Max & Yolanda Blender
Sleepless, I stumble from bed to the kitchen, where I find Max Blender doing the Sunday crossword in a t-shirt and undershorts at the counter beside a pot of fresh, strong coffee. It's only 1:30. Earlier, Max was suicidal. He had arrived with his pillow and toothbrush around 9pm, saying Yolanda had thrown him out. This is a long story. I may not tell you the half of it. Suffice it to say that their kids are out of the house, and Yolanda and Max have suddenly found life empty and pointless. They are bored with each other, bored with the long respectability of their marriage. Like everyone else in that situation, they think it's all about sex. For Max, the adventurous sex he remembers from their early times together is gone. For Yolanda, the romance is gone. How can she make love to a man who checks his phone during coitus? They have launched themselves into a series of crushes and affairs, all temporary and disappointing. They did this simultaneously, as if they planned it out together, but they didn't. They're not swingers; they're romantics. Now they both feel cheated on.
Commentary
In my last story collection, Savage Love, I included a section of microstories, most were less than a page long. They’re not flash fiction or prose poems, or anything else already named and categorized. I resist calling them anything other than microstories, by which I only mean that they are exceedingly short.
How do you know when a story is done? Two things. First, you haven’t got anything more to say. You have the distinct feeling that one more word added to the pile will irretrievably distort the structure. Your little house of cards will come falling down. Second, you have achieved a certain density of semantic and syntactic play. You have invented layers, implications, clever juxtapositions and reversals, striking diction, emotional depths, and perfect characters (reflected in perfect names) who have all the personality they need to make the story work and no more. You have created a fizz of synaptic activity for the reader to enjoy. Brain fizz.
The thing to notice about these little stories is that the real story is much larger than the words on the page. They leave a tremendous amount to the reader’s imagination through techniques of implication.
“Max & Yolanda Blender” begins with three short scenes sketched (implied) in 35 words. The time scale recedes in precise steps, with the most emphasis placed on now, 1:30am, when the narrator stumbles into the kitchen. “Sleepless” announces the original disjuncture, but then, as the first sentence rolls out, everything is a bit of a surprise though the surprise is only registered in the word order and the diction. There’s a lovely oddity in the use of the full name “Max Blender” that signals he is somewhat of an outsider, not a normal member of the household, definitely not what you expect in the kitchen doing the crossword at 1:30am. The last words of the sentence, “fresh, strong coffee,” already imply a new determination, a strengthening of the nerves, and they contrast nicely with “sleepless” at the beginning and with “suicidal” seven words later. I like this sentence because there is no emotional coaching. It’s deadpan. All the words are commonplace, but they glitter with irony.
So then we go back through time. Max’s arrival at 9pm. (With pillow and toothbrush, details that are comic in their juxtaposition with tragic domestic upheaval—the earlier commonplace details in the kitchen become increasingly comic in retrospect.) The earlier bust-up with Yolanda, leading to his expulsion. (Some story writers might assume that this is the important part of the narrative, but to me all bust-ups are about the same and there is absolutely no point in wasting words on this one.)
Then the narrator breaks off (narrator/authorial intrusion—metalepsis) and tells you that’s not the whole story and he’s not going to tell you the whole story (so you have to imagine it). This is story action at the level of structure. You set up a structural expectation, then you break it. Better than droning on and on about he-said, she-said, and all the incriminating character evidence. Tell another story instead.
Most writers and readers think that telling a realistic story is important. Get the details down, present scenes, record the dialogue, tell about everyone’s childhood memories. What I generally think is important is shaking up the reader’s synapses, creating fizz. Think of a sentence as a one-way street. Suppose you just stay on the street for two hours, with the same housing developments and strip malls the whole way. Now suppose there’s a detour in the first block, you have to drive up on the sidewalk, but there’s a young couple there with a dog and a toddler, your appointment is important, you try to get around, hit a parked police car, you exit your vehicle and begin to run up the street, you still haven’t got past the first block, you duck down someone’s driveway, after following various lanes and sidestreets, you find yourself back on the original street, you can see your car a block away, no time to retrieve it, you have to push on, there’s a short cut just ahead—
I like to write sentences and paragraphs like that.
(It has not escaped me that the commentary is now ten times longer than the story.)
But then the narrator goes on to tell you the whole back story in summary, in a series of sentences that juxtapose Max and Yolanda. Thinking of their marriage, he misses adventure, she misses romance. Suddenly the story has two parallel plots. Parallel structure is a standard technique of elaboration. In this case, they are parallel yet contrasted. (Note the anaphora: “For Max” “For Yolanda”.) And the narrative has jumped a semantic level; the story of Max and Yolanda has become distributed, that is, it’s the story of a lot of married couples—we are all Max and Yolanda Blender.
All this is good and fun, but the ending is what makes this story zing. Look carefully at the last three sentences.
They did this simultaneously, as if they planned it out together, but they didn't. They're not swingers; they're romantics. Now they both feel cheated on.
Terse and packed, these sentences, in effect, present an aphorism based on the contrast between swingers and romantics. Swingers knowingly and openly embark on affairs. Planned polyamory. Based on lifestyle choices. Romantics are individuals looking for true love. They might still end up sleeping with a lot of people, but their project is different. Swingers logically can’t feel betrayed by their partners; romantics feel betrayed by their partners and by life.
I won’t argue for the universal truth of these sentiments; one never does with an aphorism—an aphorism is a trope, not a research paper. It’s a little text meant to make the reader stop and think, not a thesis. But I love the occluded syntax here, the rhythmic stops, the parallel construction in the middle sentence. The whole passage beginning with “Suffice it to say…” and ending “Now they both feel cheated on” has a shape and trajectory. Max and Yolanda begin together, married and bringing up kids, then they hit the life rapids and split apart, yet “now,” ironically, they are “both” together in spirit, in the same spiritual spot, feeling “cheated on.” They don’t know this themselves, but the narrator does.
With this figurative coming together of that which was sundered, the story comes to an end.
Note that we know nothing about the narrator and very little about Yolanda. In contrast, Max Blender has a personality. In moments of great domestic tumult he is apt to make coffee and do the crossword puzzle. Suicidal, he nevertheless remembers to bring his toothbrush and favorite pillow. During sex, he will check his phone. His personality is a comic motif.
I didn’t invent very short stories. I just the other day reread Thomas Bernhard’s collection The Voice Imitator. And I keep a copy of Ror Wolf’s Two Or Three Years Later: Forty-Nine Digressions near to hand. The Canadian writer Kent Thompson used to compose what he called “postcard stories” meant to fit in the message box of a standard postcard. He published a collection of his own postcard stories called Leaping Up Sliding Away and an anthology of other writers’ work called Open Windows: Canadian Short Short Stories (two of my stories included). Also Adelheid Duvanel, Robert Walser, Lydia Davis. To name a few. But these are co-conspirators, not influences.