Braunstein: Contrast and time shift

          Check out a few interesting techniques that are being combined in Sarah Braunstein’s short story, “Marjorie Lemke.” The first is that it is like she’s holding a conversation…with herself. The second is a time shift: the “selves” who are talking with each other are the person she used to be and the person she is now:

Was she a loser? Yes. Now. But then? An eight-year-old in nubby knit tights, a girl with glistening pigtails who carried a Muppets lunchbox? No. Back then she had been merely a girl. A girl with a certain open-eyed, owlish look, good posture, a knack for the Rubik’s Cube. She had not yet got her period in Algebra or made out with Len Dugan in the janitor’s closet or been fired from Rite Aid for stealing a can of Pepsi. She had not yet tripped over herself at the cheerleading tryouts and gone home to scrape the skin of her forearm with a safety pin. Bobby Miller. Keith Paulsen. Jose, who had no last name, who gave her a pill to swallow, who said, ‘Think of me as Superman,’ and took off his shirt and on whose hairless chest she saw a giant red ‘S,’ and she kissed it, full of incredulous relief, believing she had found at last the one who would perform the rescue.

Those things and people had not yet happened. Her nose was still unpierced. No butterfly tattoo above her anklebone. No snake eating its tail on her shoulder blade. No Clive. She had not yet become a pregnant nineteen-year-old. She was not yet that girl in the back of Parenting 101 being lectured by a social worker about not shaking your kids and how you got to give them whole milk and lots of vegetables–peas, carrots, zucchini–as if she needed reminding of what a vegetable was.

          The effect is that we get a very complete backstory of her in a very interesting way. We see she’s a realistic character–she has made mistakes in life–and we care about her and are cheering for her to improve her life by the end of these two paragraphs. We see the innocent child and the corrupted adult, the one who used to be ignored by others and the one who seems to ignore being used by others.

Try this:

          I’m going to give you a name. You give me two paragraphs that show me who this person is. Deal? Ok, here’s the name:

BLAKE MACK

Coming tomorrow: I’ve finished reading Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and thoroughly enjoyed it! For the next five posts, I’ll be showing some of the techniques I noticed him using in that amazing story. . .