiscent of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery as well as the conceptual fantasy sci-fi appeal that made so many of early Kurt Vonnegut stories great. Yet "Disturbance" stands on its own as a first-rate story with its own gentle sense of humor I happen to love.
The title story, "The Loss of All Lost Things" has us following the tortured lives of a married couple that has just lost their child. From the opening words of the story, "The posters go up immediately," we embark along with these two people on their frantic, anguished nightmare. At first, we're certain this couple will never give up its quest to recover its lost child. Yet just eight pages later, we conclude that it's the parents themselves who have become lost: "Into the dark, against the curve of his neck, she whispers, 'Find me.' Urges him on, saying, 'I want you to lose me and then find me.' She is trying to say what she cannot say, but lost in the moment of rekindled pleasure, all he hears is what sounds like talking crazy. They have sad, sorrowful intercourse, making a love that leaves them feeling worse. When they are through, their thoughts remain as troubled as ever. They hate and they love. They do not know why, but they feel it and they are in agony. Immediately after, she peels him off her like a top sheet and slips from his embrace…"
In the end, only two pages later, they know that once their agony is over, they must lose themselves, move to somewhere new:"Let them start anew.
"Poring over the planner, they consider the geometry of states, and wonder where they might go. They will pick a state—any state—and once they are together they will head out for it and hold it to its promise. There, in that new place, they will all be new people. Where shall it be? They close their eyes. He places his hand atop hers and they move their index fingers across the map. Blindly, they point. When they open their eyes, they sound out the name beneath their fingers, trying its newness on for size."
In "Cicero Waiting," a child's death is ever present. It's about a high school classics instructor who, while teaching his students about the "devastation of Pompeii" is in the midst of having his and his wife's life totally devastated after he loses his daughter while on a shopping trip.
"He packed their daughter into the car and went to Target to buy detergent. He would help out by doing the laundry. It would be a surprise for his wife.
"It pained him to think how easy it had been to lose his daughter. One minute she was near him, playing among a nearby rack of clothing, her head dwarfed by two-pieces on hangers, her feet visible. The next minute she wasn't there… Ten weeks later, the police found his daughter's body."
Meanwhile, his wife is patient; she appears like a saint: "She believed that they could heal."
In the end, she wants to make love.
"Are you coming to bed?"
"Not yet…"
"More work?"
"Cicero—a stack of papers—they're waiting for me."
"I'm waiting for you."
"I need to finish them."
She patted the empty side of the bed and held out her arms to him again…
"Honey, I can't," he said. "I don't know what to do."
"Come here," she said. "I'll show you."
That's poignant Amina Gautier in the process of ripping your heart out.
Now if you're also looking for a courageous Amina Gautier, she is very much in evidence. For example, her story, "As I Wander" starts out as one story, yet miraculously wanders into a totally different story by its end, a mere ten pages later.
Note: Most will agree that an important short story writing rule is what I call Conservation of Characters: Whatever characters you start out with at the beginning of a short story, you had better end up with at the end. That's the case, even if the characters are dead by the end of the story. They can be dead, but they have to be somehow present.
"As I Wander" starts out as a conventional short story: a widow, Judy, four hours after burying her husband, is beset by a group of his estranged relatives who she's never met before visiting her house. They go through her home, touching her things as though they intend to take them home just as soon as she feeds all of them dinner.
Next Judy awakes to the sound of garbage trucks; a month has passed. Judy sits on a bench in a nearby park all night until the sun comes up. She becomes interested in a neighbor, Sampson. When a young man with a "du-rag on his head" rings Sampson's doorbell, Judy strikes up a conversation, asking him '"You ever read any Baldwin?"' a wickedly funny line.
Judy and this young man have a reasonably coherent conversation. A half page later, they're in her bedroom and he's undressing, and we see this man, who is never named, naked: "After taking off his du-rag, he removed the rest of his clothing, revealing a lanky frame. His legs were long, his calves small hard knobs protruding from the backs of his bony legs. She pulled his face to her and kissed him hard and tasting. His lips were soft and fleshy, unlike the rest of him. He was surprisingly gentle and silent within her.
"Making love to the unnamed man leads to thoughts of her deceased husband, Gene: "She loved all the lines on Gene's face.
In the next paragraph, Judy is in bed with the unnamed young man:
"The boy jerked under her hair, and Judy touched his hair lightly, smoothly, her fingers wandering over his intricately patterned corn-rows, following their winding paths along the contour of his head to the base of his skull where they curled under the ends. Once he quieted, Judy grasped the soft and tenuous braids undoing the plaited strands."
The story ends with those words. Like her fingers, the story wandered from where it started. Upon first reading it, I thought it was flawed because it didn't observe Conservation of Characters. Then I decided a great and courageous writer not only knows when to break the rules, but how to break them. And that is the case with "As I Wander."
The characters at the beginning of the story are not the same as at the end, but portraying a story with this shape where the only common character is the principal protagonist, Judy, enables Gautier to show Judy totally overwhelmed with grief. We get to see her losing herself in her grief when she makes love to the unnamed man. The brief affair she has with him is simply the "inciting incident," the event that releases or externalizes her grief, thereby helping us to understand who she is now that Gene is dead and buried, while she simultaneously is answering the same question.
These are just a few of Amina Gautier's creations. Read The Loss of All Lost Things and rescue some of the other Gautier stories from being mired down in grief and loss.
