Scott Blackwood

Praise for In the Shadow of Our House

New York Times Book Review

IN THE SHADOW
OF OUR HOUSE
Stories.
By Scott Blackwood.
159 pp. Dallas:
Southern Methodist University Press. $19.95.

THE title story in this impressive and accomplished debut collection imagines the emotional ache of the doctor in Jonestown, Guyana, who discovered the followers of Jim Jones after they drank that infamous cyanide-laced punch. The doctor, now retired and back home in Texas, is dying himself (of cancer), but the memory of all those bodies -- Families. Limbs intertwined. Mothers sprawled over children'' -- has become ''the axis around which his life winds.'' In the course of things, Joseph Conrad is quoted, but the story is more original than that -- in its point of view, for instance.

''In the Shadow of Our House'' is narrated by the collective ''we'' of the doctor's neighbors. (''If you had lived long on our street and drunk late at our parties,'' it begins.) The neighbors do more than the usual unburdening of themselves, so we learn a fair bit of their individual histories. But at the story's center is a hallucinatory scene in which the doctor dreams about confronting Jones, who can give no more satisfying an account of the tragedy than ''Words fail.'' ''That's it?'' the doctor asks. ''Words fail?''

And though we have the story before us to testify that they don't, Scott Blackwood seems to have placed it up front as a sort of disclaimer, a warning to readers about the inadequacy of language. Another story, ''Prodigal Fathers,'' underlines the point. Darnell, the father of the title, has been away from his wife and son for months, working on a movie crew. He comes home for Christmas three days late because he has spent the holiday with his lover. His son has guessed the reason for the delay, and when Darnell finally arrives, the boy asks him if he has a girlfriend. ''I tried to think of something to say,'' Darnell reports, ''words that would fall meaningfully into place, like in Scrabble. Single truths about relationships, integrity.'' But he can think of nothing but an obvious lie.

It is not only language that is failing in these stories, which are set in Texas among people whose marriages are falling apart and whose children are going astray. And though one story, describing a river that both erodes its banks and deposits silt to form new ones, notes that there is ''loss and compensation everywhere,'' it is difficult to find anything here but loss. Yet the cumulative effect is not entirely sad, perhaps because these stories are so honest as they capture the dapple of emotions and perceptions that cross the mind like sunlight and shadow on a river.

One of these perfectly described interludes comes in a companion story to ''Prodigal Fathers,'' told from the point of view of Darnell's wife, Kay. She is grieving over the death of their other son (indeed, Darnell's infidelity may be his own response to grief). Sitting alone in her car, drinking peach wine coolers, Kay has one of those moments, not exactly epiphanies, when, in the midst of intense emotion, the eye is suddenly caught by an inconsequential detail that becomes engraved in memory. For Kay, it is the sight of a woman in a red sundress talking on a pay phone, holding her little girl by the shoulders. As Kay watches, the woman begins shouting into the phone, the child breaks free and the woman's change spills to the ground. Kay longs to tell her that ''it would be all right, whatever had happened, though I knew it wasn't true. She would have to live without things. But knowing this wouldn't make it any easier.''

Kay may be wrong, you think as you finish the story, the last in the collection. For just as the act of reading this book disproves the contention that words fail, the characters in it manage to survive their losses. They carry on, perhaps destructively or self-destructively, and they never entirely succumb, are never frozen in despair. As Darnell says, ''For the most part, I think we do the best we can, with uneven results.''

Darnell's modest claim for our human strivings, though humbling, is right on the mark, as are these acute and nimble stories.

Julie Gray is on the editorial staff of Town & Country magazine.

First Chapter of WE AGREED TO MEET JUST HERE

1

The river winds through the cedar and oak clotted hills west of our city. Along its limestone bluffs, where Tonkawa Indians once lived, now sprawl lavish Mediterranean-style homes. Gazing from the terraced deck of one of these, you’d see our city’s earnest skyline to the east, a half-dozen crane arms hoisting new bones alongside the pink granite dome of the state capitol. To the north, the University Tower, its clock face and observation deck, from which a man once shot and killed fifteen people. Others have leaped from the tower, coaxed by the dizzying voice of the ground, some leaving behind shoes neatly paired on office window ledges, notes folded in pockets: I didn’t fall, I wasn’t pushed, I jumped. You might even hear that same dizzying voice now, standing at the terraced deck’s railing one early August afternoon, watching a paddleboat move upriver past Deep Eddy swimming pool, pale green and winking in the heat. On the hill beyond, the peaked roofs of our craftsman-style homes, our shadowed porches and lawns. And in one backyard, Winnie Lipsy stares up into the gnarled branches of an oak, where her eight-year-old son Isaac sits. Too high, she says. Come down now. She can’t help but raise her arms above her head as if she too were climbing. Come down now. And later, when we hear about Isaac’s fall from that tree, his arm broken in three places, we remember Winnie’s self-contained silences at our parties and homeowners’ meetings, gaps between words which we anxiously fill with talk of rising property taxes, crepe myrtles, and perennial beds, and we think of this as her comeuppance. At the hospital, some of us embrace her, feel her body at first stiffen then give way a little, like a loose hardwood plank beneath your foot. We talk of our own sons’ and daughters’ broken bones, their near misses, their current troubles. Winnie listens, her face taut, expressionless, and we think of deer we sometimes still see along our greenbelt standing in groves of cedar, motionless, testing the air. We imagine she is thinking, not of her son, but of her long ago given-up daughter, and for a moment, she gives way to us, and we can feel the morning dark quiet of our houses just before the children wake up, just before our hearts are gripped with doubt. We want to absolve her of all the lies she will tell herself and her children because we wish to absolve ourselves. We later come by Winnie and Dennis Lipsy’s house to deliver jelly beans and cookies, to sign Isaacs’s cast with our looping scrawls, and, like the dizzying voice of the ground, we say, See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart?

