Balancing the social ledger: "Tender" by Cherline Bazile

There are at least three meanings of the word "tender" I can think of, and all of them play a role in the short story "Tender" by Cherline Bazile, the first entry in the 2023 "Best American Short Stories" collection. The most-used meaning is more or less synonymous with "sensitive," as in "I twisted my ankle and now it's kind of tender." That's the meaning that gets overtly mentioned in the story, when Eden protests to her best friend Fatima that Fatima is braiding her hair too tight. "You know I'm tender-headed," she says. If Eden--an ironic name if ever there was one, because he life is no paradise--is tender, she's entitled. She's poor-ish, she's an immigrant child in a place where that hurts her social standing, and, most importantly, she suffers physical abuse at the hands of her mother. So that's one meaning. 

The second meaning is related, but in a more positive and active sense. It's the meaning that shows up in words like "tenderness," where it means something like "kindness." Eden is craving this kind of tenderness, and she envies Fatima for her supply of it from a boy they both like and, more importantly, from Fatima's mother. One tenderness the story itself shows Eden is that it does not render a scene of violence for the reader to witness, but in Eden's life, she's lacking it badly. 

The third meaning is one we don't use much in everyday English, but it leaped out to me about halfway through. It's the one that means "to offer," as in "tender a contract offer" or "tender a resignation." After Eden's hair braiding at Fatima's house--which Fatima's mother helps with--is interrupted by the arrival of Fatima's father, leading to an argument, Fatima takes Eden home. Fatima tries to seek sympathy from Eden--to seek tenderness, that is--but Eden doesn't want to give it. Eden refuses to grant Fatima the right to be unhappy with her home life, because, Eden insists, arguments aren't as bad as getting hit. Later, reflecting on this, Eden recalls how Fatima had "gone frigid in the car, how she wanted my sympathy without ever offering hers."

Relationship ledgers

Eden seems to think sympathy should be reciprocal. It's almost transactional, to use a word now much abused, but which I nonetheless think fits here. Eden thinks not only that she shouldn't have to give sympathy (or tenderness, perhaps) without receiving some in return, but that the level of sympathy one receives should be equal to the level of hardship one faces. Since Eden thinks her life is much worse than Fatima's, she thinks she should receive more sympathy.

Once I realized this, I started to see a lot of other transactional philosophies at play in the story. 

1) Eden's mother believes she could get the best of transactions, that when she calculated what she got for what she gave, she should come out ahead. When her mother sees the scarf on Eden's head that Fatima's mother loaned to her, she says, disapprovingly, that she bets "she bought it for one hundred dollars. I could have found it at a yard sale for five." 

2) The white people in the story show two different philosophies. On the one hand, they believe the world is set up in such a way that needs will be met. That's why they push Fatima and Eden into a friendship (the only two black kids in school are surely meant to be together) and why they also think the mutual blackness of Eden and Chris, the only black boy in school, is "sufficient cause for a wedding." Because life has taught them that most of their needs will be met, they believe the universe works like that for everyone. They have a lot of "of course it's that way" assumptions, and when they calculate the plusses and minuses of social interactions, they do not doubt that they are right. Transactions are not do-or-die for them, because they assume there's enough of everything to go around.

But there is also a sense in which the white kids also believe in retribution for bad transactional behavior. When one white girl confesses to stealing earrings from Walmart, she apes the language of social justice to justify it. "I don't even feel bad about it," she says, because "they treat their workers poorly." 

To some extent, both Fatima and Eden are being influenced by these kids. Whether that influence is good or bad isn't clear, but at the end, I think that at least the results of the first kind of thinking might be healthy for Fatima at least. 

