Edan Lepucki's "A Love to Calm the Body" can be found in Avery Anthology 4. It's a story with two similar narratives, one told by Dorothy, a college-aged girl in Southern California in the late 1940's, and one from the point of view of, though still told by Dorothy, of Dorothy's grandmother (her mother's mother).
While the two narratives eventually head in the same direction, they do take varying paths and speeds to get to the finality of them. The grandmother line jumps right into what was going on - the grandmother, as a young, married, woman, being treated for hysteria. I'm not at all sure if the reader was supposed to be surprised at the treatment method, I do not believe that's the reaction Lepucki was looking for, but this particular reader wasn't. I was more surprised at Dorothy and her own path to a similar sort of treatment from her friend's boyfriend near the end of the story - this line of story took much longer to get to this level of action than the grandmother's did.
It's a fairly long story (19 pages) and Lepucki does a nice job of maintaining the reader's attention the entire time. The story is written in a straightforward manner that fits very well, especially seeing as the grandmother's story is from the last decade of the 20th Century and Dorothy's is from the late 1940's. For a hint of the writing style, maybe my favorite passage, from toward the end of the story:
(I told my husband I was pregnant with our third child late one evening in the kitchen, the back yard only a black square in the window above the sink. We'd been married for over six years. I remember when I told him the news, he reached out and touched my belly in a way he'd never touched it before. My breath went out of me.)
Thanks for the write-up! I wasn't sure what people would think of the grandmother's narrative. The character's treatment of hysteria (the doctor giving her an orgasm) is historically accurate, but many people have asked me if I made it up!
Posted by: Edan | May 22, 2009 at 10:57 AM