Reading Manuel Munoz's "Anyone Can Do It" Twice

So already, a couple of weeks ago, I read Manuel Muñoz's short story "Anyone Can Do It,"* which appears in The Best American Short Stories 2019,** and about which Manuel was recently interviewed as part of an online series called 1 Week Critique.*** Over the next couple of weeks, the story so haunted me that I knew I had to read it again. And so I did, taking notes on its plot events and literary aspects and my feelings about them.

So let me begin by saying that the story made me feel both sad and hopeful--a combination I've been getting used to in my own life. I'd like to attribute my personal feelings to the simultaneity of national political events, pandemic fatigue, and the recent death of my father, but I'm actually suspicious that they may be feelings that often co-exist for many people.

Let's face it: despite the Irish prayer, the road doesn't rise up to meet all of us, and many markers along it reveal who and what is buried beside it rather than point travelers in the sunlit direction forward. Even the most fortunate don't get a pass on experiencing loss and unwelcome change, though they may have more resources for responding to it, coping with it, even running from it. As the story ended, I found myself haunted by the question of what life beyond the story would be for Delfina, the story's main character: she felt strong to me, but also very alone as she sat with her son on the front steps of her house at the end of the empty road.

A Facebook Photo of Manuel, in Shadows and Light

So now that you have some understanding of how the story haunts me emotionally, let me tell you a little about why it haunts me intellectually. I'm a retired English teacher, someone who spent many years helping students to recognize and respond to literary craft, to detect literary clues suggesting the "inevitable"***** directions in which works of literature might be heading.******

And yet, despite my training and my perceptions of disturbances beneath the story's surface even in the opening paragraphs, I was completely surprised by what happened later in the story--twice.******* As a result, the intellectual-literary question that has been haunting me--and it's accompanied by so much admiration--is this one: how had Manuel's writing so subtly both prepared me for and distracted me from what was practically bound to happen? I mean, how had he done that? His writing had pulled me so gently toward and away from the inevitable. And it felt so important that it had done that--so authentic in the sense of its being true to life.

Let me tell you a bit more about the story so that what I said in my last paragraph, especially in its last sentence, has the chance to make some sense.

The story begins like this: one Friday afternoon, the neighborhood men do not return from their day of work, having been deported to Mexico--a disheartening but not unknown experience that unsettles their women/wives, who have been depending on their wages to help pay their soon-due monthly rents.********

Delfina, relatively new to the neighborhood and experiencing her husband's deportation for the first time, isn't certain about whom she should trust. Lis, one of Delfina's neighbors, sees a financial opportunity in the fact that Delfina has a car (actually, it's her husband's Ford Galaxie): the car could transport the two of them to the fields usually worked by the men where they could earn the rent money they need by picking fruit. At first, Delfina says she needs more time to think. But after a trying morning the next day, she surprises herself by agreeing to Lis's plan. And so the story unfolds from there.

I have to say that when I encounter cars in literature, my former English teacher self prepares for disaster. There's the red convertible in Love Medicine that goes into the river at the same time that Henry Lamartine does, and the prized motor cars in Howard's End and The Great Gatsby that are driven by entitled men who do terrible harm. There are cars in literature that manage to set people free--one liberates two characters at the end of Love Medicine, actually--but more often than not, cars mean trouble for someone. In Lauren Groff's "The Wind," which I blogged about earlier this month, a harrowing car ride almost liberates a family, but doesn't. The problem with cars is that other people notice them.

So I had instinctive car-related reservations when it came to "Anyone Can Do It." But I let go of them when I joined Delfina on the edge of an orchard row where, after Lis's and her productive morning of harvesting, she sat feeling peaceful and satisfied while she awaited Lis's return from the car with their lunches:

Delfina sat in the higher bank of the orchard row, catching her breath, massaging her upper legs and resting. It was Sunday, she remembered, and Lis had been right after all. People did work on this day, even if it felt as tranquil and lonely as Sundays always did, here among the trees with the leaves growing more and more still, the orchard quiet and then quieter. Sundays were always so peaceful, Delfina thought, no matter where you were, so serene she imagined the birds themselves had gone dumb. El día de Dios, she thought, and remembered Sundays when  her white-haired father had not yet slept out the drunkenness of the previous night. Her own husband had sometimes broken the sacredness of a Sunday silence and she was oddly thankful fro the calm of this orchard moment that had been brought on only by his absence. Delfina looked down the row to soak in that blessed quiet and the longer she looked, the emptier and emptier it became. . . .

