Blahblahblah: Recent Stories by Rebecca Curtis

By Gavin Thomson

Rebecca Curtis deserves a cult following. Also, a larger regular following. Her short stories, particularly three of her recent ones, which haven’t yet been published in book format—she has so far published only one book, a collection of stories called Twenty Grand and Other Tales of Love & Money (2007)—are hysterical in both senses of that term, and exhilaratingly addictive, like street fights on YouTube. In these three stories, “The Toast,” “Fish Rot,” and “The Christmas Miracle,” she proves herself to be a literary relative of Saunders, Lipsyte, and Moshfegh: if Saunders is the sage father (Superego), and Lipsyte the cool uncle (Ego), and Moshfegh the cousin who’s a black sheep and a bad influence (Id), then Curtis is the crazy aunt with whom it’s fun to talk shit and shoplift (cocaine). What all four of these writers share is that they are each in their own ways temperamentally and stylistically singular. Aspiring writers would learn a lot by trying in vain to imitate them. (Imitation is the highest form of learning you’ll never be good enough.) What I mean to say is no two unhappy literary families are the same, and this one is made of heroes.

A literary hero has her strengths and weaknesses, and it’s her strengths that set her apart from the lettered plebs. Some of Curtis’s strengths are her ability to be funny without making jokes, her irreverence, wayward digressions, herky-jerky phrasings, sneakily sad surprises, repetitions, deceptively sophisticated plot structures, and a big je ne sais quoi that makes her tough to write about without feeling as though I’m doing her work a disservice. The three stories I’ve mentioned have much in common; they’re not unlike three acts of the same play, populated by a rotating cast of sisters, Jewish ex-boyfriends, kind pedophiles, parents, nieces, devoted Catholics, bipolar moms and landlords, goddaughters, and so forth. Curtis could possibly get away with combining the three stories into one PDF and persuading a publisher to market it as novel. According to my copy-and-paste calculations, she’d make the word count, almost.

Each of the three stories is narrated by a middle-aged struggling writer who has either lost her job teaching at an Ivy (Curtis once taught at Columbia) or been demoted to underling (adjunct) status. The writer-narrator tries to defer bankruptcy by working as a semi-employed, licensed nutritionist with dubious ideas on blood type, digestion, and fluoride (Curtis is a licensed nutritionist). The narrator is fully sick in the body, and one-third sick in the head. In “The Toast” (Harper’s) and in “The Christmas Miracle” (The New Yorker), the narrators have Lyme disease (Curtis had Lyme disease). In “Fish Rot” (n+1), the narrator has Fish Rot, a made-up disease that’s a lot like Lyme disease. Symptoms and co-symptoms of Lyme include an inability to control oneself around sugar, vomiting, “babesiosis, a malaria-like virus that drains red blood cells and causes fatigue,” and “bartonellosis, a bacterial infection common among homeless men, which causes vascular inflammation in the brain and bouts of madness, fantastical visions, and frank or rude speech, usually set off by eating carbohydrates.” The narrator goes insane when she eats carbs; “Bartonella” possesses her like Beelzebub and bullies her into bullying her nieces. Fish Rot causes fishy smells, tongue spores, eye pus, numb feet, shedding, brain fog, hallucinations, peripheral neuropathy, and colon rot.

In each of the three stories, the narrator has an older, kinder, and all around more competent older sister: a happily married or soon-to-be-married mother with a demanding job that pays the big bucks. The narrator despises and loves her sister. One story features an uncle who, though kind, is a pedo; he rubs the narrator’s nieces’ bums and afterwards takes a shower. Another story features a “kid-rubber” father who massages the narrator’s nieces’ legs and backs; to get him to stop, the narrator and her sister spritz him with a water bottle because, for whatever reason, he dislikes water. Always the narrator is irresponsible, is told to behave, and doesn’t. Plus, in “The Christmas Miracle,” the narrator admits that she’s a racist. She says, “plus I’m racist.”

In “The Toast,” which I consider the best of the three, the narrator grades students’ stories while hooked up to an IV.