***

For decades, our children have skinned their noses and chins on Deep Eddy’s shallow bottom. NO JUMPING the white painted letters on the side say, yet they dive, jackknife, cannonball, and shot-in-the-heart-gunfighter fall into its spring-fed water. Scars stretch on skin until almost imperceptibly they become our children’s grown faces. The pool, too, is scarred from one hundred years of floods: granite blocks from burst dams have scored it; ancient uprooted cypresses have hammered its plaster sides. After one flood in the 1920s, a great hole was gouged in the bottom. The pool’s owner, a former circus promoter, took the opportunity to dig the hole even deeper and line it with canvas. He constructed a sixty-foot platform for Lorena and her diving horse, who appeared nightly at 8:45 sharp. We’ve seen pictures of her up there on her horse, Mumford, staring down into the great watery wound below.

For three summers, Natalie Branch was our pool lifeguard. She wore an old broad-brimmed white hat, the kind a fifties movie star might wear, while perched on her platform overlooking the pool. We coveted Natalie’s smooth pale skin, her wide hips and large breasts, so unlike the tan boyish bodies of the other girls who worked the pool. We watched with a kind of awe across the water as she gazed down between her knees at a knot of rule-breaking teenagers, some of them our own sons and daughters, their faces repentant. Later, she’d wave them over and they’d talk excitedly with her, forgetting themselves, their limbs intertwining lazily with the legs of her platform. We understood. Sometimes we pretended Natalie was our girl. So what did Natalie have to say? we’d quiz our children on the walk home, our secret hearts clenching. Vacationing in Colorado or on South Padre Island, we’d suggest sending Natalie a postcard and our children would give us sheepish looks and go silent, as if they suspected. And sometimes we’d see Natalie standing in line just outside the pool at Jim-Jim’s Fruit Ice stand, talking to college boys about a local band or a foreign film showing at the University (Almodovar, a name we rolled in our mouths like a lozenge). She’d let the college boys buy her mango ices and then dismiss them, all the same, with her wide canted hips, promising only that she’d be at the pool again tomorrow, the white hat askew on her head, fingers winding and unwinding her tethered whistle. Some of us wanting nothing more than to drunkenly fall upon Natalie in the darkened backseats of our Volvos and SUVs some night after she’d swum her mile. Smell chlorine on her skin. Wear her wide-brimmed hat low over our eyes, as she does.
And sitting by the pool one late afternoon in July, Winnie Lipsy had looked up from her book to see Natalie’s wide-brimmed hat being swept across the water by a gust of wind. It caught against the chain-link fence. Maybe Winnie thought about retrieving it. Rose off her towel. Looked across the pool to where Isaac was but couldn’t find him. Her heart stuttered. A dark shape was submerged near the lap lanes. People underwater can’t breathe is what she thought. For an instant, she imagined the pool emptied, EMTs crouched around her son, a puddle spreading on the concrete. But then Isaac’s head poked to the surface and she shoved the image aside, as any of us would. Natalie came for her hat and smiled at Winnie as she passed. Another wind gust and Natalie clamped the hat on her head with both hands and pretended to fly, soaring over a few of the small children in the shallow end of the pool, who giggled and splashed. And before Winnie made her way to her son on the other side of the pool, before she touched his head like a talisman, she might have thought how our Natalie was everything she was not at nineteen: unselfconscious, funny, sensuous, unafraid.

***

In late August, the sun hammers our city flat and listless. The river has a fetid smell. At home, we sweat and bicker with our children returning from the last week of camp or just-ending summer jobs. We walk our dogs, who, grown sullen from the heat, have forgotten the nutrias swimming along our riverbank. We visit the pool in the early evening, play keep-away and Marco Polo with our children, and look for Natalie, but she’s nowhere to be seen. A few of us ask an acne-faced boy at the front counter if she’s sick. He shrugs, says he doesn’t know. Do you work here? we want to ask. Tomorrow, she will be back, we tell ourselves, already wistful. But then we see her outside the fence, locking her bike to the railing, and realize our Natalie has only swapped shifts. We breathe easier.
The pool shows movies on Thursday nights. Creature from the Black Lagoon. Jaws. From our porches, we can hear children’s collective screams. When they first started the movies years ago, Ruth Dodd heard the screaming and called the police. Didn’t they tell you about the movie night? someone asked. Yes, she said, but what did that have to do with all those awful screams?
On movie nights, we make drinks, sit on our porches and wait for our them. The joy and terror in those voices. The hairs rising on the backs of our necks. The night, sharpened.
And then, just before Labor Day, the pool is closed for repairs. We stare in disbelief at the sign on the gate, the pale green water winking up at us below. Curse under our breath. Our children protest. Older ones look at one another, say There’s more than one way to skin a cat, certain that only they could be clever enough to come up with such a macabre expression. So they say it again.
The night is clear. Heat radiates off our streets and houses, back into space. We sit on our porches and look at the stars and try to recall constellations. Cassiopeia is one. Pleiades, the seven sisters. We try not to think of Natalie. We remember the TV weatherman saying that relief is on the way.

Scott Blackwood

We Agreed to Meet Just Here: A Novel

Excerpt "Indians" Story from Boston Review

Thursday, December 3, 2009

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In the Shadow of Our House: Stories

Praise for In the Shadow of Our House

First Chapter of WE AGREED TO MEET JUST HERE

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