As I read this, though some details tampered with its peacefulness, I couldn't help but think of Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi, the widowed central characters in the Book of Ruth who, having committed to being each other's family and caretakers, gleaned together in the fields. Like Delfina, I initially had been wary of Lis, had wondered about her game. But maybe Lis was someone to be trusted and depended on after all; maybe she was the good sister Delfina felt she'd never had. Maybe the two of them, made temporarily husband-less by deportation, were on their way to becoming a present-day version of Ruth and Naomi.

But I was wrong about that--you'll have to read the story to find out exactly how. And given that my understanding of the situation was dependent on Delfina's perceptions of it, perhaps I was bound to err in judgment. I say this without being at all critical of Delfina: aren't all of our perceptions shaped in part by what we need, want, hope, and fear--especially when the wolf is getting perilously close to the door and we're hoping to do more than just survive? It's not just rent money that's on Delfina's mind: in making her decision to team up with Lis, she feels pleased to be "on the brink of doing something truly on her own." And when her plans go awry, she doesn't hesitate to use the phrase "if he ever made it back" (193) in talking to herself about her husband.

There's another surprise moment later in this story, another Book of Ruth moment: a Boaz figure acts with unanticipated, unsolicited kindness and generosity. I wish I could explain to you why that surprised me so: maybe I'd bought too easily into the idea of Delfina as a woman completely alone in the universe. And maybe I've gotten far too used to a world in which acts of kindness--especially kindness to strangers--are seemingly scant. When we do hear stories of  kindness, they tend to be featured in the final two minutes of network and cable newscasts. There's another possible explanation: perhaps the people who commit acts of kindness seldom speak about them, despite the proclivity of many Americans to advertise their virtue.

Those thoughts made me listen to Manuel's 1 Week Critique interview a second time. This time, I heard--really heard--Manuel talk about the importance of "the smallest things"--which made me think that if I keep reading "Anyone Can Do It," I will begin to see beyond the smaller things in the text to the smallest ones, the ones that would have prepared me for both of the book's surprise moments. But even more importantly, maybe I will understand better how it was that Delfina grew in stature before my eyes over the course of the story--so much so that I went from wondering what would happen to her after the story ended to what she would choose to do. There's a big difference between those two things.

I hope that you'll read Manuel Muñoz's "Anyone Can Do It"; anyone can! And if when you do you have any thoughts about why Delfina, in anticipating telling her husband about the day's events, contemplates leaving out a particular detail of the story--see page 196--please share them with me. That detail is one of those smallest things that matters so much--I just know it.

* I'm not sure I'd known that "Anyone Can Do It" was among the stories collected in The Best American Short Stories 2019.** But after listening to Manuel be interviewed about it in a segment of 1 Week Critique*** aired just a few weeks back, I wanted to read it as soon as possible, in part because Manuel described it as mirroring  another story of his called "The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA." I'd loved that story so much that I blogged about it in 2015. 

** “Anyone Can Do It.” The Best American Short Stories 2019, by Muñoz Manuel, Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019, pp. 182–196. 

*** Wenzler, I. C. Manuel Muñoz Interview 1 Week Critique #0020. other. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPzPitI7lGk.  

**** 

***** I put inevitable in quotation marks because Manuel discusses inevitability in his 1 Week Critique interview.

*(6) I got to know Manuel in the mid-1990's when, as a newly minted Harvard College graduate, he was hired to teach several of my classes while I was on sabbatical.

*(7) Ingrid Claire Wenzler, Manuel's 1 Week Critique interviewer, had that same experience in reaction to the story's central event: "I couldn't believe I hadn't seen all the signs of this coming."  

*(8) Photo-shopped screen shot of photo embedded in Sidler, S. (2020, June 23). Why Does My Old House Have Two Front Doors? The Craftsman Blog. https://thecraftsmanblog.com/why-does-my-old-house-have-two-front-doors/. 

*(9) Screen shot of photo embedded in Masons, F. (2020, October 25). Peach Tree Care. The Tree Center. https://www.thetreecenter.com/peach-tree-care/.