One story was about a student who has angry feelings toward his old-maid writing teacher. The student says to the teacher, “How old are you? Your 40, I found you on Facebook. Your an old maid,” and the teacher responds, “Yes, I have hair on my face. I’m not a good writer so I teach. Now my prime is done, I wish I were dead,” and the student says, “Every dog has it’s day,” and pulls an automatic rifle out of his pocket and shoots the teacher in the head.

The narrator praises the story for its “energetic language.” Then she gives it a B. Then she adds a minus. The narrator also logs on to an online forum where women post “descriptions of their menstruation troubles,” and she writes emails to all these women “offering to make their menstruation troubles go away.” Presently, she pukes on her desk.

I want to mention that Curtis has a soft spot for the word “retard.” She uses the word more than once in each of the three stories. From “Fish Rot”: “It’s like you’re retarded.” Again from “Fish Rot”:

“You’ll pay for intravenous antibiotics for my sister for Fish Rot, or else she’ll sue using the Two Standards of Care law,” and [the narrator’s sister] cited, for why they should pay for my antibiotics, how I’d become retarded, getting the tremors at night, and not knowing my students’ names, hallucinating, and pretending all through teaching my classes that I was just kooky when really I could not think straight.

This passage evinces Curtis’s dexterity with sentence length and details. Not surprisingly, she did her MFA at Syracuse under the fatherly tutelage of the unimitative, inimitable, very funny and voice-y George Saunders, who sent one of her first tries, “Twenty Grand,” to The New Yorker, which published it. Since then she has flowered into a stylist with a distinctly unhinged sensibility that inspires giddiness and also makes one worry if she’s okay. Her narrators are not okay. They are sick and a tad insane, yes, but they are also ill-adjusted misfits who are prone to faux pas. In one story (“The Christmas Miracle”), a social misstep on the narrator’s part impels a man to punch her in the face, which everyone agrees was a good idea.

Clearly, Curtis’s stories aren’t gluten-free cupcakes for the faint of stomach. In “The Toast,” the narrator and her older sister, as kids, play with their Barbies, and for shits and guffaws, the narrator has her Barbies rape her sister’s Barbies. Although the narrator’s sister, Leala—like the older sisters in the two other stories—is as about as perfect as one can be, a true fictional role model (there are so few nowadays!), the mother treats her more cruelly than she does the narrator. The sister’s oat-milk-wholesome goodness gets her spanked. Not that the narrator gets away scot-free: all three stories feature spanking and other methods of punishment that build character. In “The Toast,” the mother is fixated on combing her daughters’ curly hair, which makes them cry. When the mother herself was a child, she was bullied at school by a gang of girls “who made fun of her hair at recess,” so naturally she grew up to punish her daughters for their hair:

The second I felt a yank I was up and running. She’d say, “It needs combing,” and I’d say, “I don’t care!” and she’d say that as soon as my father came home he would spank me, give me the spanking I deserved, and so forth; I didn’t give a shit—though in the end she might catch me and spank me herself and I’d say I hated her, it was not untrue, and she’d say, “I’m not going to comb your hair, you don’t deserve it,” and in the end, if it ended my way, Leala would comb my hair.

And I’d say, and she’d say, and so forth—these intentional ticks allow Curtis to get away with long, multi-clausal sentences that rarely go where one expects. Her sentences swerve and curve with verve. Reading her stories is not unlike sitting in the backseat of an unusually fast golf cart driven at full tilt by a lovable drunk. Other ticks Curtis uses are italics, ALL CAPS, exclamation marks, comma splices, underlined words, “blah blah blah,” “blahblahblah,” “ho-bag,” “slutty,” “and stuff like that,” “or whatever,” “paid up the wazoo,” and so forth. “Fish Rot” has the wildest vocabulary, and “The Christmas Miracle” has the tamest—perhaps because the editors of n+1 know their subscribers don’t mind sentences like, “My accountant sister was a cunty bitch,” whereas New Yorker subscribers, well.