3) Fatima, who has recently taken to courting friendships with the white kids in school, occasionally mirrors their belief in reciprocity: "If someone doesn't give a fuck about you, don't give a fuck about them. Easy." However, her more frequent attitude seems to be that she should give more than she takes. Eden imagines that this is so Fatima can stay ahead in some competition they have going between them. Putting words in Fatima's mouth, Eden assumes that Fatima thinks the reasons she doesn't like having Fatima do her hair is that she "thinks I'm embarrassed because I can't pay her." And we as readers are tempted to believe Eden when Fatima sets up an ice skating party for kids at school and insists on Eden coming, even though it means Fatima will have to pay for it. We assume, with Eden, that Fatima is using her relatively better financial situation to demonstrate power over Eden. 

This assumption is stronger when we realize that Fatima is a good skater, that she is effortlessly gliding around the rink with the boy she and Eden both like while Eden keeps falling down with Chris. We think Fatima has orchestrated the whole thing in order to make Eden feel bad for being poor and to look foolish in front of others. But the ending undoes this whole assumption, both for Eden and for the reader.

What kind of transactional ledgers does Eden keep? Well, she's kind of like her mother, believing she should get more than she gives, but with tenderness, not money. 

Symbiosis

There is a whole other type of transactional model mentioned in the story, one that has a completely different way of calculating gains and losses. It's symbiosis, a relationship in which both parties gain something. It may not be an equal gain for both sides, but both sides get enough to think that they have profited from the deal. Although when it's mentioned, Eden is announcing that she's abrogated the  symbiosis ("I've unhinged myself from our symbiotic relationship"), it's clear that this is what Eden longs for. Moreover, she kind of can't avoid it. When Eden falls on the ice at one point, she looks back to realize Fatima has fallen, too. "What happens to one happens to the other," she muses. "As if our bodies were bound together." Symbiosis here goes beyond simply a mutually beneficial relationship to a more literal meaning of the roots of the word. They are "living together" in the sense that they are almost drawing air with the same lungs. 

If Eden thinks that this symbiosis, this inextricable link, is forced, it's also something she very clearly longs for. The final words of the story reflect this longing, as she imagines having a mother like Fatima's, one who would "have time to do my hair, wrap me in her greasy legs, so that when she moved, I did too." 

The twist (the story kind, not the hair kind) 

Eden doesn't quite achieve this kind of intimacy, this tenderness, but her friend Fatima is at least the key to helping her to realize more fully that she wants it. As Fatima is taking Eden home from the ice skating outing, they stop at Subway. Eden has never eaten there before, and Fatima walks her through how to order in a surprisingly sweet moment. As they eat together, Fatima finally tells Eden what it is that's been bothering her about Eden the whole time. The story opened with Eden announcing that her best friend "doesn't like me much." We are led throughout the story to think the problem is Fatima, but at the end, we realize that Fatima had a good reason not to embrace Eden more fully.

Fatima has just told the boy they both like that her father has another family. Eden thinks she should feel sympathy, but she only feels stupid she didn't already know. When she apologizes at Subway for not having been a good friend, Fatima complains that Eden acts "like me having a bad day is a personal affront to (Eden)." Suddenly, looking back at the story, we can see that Fatima is right. Not everything is about winning a game to Fatima. She simply had her own shit, and with Eden, whose longing for tenderness is so acute she cannot countenance it going to others, she couldn't get any sympathy. It was always a victim Olympics. 

Will Eden be okay?

Eden can be forgiven for not understanding symbiotic relationships, or the way in which tenderness isn't a thing you get more of by failing to give it away. She's learned this from her mother, who is as stingy about affection as she is about paying for head scarves. Eden thinks at one point that it's "easy to feel like it's not a competition when you're winning." Since she's been losing both financially and emotionally her whole life, it feels like a competition to her. But I think there's hope for her. She claims that she's learning from Fatima. In fact, she claims that Fatima is teaching her "everything." The final moments of the story, in which Eden most openly expresses to herself her longing for tenderness and intimacy, are perhaps hopeful. Just as the scene in Subway revealed to the reader that Fatima wasn't really calculating and cold the whole time, it seems to have also opened up other possibilities for Eden in human interactions besides the need to come out ahead. Eden has hopefully gotten the point of her own story.