The Little Burst

Today's lengthy selections are devoted to a scene taken from the short story, "A Little Burst," included in Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize winning collection of stories, Olive Kitteridge.   The stories focus on the life of a retired schoolteacher in coastal Maine.  A 21st century counterpart  to Sarah Orne Jewett's late nineteenth century stories about the changes of the once familiar coastal communities of Maine in the aftermath of the Civil War, Strout's collection documents change, loss,  and disappointment as well as life's unexpected tendernesses.  Much like Jewett's unconventional heroine from The Country of the Pointed Firs, Mrs. Todd, Strout's own heroine looms large, literally and physically.  She is a formidable and yet comforting presence in the collection, which is told not only from her perspective, but from those whose lives are entwined with hers.   In the best of the regionalist tradition, we grasp the importance of perspective from the collection's own shifting viewpoints, which position Olive at center-stage as well as on the periphery.  (This aspect of the collection reminds me a bit of Jewett's Strangers and Wayfarers).  In this story, Olive introduces a theory about life that she describes as  "big bursts" and "little bursts":

 Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents.   Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.

Yet this wholesome definition of the "little burst" is soon revised when Olive is at her son's wedding and she overhears her new daughter-in-law (the perfectionist therapist, "Dr. Suzanne Bernstein, MD PhD")  making fun of her flowered dress and critiquing her parenting of Christopher.   Crushed, she retreats to the couple's bedroom. Snooping in the closet and drawers, she is further humiliated by Sue's petite clothing, which only reminds her of her own large physique. Soon, however, she discovers a way of diminishing Dr. Sue: 

Olive slides open the top drawer of the bureau.  Once a place for a boy's sock and T-shirts, the drawer is now filled with her daughter-in-law's underwear---tumbled together, slippery, lacy, colorful things.  Olive tugs on a strap and out comes a shiny pale blue bra, small-cupped and delicate.  She turns it slowly in her thick hand, then balls it up and pokes it down into her roomy handbag. 

Then, she marks a sweater: 

The beige sweater is thick, and this is good, because it means the girl won't wear it until fall.  Olive unfolds it quickly and smears a black line of Magic Marker down one arm.  Then she holds the marker in her mouth and refolds the sweater hurriedly, folding it again, and even again, to get it as neat as it was at first.

And finally she steals just one shoe, satisfied that in introducing chaos into her daughter-in-law's life, that she will subject her to the common denominator of self-doubt:   

It does not help much, but it does help some, to know that at least there will be moments now when Suzanne will doubt herself.  Calling out, "Christopher, are you sure you haven't seen my shoe?  Looking through the laundry, her underwear drawer, some anxiety will flutter through her.  "I must be losing my mind, I can't keep track of anything....And my God, what happened to my sweater?"   And she would never know, would she?  Because who would mark a sweater, steal a bra, take one shoe?

The story ends with a sharp revision of the earlier notion of a "little burst." As it turns out, life's little lifts are not simply a matter of human kindness, but are equally produced by our  less magnaminous acts--our attempts to correct and compensate, even devilishly, for life's injustices:

 As a matter of fact, there is no reason, if Dr. Sue is going to live near Olive, that Olive can't occasionally take a little of this, a little of that---just to keep the self-doubt alive.  Give herself a little burst.  Because Christopher doesn't need to be living with a woman who thinks she knows everything.  Nobody knows everything--they shouldn't think they do."

---Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge (2008)

Damn straight.

Dream House Part II: Islands

"'T was the same little house her father had built him when he was a bachelor, with one livin'-room, and a little mite of a bedroom out of it where she slept, but 't was neat as a ship's cabin.  There was some old chairs, an' a seat made of a long box that might have held boat tackle an' things to lock up in his fishin' days, and a good enough stove so anybody could cook and keep warm in cold weather....Joanna had done one thing very pretty.  There was a little piece o'swamp on the island where good rushes grew plenty, and she'd gathered 'em, and braided some beautiful mats for the floor and a thick cushion for the long bunk.  She'd showed a good deal of invention; you see there was a nice chance to pick up pieces o'wood and boards that drove ashore, and she'd made good use o'what she found.  There was n't no clock, but she had a few dishes on a shelf, and flowers set about in shells fixed to the walls...."

---Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)

In this section of Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) we hear the painful story of Joanna Todd, the cousin by marriage of main character Almira Todd.  Jilted by her fiance, Joanna is so distraught over her fate that she determines that she can no longer reside within the community.  Relocating to "Shell Heap Island," she takes up residence in her father's bachelor house, were she lives as a hermit until her death.  As she explains, her extreme bitterness and complete loss of "hope" not only make her "want to be alone" but make her unfit for social life.  Joanna's makeshift efforts at domesticating her home, as recorded above, evidence her innovation, but also the loss of the true creative power which is inextricably tied to hope--the idea that the future will be better than the past.  Joanna understands such hope as a prerequisite for community life.   

Joanna's island home is a dream home not because it represents something utopian, but because it represents something universal.  When the narrator of the story makes a pilgrimage to Shell-Heap Island, decades after Joanna's death, only a foundation of stones from her home and a few flowers from the garden remain.  Yet as her commentary suggests, this kind of island home resides in all of us in the more figurative sense: "In the life of life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong."  Our fellows of the cell....love that, Jewett. 

Mystic Gardening: Two From Jewett

These wonderfully rich and evocative quotes from Sarah Orne Jewett's masterpiece afford us a view not only of coastal Maine in the nineteenth century, but of alternative medicine during this period. Mrs. Todd's work is understood as an indispensable supplement to that of the town doctor and prompts reflection on our own contemporary commitment to seeking therapies outside of traditional medicine--a sense, perhaps, of the inadequacies of medicine as practiced today. But the pleasure of these passages comes from the sense it gives us of abundance, of a fragrant space filled with plants and people--a fragrance that signifies a human presence.

"Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks' experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be."

"At one side of this herb plot were other growths of a rustic pharmacopoeia, great treasures and rarites among the commoner herbs. There were some strange and pungent odors that roused a dim sense and remembrance of something in the forgotten past. Some of these might once have belonged to sacred and mystic rites, and have had some occult knowledge handed with them down the centuries; but now they pertained only to humble compounds brewed at intervals with molasses or vinegar or spriits in a small cauldron on Mrs. Todd's kitchen stove. They were dispensed to suffering neighbors, who usually came at night as if by stealth, bringing their own ancient-looking vials to be filled."

---Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)