Before you go off to look for America, America comes looking for you: "In the Arms of Saturday Night" by Cally Fiedorek

In the opening lines of Cally Fiedorek's "The Arms of Saturday Night," the main character, Janie, is almost literally doing what that narrator of Simon And Garfunkel's "America" is doing at one point: counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. Or at least she's counting the lack of cars she hopes she'll find there: "There'd be no traffic on the turnpike, not on Saturday. She could get her dad to drive her to the city, though at the risk of being pushy, and insensitive, really, considering the circumstances..."

The circumstances are that her dad's younger brother Murray has died, and her parents are hosting the post-funeral reception is at their house. Janie is sixteen and full of "the death-proof, scrappy ways of teenage lust." Like in the Simon and Garfunkel song, she feels the need to get on the road to go look for America, or the promise of America. It's not a road trip like Kerouac took, because she only wants to go from Jersey into the city, but she's itching for a journey nonetheless, one that will give her "some relief from the dull mortal ache of always being where the party wasn't."

Janie's fascination with Adam is entirely focused around his penis. She is almost unable to comprehend that every time she has ever conversed with Adam at school, his penis was only inches away from her. "An organ of such agonizing mystery, and he just walked around with it, like it was keys." Like it was keys, indeed, because Janie sees sex with Adam as the event that will unlock the door to escape her sense of ennui, of not belonging. "What she wanted was the ticked box, the existential check-in."

Hers is a very middle-class, American sense of ennui. She's wedged between the rich, who are "tacky, maybe, but life-loving," and the poor, for whom every day in America is like "a punch in the face." But at least these poor have something her squeezed-and-getting-more-squeezed middle class family doesn't: identity. (And here, the narrator unleashes some of her wryest barbs in describing the identity-less middle class: "They listened to NPR, sometimes, but their hearts weren't in it. They had no unifying piety, to God, or sport, or any of their many motherlands.")

Road trips might be even more American than baseball. 

So Janie's family is getting by, but not really loving it. Her father's taking it harder than her mother. Her mother has more of an old-school, "get on with things" attitude, while her father is a failing academic, one whose "career as a public intellectual had been looking, in the past year, pretty private." Janie isn't without love for her parents, some of which she actually feels the need to supress, but a strong sense of her place in the world isn't really her birthright. That's what she is looking for out on the American road, a road that leads into Adam's pants.

Aside from the Genesis connotations of the name Adam, whom Janey hopes will be her first man (I think I've used the name Adam twice in stories for the same reasons), Adam holds another meaning for her: he's about to go out on the road for real. He is going to have a Kerouac-like across-America journey, because he's headed to California soon. Janey imagines he will find some kind of Beatnik enlightenment: "She could picture them all, a week from now, in some Tonto-esque headwear, ensconced in their cocktails of peyote and electrolyte water, boning models in truck beds in the craters of the desert. Communing, amid nightblooms, with the very source of life, and he could say, years down the road, I was there. I touched the face of true experience. I, Adam Donovan, touched down in the cradle of the land."

Before Janie can go look for America, though, it comes to find her

As she's trying to figure out how to get her parents to take her to the party Adam will be at in the city even though it's her uncle's funeral, the mourners enter her house. They have peculiarly historic American surnames: Jackson and Wright and Farragut. After this first group arrives come the biker friends of Uncle Murray. As in, motorcycle friends. As in, big, scary-looking, rough-around-the-edges bikers.

The romance of the road has come to Janie! America has come to Janie, because what could be more American than a group of Easy Riders, who revel in the freedom of the American road?

It stirs Janie's longing for freedom even further. "...tonight, she and Adam would be out there, free, free to smoke and drink and spit and misbehave, and love each other."

Her mother initially strongly rebuffs her plans, but Janie sticks to her guns and finds, to her surprise, that her parents just aren't that willing to fight her anymore. They'll be disappointed, but they can't keep her locked in the house. She's almost sorry there isn't the big donnybrook she'd prepared for.

You want it to be one thing, but it's another**

So here I was at this point, thinking this story was a really trenchant examination of the emptiness and anxiety of white, middle class lives, something like reading Jonathan Franzen, but with a more believable female psyche. (Although the fascination with the dick could easily show up in a Franzen female.) But that's not what it was. 

Last year's Pushcart Prize anthology featured five consecutive coming-of-age stories at one point. So maybe I should have been prepared for this story to switch gears and become one, too. 

Well, it wasn't that sudden a gear change. There were some signs it was coming. Janie is incredulous thinking of the photo of her father at 18, himself in a motorcycle gang, because the man she knows as her father is a "cautious" man. This realization that the people she knows used to be something else is itself preparing her to change. 

The big change for Janie comes when she decides to flirt with a young man at the funeral before she leaves for her party. It's low stakes, so she has nothing to lose, and it'll be good practice. The young man is a little rough around the edges--doesn't have much going on, it seems, and he defends Uncle Murray's love of conspiracy theories by saying it was just Murray's "way of being curious." The kid's not without his own pithy insights, though, and he and Janie both agree that life is "flat." 

But the big secret is that it turns out the guy she's flirting with was the secret son of her uncle, making him her cousin. 

Her cousin has used a genetics tracing service to find his father, which, it turns out, was Murray. The kid's gone on a voyage of discovery, and the search actually brought him answers. It turns out Janie's parents have recently gone to Ellis Island, that most iconic of American sites, to research their own genealogy, and Janie's knowledge of what they found allows her to confirm the young man's story. The study of ancestry seemed like a good place to look for these people who lack identity, but for Alan, the young man, finding his father didn't really give him everything he was looking for. 

And this is Janie's wake-up moment. She realizes she's been "running the clock out for some grand encounter." She wonders what will happen if it doesn't come, then suddenly realizes the far worse scenario: "...what if it did? Wasn't that worse?" Of course, she realizes, the answer isn't in Adam's magic penis or some other bit of youthful discovery.

Having spent the last hour trying to get drunk or high to ready herself for her big night, we see her at the story's close trying to sober up. She's skipping past the need to make a long string of young people mistakes in order to wise up. She's wise already. 

But the story doesn't just end on that note. It's not a heavy message of the superiority of sober choices over drunk hopefulness. In the last sentence, Janie is smelling the summer air, and thinks that "it made you pity the dead even more than usual." That's kind of a carpe diem sentiment. 

The story's heart isn't really either fully with the freedom to make possibly unwise choices or the wisdom to refrain from them. It's with intentional life, one grounded in knowing who you are. I've thought a lot about whether one could make an argument that identity is the best source of ethics. I'm still not sure that makes total sense, but I do leave this story thinking the cure to what is ailing Janie might be at the party she's leaving rather than the one she's going to. 

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For Karen Carlson's take on this story, which picks up on the ambivalence toward adventure by zeroing in on the multiples connotations of "arms," go here. 

**Marlo Stanfield, The Wire