“‘We used to play house and she never guessed.’”
A friend invites you to dinner. You show up at the appointed hour, bearing a bottle of wine, and you notice something worrying: smoke seeping out from under the door to her apartment.
But before you can think what to do, the door swings open and there she is, and she’s on the phone, cheerful, mid-conversation. She makes greeting faces at you, ushers you in, and directs you to a couch. Which is covered in dog-eared library books and political pamphlets. And meanwhile the smoke is getting thicker. Does she even notice it?
She does! She’s off the phone now, prying open a kitchen window, apologizing, fanning the smoke with a baking sheet, all while shouting to you the heartbreaking story that her friend was just telling her. But you can’t hear because now the fire alarm is going off.
So out the two of you go, along with the rest of the building, onto the cold sidewalk, to watch the firemen tromp in. One of the firemen, your friend tells you, went to school with her son — look how big he is now!
Meanwhile she produces, from the pocket of the coat she threw on, a piece of tinfoil-wrapped banana bread, which she happily shares, along with the recipe, which comes from a senile great-aunt in Coney Island. It is, you’re astonished to realize, the most delicious thing you’ve eaten in months.
This is what it’s like to read Grace Paley. You’re in a constant state of mild (or not so mild) bafflement. You keep having to figure out who’s being talked about, what’s going on. Delights present themselves at regular intervals, but so do worries, disasters, sudden half-comprehended stabs of emotion.
Which is to say that reading Paley feels like living. Her stories are realistic not in the ordinary containing-accurate-descriptions-of-rivers sense; they’re realistic in the sense of seemingly perfectly contiguous with the crumpled receipt in your pocket, the phone call you have to make, your current headache. If books could be hooked up to life-detectors, like those little blood-oxygen things we were all told to get at the beginning of the pandemic, hers would all read: HIGH — CONSULT PHYSICIAN. So it’s natural, given all this, to imagine that writing like hers must be easy to produce: just grab an old pencil-stub, turn off your inner critic (as well as your inner grammarian), and watch the awards roll in.
As Paley might say: ha!
My favorite of her stories — the one that most clearly demonstrates the mastery it takes to produce dishevelment this ravishing — is “Faith in the Afternoon.” Faith is a recurrent character, an unapologetic Paley stand-in. In “Faith in the Afternoon” she’s visiting her parents in an assisted living facility, agonizing over the collapse of her marriage. She spends most of the story standing around her mother’s room, being made to feel horrible about herself (“‘Ai, Faithy, you have to do your life a little better than this,”) and wishing her mother’s vicious friend, Mrs. Hegel-Shtein, would go away (“‘So it turns out you really have a little time to see your mother…’”).
Eventually the talk turns to people from the old neighborhood. A little conversational refuge, Faith thinks.
But Mrs. Hegel-Shtein, brimming with venom, encourages Faith’s mother to go ahead and tell about Faith’s old friend Tessie. Faith’s mother refuses. Go on, says Mrs. Hegel-Shtein. Tell her what was in the letter. What’s the use in coddling her?
So Faith’s mother relents. And Tessie’s story is, of course, a nightmare. She — who was so beautiful as a child, who Faith “never didn’t like” — ended up having one child born with such severe disabilities that he had to be placed in a home. Then she had another who was allergic to everything, who “choked from milk.” And finally her husband, “a very pleasant boy,” got cancer, had his finger amputated, then his hand, then died.
You see?, you can hear Mrs. Hegel-Shtein thinking. This is what life is like! And still you don’t visit your mother?
How I read this moment is: Faith is being asked — by the story, by her elders, by the fates that befall even people like Tessie — to surrender. She’s already miserable about her husband and kids, she’s endlessly guilty about her parents, and now this. Bow to Mrs. Hegel-Shtein. Life is too much.
But Paley does something tricky here — much trickier than any pencil-stub imitator could manage.
First she has Faith think, guiltily, about her cheating husband — she wonders if a couple of amputations might actually have kept him at home. This is good — its lack of sentimentality catches us off guard, and it establishes the impregnable courtyard of Faith’s mind, where self-centeredness is not a sin, but just a fact. How long has it been since Faith has seen Tessie anyway?
But then Tessie’s story, having passed through the prism of Faith’s own concerns, lands. And with no Jamesian account of her shifting inner weather patterns, with nothing more than a paragraph break, Paley has Faith say this:
“‘Oh, Mama, Mama, Tessie never guessed what was going to happen to her. We used to play house and she never guessed.’”
Has there ever been a more heartbreaking, heartfelt lament? If life had a customer service department, and if, after decades of tragedy and disappointment, you finally reached a representative, this would be the complaint you’d lodge. Beautiful Tessie, with everything going for her, played house as a kid and had no idea what lay in store for her. How can that be? No fancy metaphors, no philosophical arguments. Just plain human bewilderment, naked as Job.
Most writers, having brought the reader to this point, would take a bow. Title the story “She Never Guessed,” hit ⌘+ P, and go take the dog for a walk.
But Paley, being Paley, does no such thing. The conversation with the old ladies goes on, with further moments of tenderness and chilliness. Then there’s a whole scene with Faith’s father, every bit as rich and sad and unsummarizable as the one with her mother. Life, Paley always seems to be saying, is this and that (and that, and also that). Ivy grows over the grave of your beloved and then gets tangled around the maintenance guy’s weed-whacker and then gets eaten by a goat.
The honorific “vital” has, in American literature, long been firmly affixed to the lapel of Saul Bellow, with his endlessly pushy and impressive prose; if I ran things I’d snatch it from him and pin it to Grace Paley instead. Life isn’t a superheated diatribe about Spinoza and individualism. Life is having your heart broken and then remembering a petition you were supposed to sign and then needing to pick your kid up from school. It all adds up to something, but Paley’s too unassuming, and in too much of a hurry, to say what. Have some banana bread.
Nice low-alarm scene at the start to convey your comparison!