Reviewed By Donna Miscolta
One of the beguiling features of Margaret Malone’s story collection is the multiple meanings of its title People Like You. It can be a Sally Field type of reassurance: People like you! They really do. It can be a disdainful categorization: People like you. Blech. Or it can be a comforting promise, more or less: Don’t worry. There are people like you in the world. You’ll find them. Maybe.
Malone’s protagonists are young or youngish women, some with an ambivalence about marriage despite an all too human need for connection. They’re at a loss as to how to achieve that connection. They’re convinced that there’s some mystery to it, but they’re not convinced that that connection, if made, would be enough to puncture a person’s bubble of isolation. Or fragile autonomy. All of the stories are told in first person, enabling the reader to more deeply reside in the aching consciousness of these women trying to find a way to being themselves.
One character, Sylvie, believes she is not brave enough. For others, it’s boredom or inertia. It’s laziness, admits one character. There is self-doubt, hyper-self-awareness – an obsessive calculation and recalculation of motives – both theirs and the world’s.
Malone’s characters often make decisions by not deciding, by accepting the default mode. Or they don’t understand they have a choice. But sometimes along their uncertain way, they follow their instincts to find if not deliverance from, at least insight into their situation – and themselves.
My favorite story is “Good Company,” which is also the longest in this collection of short but pithy and thoroughly disarming stories. Caroline and her boyfriend Marcus drive to Henderson, Nevada, to spend Christmas with Marcus’s parents. His father is a banker attendant at a casino, his mother is staving off death from some chronic disease by consuming fruits and powders pulped in a blender while refusing to deny herself cigarettes. It is the mother Caroline gravitates to. They smoke on the back porch, point at the desert stars with their cigarettes. They chew gum in the car and later remove it from their mouths and stick it on the fence of a construction project they have come to gaze at late at night in a bad part of the city. As they contemplate the changes the new construction will bring, there is a moment that connects these two – the young woman trying to figure out love and life, and the older woman waiting to die – in a city of omnipresent slot machines with their blinking lights of promise.
Malone’s characters make wry, funny comments, sometimes to others, but often to themselves as they try to sort through dilemmas or ponder circumstances of their own unintended making.
In the story “Yes,” a seventeen-year-old girl says “all right” to a bended-knee marriage proposal only because she wants to get the moment over with and her boyfriend back on his feet. She observes inwardly, “So now I’m engaged. I am reserved like a table at a restaurant.”
The words are funny. They also carry pain. It’s the kind of humor that belies our fears of being alone or lost or unwanted. We laugh because we recognize our own vulnerabilities and the possibility that what the world offers will fall short of what we imagine for ourselves. Or what others expect of us. What that seventeen-year-old girl wants is not a wedding, not a husband, but the silent, easy closeness of clinging to a body on the back of a motorcycle and the sense of movement and escape it offers, the feeling of having her breath taken away by the rush of the wind in her face. It’s as simple and ephemeral as that.
Sometimes characters self-sabotage like Delilah in “The Things We Know Nothing About.” Delilah is pregnant and dubious of her maternal instincts, of her readiness or even willingness to be a mother. She justifies the weekly beer she consumes and the bottle of wine on her birthday for their grain and fruit content. All the while she is wishing for a good outcome, because sometimes wishes are all we have.
While Delilah is ambivalent about motherhood, Cheryl yearns for it. Bert and Cheryl open the collection in the title story. They appear again in the middle and once again to close out the collection.
In “People Like You,” after much dithering and wrong turns, they arrive at a surprise birthday party where they know no one except the hosts. The few other women in the room are all pregnant, which Cheryl is not. She finds that a bunch of someone else’s balloons can offer solace at a party where you feel alone and out of place, even though your spouse is there with you, because even though there are times when you think you might actually get a divorce, there are also those times when you share those inside jokes about isolation and you laugh and laugh, and this is as close to love as you can possibly get.
In “I’m Your Man,” there’s the humiliating probing in a doctor’s office, where Malone makes comic and tragic use of the mundane. A sign in the examining room assures patients that We’re all in this together. A urine sample in a brown bag resembles a sack lunch, which first Bert and then Cheryl clutches as they make their escape to the safety of an elevator.
In the last story, “Welcome to Samsara,” Bert and Cheryl have retreated to a beach in Hawaii to recover from a miscarriage, to forget. Bert generates tidal waves in the hotel pool. Cheryl frequents the outdoor market to disappear in the crowd and sit under a tree. “Underneath that tree, each afternoon, I would sit for a little while and hope for my life to make sense again. Then when it didn’t, I’d head back to the hotel.”
She observes the people around her in this paradise, wonders what brought them here:
I watched them walk on packed sidewalks with melting ice cream cones in their hands. I watched them rub shiny oil on their jiggly bellies and thighs, then untie their bikini halter strings to avoid unsightly tan lines. I watched them play tennis, the bright green ball smacked back and forth in the hot sun. I couldn’t tell a damn thing. All of us were here in this beautiful place for our own reasons, and we’d never know who came here to remember and who came here to forget.
The full beauty of Malone’s writing never flaunts itself, but carries a quietly growing ruckus of feeling to the last lovely paragraph of this story, which also closes the book, leaving the reader with a space in her chest more than big enough to embrace these characters over and over again.
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Donna Miscolta is the author of the novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced (Signal 8 Press, 2011). Her short story collection Hola and Goodbye won the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman and will be published by Carolina Wren Press in November 2016. Find her at donnamiscolta.com.