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Monday, August 20, 2007
The Girl Detective
When you move, you lose things, and you find some things that were lost. I can’t find my damn pen to go with my Graphire drawing tablet. Damnit. Nor my box of Sgt. Frog VCD’s. But I found my copy of Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen
She has a new book coming out just this week - as editor and contributor: The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
A few thoughts about Stranger.
The really, truly spooky story is “The Specialist’s Hat". So if that’s what you want, try it on.
The author’s signature stylistic achievement is a clipped, understated, pregnantly affectless diction. She writes like Donald Barthelme, but to deeply uncanny as well as genuinely comic effect. She does a lot of retelling of fairy tales, in modern dress - something Barthelme did, too. (I was just rereading his Snow White and The King, which is probably why this connection is striking me.) Accordingly, “Travels With The Snow Queen” is very nice. Best of all is the “The Girl Detective”; sort of a Nancy Drew and the Case of the Twelve Dancing Princesses thing. Hardboiled, this trip to the underworld.
I’ll tuck the first bit under the fold. Get the whole book to read the whole thing. (OK, maybe this story is more comic than uncanny. Here is seems to me she is just plain beating Barthelme straight up at his own game. Which is saying a lot. Elsewhere she tones down the comedy and achieves truly creepy effects with many of the same stylistic tricks. She really puts the dead back in deadpan.)
The girl detective looked at her reflection in the mirror. This was a different girl. This was a girl who would chew gum. - DORA KNEZ, in conversation
The girl detective’s mother is missing.
The girl detective’s mother has been missing for a long time.
The underworld.
Think of the underworld as the back of your closet, behind all those racks of clothes that you don’t wear anymore. Things are always getting pushed back there and forgotten about. The underworld is full of things that you’ve forgotten about. Some of them, if only you could remember, you might want to take them back. Trips to the underworld are always very nostalgic. It’s darker in there. The seasons don’t match. Mostly people end up there by accident, or else because in the end there was nowhere else to go. Only heroes and girl detectives go to the underworld on purpose.
There are three kinds of food.
One is the food that your mother makes for you. One is the kind of food that you eat in restaurants. One is the kind of food that you eat in dreams. There’s one other kind of food, but you can only get that in the underworld, and it’s not really food. It’s more like dancing.
The girl detective eats dreams.
The girl detective won’t eat her dinner. Her father, the housekeeper—they’ve tried everything they can think of. Her father takes her out to eat—Chinese restaurants, once even a truckstop two states away for chicken-fried steak. The girl detective used to love chicken-fried steak. Her father has gained ten pounds, but the girl detective will only have a glass of water, not even a slice of lemon. I saw them once at that new restaurant downtown, and the girl detective was folding her napkin while her father ate. I went over to their table after they’d left. She’d folded her napkin into a swan. I put it into my pocket, along with her dinner roll and a packet of sugar. I thought these things might be clues.
The housekeeper cooks all the food that the girl detective used to love. Green beans, macaroni and cheese, parsnips, stewed pears—the girl detective used to eat all her vegetables. The girl detective used to love vegetables. She always cleaned her plate. If only her mother were still here, the housekeeper will say, and sigh. The girl detective’s father sighs. Aren’t you the littlest bit hungry? they ask her. Wouldn’t you like a bite to eat? But the girl detective still goes to bed hungry.
There is some debate about whether the girl detective needs to eat food at all. Is it possible that she is eating in secret? Is she anorexic? Bulimic? Is she protesting something? What could we cook that would tempt her?
I am doing my best to answer these very questions. I am detecting the girl detective. I sit in a tree across the street from her window, and this is what I see. The girl detective goes to bed hungry, but she eats our dreams while we are asleep. She has eaten my dreams. She has eaten your dreams, one after the other, as if they were grapes or oysters. The girl detective is getting fat on other people’s dreams.
The case of the tap-dancing bankrobbers.
