In the Eye of the Storm: Reading Lauren Groff

So already, sometimes people have no idea they're in trouble, even in actual danger. Other times, they do know, but they fear there is no way out of or through it. In this latter instance, it can be hard to tell whether there's no one who can or will help them--or whether, for whatever reason, they either fail to convey their need for help--or actively conceal it.

Saturday, I picked up the most recent New Yorker and read two pieces about people in dangerous trouble of different sorts.

One piece was  John Mathias' "Living With a Visionary," a personal history that reveals the severe toll that unceasing worry, caring, and grief can take. In this piece, the victim is the dedicated spouse-caretaker of a person with Parkinson's accompanied by hallucinations in the era of COVID-19. Reading this piece made me even more grateful for the cheerful window visit* my sister, cousins, and I had had with my mother earlier in day, courtesy of her dedicated care-givers: my mother had stood tall, recognized us all even though we'd been wearing masks, blown kisses to us, and told us, courtesy of speaker-phone, to be careful in the snow.

The other piece was Lauren Groff's very intense short story, "The Wind," which compelled me to keep reading, despite the sinking feeling I had after reading its first two columns in the print version. I have this same sinking feeling whenever I'm confronted with a tale of what I sense are diminishing odds, especially if they are at all connected to the  simultaneous terror and calm of children who are literally and figuratively along for the dangerous ride.

The short story presents, among others, three women in the same family, each of a different generation: the female narrator of the short story; her grandmother, who was the driver of the car in the story; and her mother, who was a passenger in that car, and who has shared the story of the car ride with the short story narrator and her other children.

After I finished the story, I kept rereading its last two columns on p. 54 of the print version. They do the following in this order: 

• describe the moment when the mother of the children in the car**--the short story narrator's grandmother--can't make her own body move--and the narrator's mother, the oldest child in the car, realizes "that everything depended on her"; 

• assert the existence of two stories of what happened next, the version the narrator's mother is known to tell in minute detail, and the "true story" the short story's narrator perceives beneath her mother's version; and 

• express metaphorically the legacy of such events, regardless of how accurately they're recounted.

I've watched enough Law and Order: Special Victims Unit to know all about escalation in domestic violence situations and to understand the particular plight of victims whose abusers are members of the police department. So on that score, this story does not surprise.

But "The Wind" is the story told by the child of the child who was an eyewitness to the events that I didn't want to watch unfold as I kept reading. It's not so much about the danger of rewriting the story, as the eyewitness does, according to the short story's narrator. It's about the impossibility of erasing the story's emotional legacy regardless of how it's told.

The final sentences of the story provide a metaphor for this pervasive legacy--I believe you can read them without damaging your experience of reading the story.

But always inside my mother there would blow a silent wind, a wind that died and gusted again, raging throughout her life, touching every moment she lived after this one. She tried her best, but she couldn’t help filling me with this same wind. It seeped into me through her blood, through every bite of food she made for me, through every night she waited, shaking with fear, for me to come home by curfew, through every scolding, everything she forbade me to say or think or do or be, through all the ways she taught me how to move as a woman in the world. She was far from being the first to find it blowing through her, and of course I will not be the last. I look around and can see it in so many other women, passed down from a time beyond history, this wind that is dark and ceaseless and raging within.***

I have to admit I was surprised when the experience of the wind went from being particular to the narrator and other members of her family and became something shared by people more generally, especially women--a kind of primordial legacy borne uncomfortably by one gender.**** 

The truth is that for me personally, even more memorable than the story's metaphor of the wind was the harrowing image created by the last sentence in the paragraph before the one from which I quoted above. It was so harrowing, so paralyzing, that my mind could not move beyond this particular story quickly enough for Groff's final general statements to resonate with their desired social significance. To experience that harrowing image yourself, however, you'll have to read the story.

That wind and that image stayed so much with me that I woke up on Sunday morning recalling another Groff short story that relates wind and memory. In "Eyewall," found in Groff's collection called Florida, a woman decides to ride out a major hurricane in her house despite being urged to evacuate: a neighbor even comes by to offer her ride. But we soon learn, due to the story's blending of knowledge of events past, present, and future, that that the neighbor who tried to be helpful does not survive.

The woman, however, does--not exactly with the help of red wine and visitors from her past, but certainly in their company. "Houses contain us; who can say what we contain?" she says at one point. Which winds are within, and which without? The storyteller survives them, but that's about all I can tell you. 

What I really want to know--and don't--is why she decided to stay in the house in the first place: throughout the story, she often seems more like a dazed, somewhat detached Dorothy watching the people and things of her Kansas life superimposed on the swirling tornado than like an Ebenezer Scrooge about to be transformed by the visits of the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. I can't say how, or even if,  Groff's narrator's hurricane experiences will affect her. And that bothers me.

In "The Wind," Groff provides us with two perspectives, and ultimately with two stories that together explain the presence and persistence of the wind. "Eyewall," in contrast, provides only one perspective--and frankly, leaves me hungering for a second perspective--like the one that might be offered by the eye in the top half of the illustration accompanying "The Wind" in The New Yorker (see above). I really need and want to know more. There may be some hope, or at least some wonder, at the end of the story. Pay attention to the chickens and the eggs if you read it, and please let me know what you think.

Winslow Homer's "Hurricane, Bahamas"--Not Wild Enough!

There's a difference between trouble and danger . . . sometimes . . . I think. The narrators of both  Groff stories are out of danger at the end of their respective adventures. But I'm not sure they're out of trouble. Maybe the truth is that in each of us--or at least most of us--lives some trouble that, like the ache in a joint that acts up in certain kinds of weather, can be counted on to rear its head with sufficient regularity, especially in predictable circumstances, making it impossible for us to forget that it's very much a part of us. It's like the last line of The Great Gatsby says: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." But maybe we learn, too, sometimes. Well, maybe some of us do.

* My mother's senior living facility discourages face-to--face visits during the pandemic except in cases of emergency. 

** Screenshot image of Illustration by Ping Zhu on linked story page: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/the-wind .  

*** Groff, L. (2021, January 25). "The Wind". The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/the-wind.  

**** Similarly, I felt parts of the interview with Lauren Groff on The New Yorker web site veered off in a direction of a topic I hadn't even been thinking about when I finished reading the story, namely who was to blame for the "evil" that happened to the narrator's grandmother: 

"I think that much of the evil of this world comes from people who consider themselves good people, who genuinely love their families and friends and communities, but who act just a little bit too slowly to be of much help, who give just a little less than they should, who don’t want to get involved in other people’s messes, who value their own comfort a little more than the thought of extending themselves as far as they can to insure the security and happiness of others.  . .  . we’ve made it normal to extend our collective acts of caring only far enough to protect our immediate families and friends. "***** 

I have to say I was so busy imagining the children in the car with their mother who suddenly was unable to move her body that I hadn't been wondering at all about whether the mother's friends and co-workers had done enough for her. If anything, Groff's words made me think about John Mathias's friends and family: what had and hadn't they done for him when they understood that he was in such distress? (Always, those troubling questions arise: did he hide his distress, and/or how much did they really want to know that he was in distress?) 

***** Leyshon, C. (2021, January 24). Lauren Groff on the Aftershocks of Violence. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/lauren-groff-02-01-21.   

*(6) Screen shot of the first frame of the video "The wind is blowing through my hair": https://8tracks.com/muffliato/the-wind-is-blowing-through-my-hair