Riverhead
Review by Walter Cummins
The title of this collection is appropriate for each of its nine stories. In some literal brawls take place, the combatants physically scarred. In others the wounds are psychic and emotional, even more debilitating than the physical. It’s painful group of stories, harrowing for those afflicted, and for readers who find themselves fully engaged. Coping with life’s circumstances is a brawl, a combat with others and even with self.
In the title story, Sara is typical of Groff’s protagonists, facing a confrontation with a world that conspires against her. A “skinny slinking girl with bad skin and teeth,” she feels transported when standing high on a diving board as a member of her swim team. Her dive is beautiful, her coach and teammates, the spectators all on their feet cheering for her. Then she discovers a rip in her skin of her neck, touching it with bloodied knuckles, now aware that she had scraped the board and is disqualified, her talent wasted.
Later that day, as Sara steals two frozen dinners in a convenience store and pays only for a popsicle, the boy at the register, a schoolmate, reveals the reason for the bloodied knuckles, a fight Sara had at school, her most physical brawl. Back in their shabby apartment Sara finds her mother staring at the television, a woman who drinks only vodka and eats only pills. An ER doctor had told Sara the woman was malnourished. Sara gives her the popsicle and the stolen dinner, longing for her to eat. The TV screen displays glaciers with “savage dark beasts swimming in the waters beneath,” and Sara knows that she will be able unable to resist “the denser and darker and far lonelier stuff that would make up the rest of her life.” Sara’s defeats are her destiny.
She is just one of Groff’s scarred characters facing a haunted future. In the collection’s opening story, “The Wind,” a woman relates a story of a day in her mother’s childhood, one that the mother is compelled to tell again and again whenever she finds herself frozen in memory, “as if ripping out something that had worked its roots deep inside her.”
On that day, the teller’s mother’s mother, with a mashed face from another beating by an abusive husband, has a plan to escape that relationship with the girl and her younger brothers. The children first get on the school bus to drop off at a point where their mother will pick them up with her car. The details of the flight is told long after the event by the daughter of that girl with an urgency that captures the desperation to cross the state line, where they can board a bus to safety.
The terrorized mother, the teller’s grandmother, her children on the bus and about to board herself, has her freedom ripped away when her abuser seizes her hair and drags her back. It’s a split second action, much like Sara’s heel brushing the diving board. The children never see her again. The teller, her granddaughter, who was not there, now finds her mother’s story has “seeped into me through her blood,” both mother and daughter unable to escape the dark stuff that raged throughout their lives.
Darkness lies beneath each story in Groff’s collection, when “life seems so small that the darkness in me has no outlet,” a darkness embedded for different reasons, each afflicting a character’s life with no escape. The teller of the final story, “Annunciation,” initially abandoned by a mother who did not bother to come to her college graduation and then connected with two women whose lives have been even more painful, speaks for the tormented in all the stories, where the darkness keeps “circling, faster and faster, tighter and tighter, until it seems that there is nothing but darkness, endlessly spinning.”
Lauren Groff’s gift for language that captures the despair of her people is the convincing force throughout the collection.
