Hello Muddah, hello Faddah, here I am getting crushed by the patriarchy: Ann Glaviano's "Come on, Silver"

We've had a couple of entries so far in the 2018 Best American Short Stories anthology that, although acknowledging that society can present people with obstacles, still held people accountable for their actions. Danielle Evans's "Boys Go to Jupiter" and Emma Cline's "Los Angeles" both presented us with lead characters who had problems that were to some extent not of their own making, but who both needed to make changes in order to "stop making it worse."

The question over whether society is to blame for the bad actions of people or they are responsible for their own bad actions is one of the longest running threads in our current cultural divide. It's also a false dichotomy. The sum of our lives is a mix of social forces we cannot control and individual choices we can, but to varying degrees. It's important to emphasize controlling what we can. It's also important to call out those social forces that put obstacles in our way. Getting too focused on one or the other is an imbalanced way to approach the problem of how to make humans improve. Too much focus on the problem of individual responsibility becomes hypocritical at some point, asking people to overcome more than is reasonable, but focusing too much on the responsibility society bears for individual action can deaden individuals to their own agency for improving themselves.

Glaviano's "Come on, Silver," brings balance to the anthology by focusing on the social failures, rather than the individual ones, that impede human happiness and fulfillment. When Josephine, who prefers to be called "Fin," goes off to a summer camp that's sort of like a week-long finishing school, you'd think that would be the perfect example of the belief that by making ourselves better, we can actively control our fate. She is there for no less a reason than to learn "what it means to be a woman."

She is sent to camp because her grandmother caught Josephine playing with Barbie dolls, but playing with them in a sexually explicit way: "On this particular day, Ken and Skipper were naked, and Ken had tied Skipper up with a broken necklace that my grandmother had given me from her junk drawer." She is both too childish and too grown up to stay home during the summer, and she needs some kind of education. This won't be the last time that symbols of childhood innocence are mixed up for Fin with an awakening sexual curiosity. Her obsession with horses--that most quintessentially girlish of obsessions, at least in popular imagination--quickly gets turned into an interest in Andrew, the counselor who teaches the girls to ride horses. Fin describes Andrew at one point as looking like a Ken doll, as well, meaning she has associated him with both ponies and dolls.

There might be something more immediately identifiable with little girls than ponies and dolls, but I don't know what it is.

Manners camp or sex-ed? 

The camp, which is supposed to be about teaching girls to be women, seems to focus a lot on sexuality. The only requirement to attend the camp seems to be that the girls have to have had their first period. But it's never clear what the camp teaches about sex. It's surrounded by rituals meant to frighten them, but not to enlighten them. And that's the whole paradox that these young women are confronted with. The camp's motto is dignae et provisae iucundae, which Google Translate renders, unhelpfully, as "worthy and provided enjoyable." Fortunately, I have a Ph.D. friend with the correct expertise to help with this, but he came away confused by it as well. His take: "if it's a girls' camp, then maybe 'worthy and pleasing;' I wouldn't know what to do with provis- which means 'foreseen.'"

It's a motto, then, with no apparent meaning, although whatever meaning there is seems to be self-contradictory, especially when thought of in a sexual context. Dignified would suggest sexual restraint, but pleasing, of course, connotes sexual license. Even Fin, at the end of the story, is asking what it means, meaning the girls have been repeating a motto three times before each meal without knowing what it means. 

There is a scene that I found hilarious, although maybe I was supposed to be horrified by it. Fin sneaks out at night to try to ride her horse faster than she is allowed to do during the day. Andrew, who is obviously into Fin sexually because of her large breasts, takes her for a bareback ride that is such an obvious metaphor of a woman's first sexual intercourse, I have to imagine the writer was giggling while putting it together. It's all rather over-the-top, but in a good way. It starts with Andrew convincing her to ride bareback: "'Plus it's natural,' he said. 'Think about it.'" That's how teen pregnancies happen, Andrew.

When they get down to it, it's pretty bad:

I sat in front and his arms around me and his thighs pinning me and my back slamming against his chest and my butt slamming against the horse and all of it hurt....And Andrew rocking and grunting behind me. Finally it ended...'Did you feel anything?' he asked." 

The nighttime horse ride ends with a rude good-bye from Andrew, which is why I'm not sure I was supposed to find the whole thing funny. Fin says her butt hurts, and he tells her to grow up. "You got just what you wanted," he tells her. There was a rape allusion earlier, and while it doesn't seem to me that this was a metaphorical rape, I don't think Fin realized what she was getting into, either.

Sisters turn against each other

When the escapade with the horse is over, Fin finds she is the target of some private joke among the other girls. There is a song Fin's friend plays on her flute, a Christmas song about a hooker. (Anyone know what this is? I have no idea. Is this a red herring?) The song suddenly seems to be directed at Fin. A note is pinned to the door of the dining hall that Fin didn't write but that has her name signed to it, asking Andrew to touch her breasts. The real irony, Fin notes, is that she is being accused of having wanted to have sex, but she "had failed, in fact, to like or want these things."

In fact, Fin realizes, she is damned no matter what attitude she takes toward sex. "I was supposed to want, and not to want, simultaneously. Those were the rules. There was no winning. I would fail either way." It's the same unwinnable paradox she faces on the first day of camp. "My mother says it's rude to keep someone waiting. She also says that I am an impatient girl." As one camper says of the "sisterhood" they are all trying to get into at camp, "the secret of the sisterhood is that there is no secret." Indeed.

At the end, Fin is forced to prove she is the paragon of womanhood by swimming across the lake, even though her large breasts make swimming difficult for her. At this point, I found her preferred "Fin" moniker meaningful in two ways: We are both at the "Fin" or end of the story, and also the girl who can't swim is named "Fin."

Personal notes on the writing

This is the kind of story that appeals to me. It's easy to read on a basic level, and then, when you read it a little closer, it rewards a reasonable amount of effort by putting the thematic gold in a place where it's just the right amount of work to get to it.

I was a little surprised by the vehicle of the story. It's an epistolary story, written in letters by Fin to her future husband. She's assigned this task by her counselor, a woman the campers call "Beaver." Beaver immediately criticizes Fin for the letters she's writing, so Fin starts to write fake letters for Beaver to see and the real ones in a hidden notebook.

A story in letters is an old technique, but I wouldn't say it's worn-out. (I was amused to read Glaviano say in the contributor notes that she has "hated epistolary novels her whole life.") There are so many things you can do with it, I don't think it'll ever go away. But when Fin has to switch to a secret notebook, that presents certain logistical problems in the story and also certain suspension-of-disbelief issues. Fin has to keep checking on the notebook, and we have to imagine she has time for the long and secret dalliance of these letters every day without anyone noticing she's been gone. The story ends with Fin somehow sticking the notebook into the empty wrapper of a sanitary pad, which she then stuffs into her underwear. I guess that act was meant to show that the notebook would survive her eventual dip in the lake because it was wrapped in plastic. Or did she put it in her underwear in her trunk, not the underwear she was wearing? Either way, it's a thing the author has to account for, in order for us to be reading the contents of the notebook. But these little things weren't enough to take away from enjoying the story.

FOR KAREN CARLSON'S TAKE ON THIS STORY (I.E., FOR A TAKE FROM SOMEONE WHO ACTUALLY KNOWS WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE A YOUNG WOMAN LEARNING ABOUT THE CATCH-22 RULES OF FEMALE SEXUALITY), GO HERE.