A discerning editor would be able to tell that a story is by Curtis without her name beneath the title. Indeed, it would probably take him only one page.

Speaking of editors, an editor of a good literary magazine once told me that Saunders is one of very few writers who can get away with writing “hahaha.” I asked this editor why, and he said Saunders gets inside the neurotic neurological nexuses of his character so convincingly that we have no choice, really, but to believe his characters do in fact think in their hysterical heads things like “hahaha.” In other words, Saunders is psychologically astute and stylistically super-powerful enough to render his character’s wacky psyches in their own wonky words. That’s one of his superpowers. The Muse—that usually absent mother—has blessed Curtis with a similar superpower. From “Fish Rot”: “My older sister got [Fish Rot] first. When she got it, I thought: Hahaha, she would get Fish Rot.”

There are elements of the low burlesque in Curtis’s three stories. A typical writer would handle the matters that Curtis speaks about delicately, with reverence, and maybe a bit of fear. Not Curtis. Yet her prose reads more like a low burlesque satire without an object; like a satire of the satirical tone itself. And it comes from a painful place. I’m willing to bet my dog on that. She is a crazed and comic writer, a kooky clown whom no competent parent would hire for a birthday. (A Curtis story is a clown flower that squirts acid into the frozen sea inside my soul.) She touches dark things with tickles. One can find in her prose signs and symptoms not only of Lyme Disease (or Fish Rot) but also of a mind disturbed and trying to get by, to just keep swimming, just keep laughing, just keep swimming, blahblahblah.

In “The Toast,” the narrator’s sister asks her to attend her wedding. The narrator can’t, as she can’t afford the plane ticket. Most of her credit cards are maxed out, a debt collector keeps leaving her voicemails, and she’s behind on the rent she pays to live in a cold attic, where she’s fond of the mice that patter out from beneath the futon whenever she eats buttered crackers. But she is too proud to ask her sister for money, so she tells her sister that she’s been accepted to a writing colony. (“In reality I would never go to a colony to write,” she admits, “because in my apartment I have a desk, and I have a pen and paper. I wouldn’t go to Yaddo unless I wanted to have sex with some lousy-in-the-sack, fluoride-drinking writers.”) The sister asks her to write a toast that someone can read at the wedding. The narrator tries; then she gives up. Which prompts the following roundabout digression, which is like a mini story in itself (Curtis has published mini stories in NOON):

I had no interest in my sister’s boyfriend or in his marrying—a stupid move—my sister. I recalled how when I was angry at her as a kid, I used to hit our dog, because I lost in our physical fights, because she was bigger, but if I hit our dog, a docile English sheepdog, she would let me have whatever I wanted, as long as I didn’t hit the dog, and it became a tool of mine, when my sister was being obtuse I’d hit the dog’s gray rear, and my sister would say, “Don’t hit the dog,” and her gray-green eyes would glisten and she’d grab my arm, but I kept pounding the dog’s flat hind, the dog had hip dysplasia and a keen would emit from her black lips and I’d pound her rump until my sister said, “Okay, you win,” and I remembered how when my parents killed the dog, my sister was ten, I was seven, and the dog was three, and my sister tried to construct a human blockade, she wanted me to stand in the front door of our house and hold hands with her so that our parents would be unable to drag the dog—to whom my mother had become allergic—through the door to the car to drive it to the pound. “Come on, Sonya,” my sister said. “It will work, a human chain, we can stop them!” and I said, “They’ll just use the other door, idiot,” and went to read a book in my room. Fortunately, the death of Almond—oh, Almond, who licked my father’s hand every time he stuck it forth even though once he threw a wrench at her head and knocked her flat—reminded me of a usable anecdote.

To borrow a phrase from Denis Johnson, “It was so horrible it could only have been a joke.” A Curtis story is a joke, and also it very much isn’t. Hahaha.

Gavin Thomson recently completed his MFA (fiction) at Columbia, where he was a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow and also nominated for the Henfield Prize.