Just a few days ago, I saw this on the news. You remember, that bank downtown. Maybe you were in line for a teller, waiting to make a deposit. Perhaps you saw them come in. They had long, long legs, and they were wearing sequins. Feathers. Not much else. They wore tiny black dominos, hair pinned up in tall loopy curls, and their mouths were wide and red. Their eyes glittered.
You were being interviewed on the news. “We all thought that someone in the bank must be having a birthday,” you said. “They had on these skimpy outfits. There was music playing.”
They spun. They pranced. They kicked. They were carrying purses, and they took tiny black guns out of their purses. Sit down on the floor, one of them told you. You sat on the floor. Sitting on the floor, it was possible to look up their short, flounced skirts. You could see their underwear. It was satin, and embroidered with the days of the week. There were twelve bank robbers: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then Mayday, Payday, Yesterday, Someday, and Birthday. The one who had spoken to you was Birthday. She seemed to be the leader. She went over to a teller, and pointed the little gun at him. They spoke earnestly. They went away, through a door over to the side. All the other bank robbers went with them, except for Wednesday and Thursday, who were keeping an eye on you. They shuffled a little on the marble floor as they waited. They did a couple of pliŽs. They kept their guns pointed at the security guard, who had been asleep on a chair by the door. He stayed asleep.
In about a minute, the other bank robbers came back through the door again, with the teller. They looked satisfied. The teller looked confused, and he went and sat on the floor next to you. The bank robbers left. Witnesses say they got in a red van with something written in gold on the side and drove away. The driver was an older woman. She looked stern.
Police are on the lookout for this woman, for this van. When they arrived, what did they find inside the vault? Nothing was missing. In fact, things appeared to have been left behind. Several tons of mismatched socks, several hundred pairs of prescription glasses, retainers, a ball python six feet long, curled decoratively around the bronze vault dial. Also a woman claiming to be Amelia Earhart. When police questioned this woman, she claimed to remember very little. She remembers a place, police suspect that she was held hostage there by the bank robbers. It was dark, she said, and people were dancing. The food was pretty good. Police have the woman in protective custody, where she has reportedly received serious proposals from lonely men and major publishing houses.
In the past two months the tap-dancing robbers have kept busy. Who are these masked women? Speculation is rife. All dance performances, modern, classical, even student rehearsals, are well-attended. Banks have become popular places to go on dates or on weekdays, during lunch. Some people bring roses to throw. The girl detective is reportedly working on the case.
Secret origins of the girl detective.
Some people say that she doesn’t exist. Someone once suggested that I was the girl detective, but I’ve never known whether or not they were serious. At least I don’t think that I am the girl detective. If I were the girl detective, I would surely know.
Things happen.
When the girl detective leaves her father’s house one morning, a man is lurking outside. I’ve been watching him for a while now from my tree. I’m a little stiff, but happy to be here. He’s a fat man with pouched, beautiful eyes. He sighs heavily a few times. He takes the girl detective by the arm. Can I tell you a story, he says.
All right, says the girl detective politely. She takes her arm back, sits down on the front steps. The man sits down beside her and lights a smelly cigar.
The girl detective saves the world.
The girl detective has saved the world on at least three separate occasions. Not that she is bragging.
The girl detective doesn’t care for fiction.
The girl detective doesn’t actually read much. She doesn’t have the time. Her father used to read fairy tales to her when she was little. She didn’t like them. For example, the twelve dancing princesses. If their father really wants to stop them, why doesn’t he just forbid the royal shoemaker to make them any more dancing shoes? Why do they have to go underground to dance? Don’t they have a ballroom? Do they like dancing or are they secretly relieved when they get caught? Who taught them to dance?
The girl detective has thought a lot about the twelve dancing princesses. She and the princesses have a few things in common. For instance, shoe leather. Possibly underwear. Also, no mother. This is another thing about fiction, fairy tales in particular. The mother is usually missing. The girl detective imagines, all of a sudden, all of these mothers. They’re all in the same place. They’re far away, some place she can’t find them. It infuriates her. What are they up to, all of these mothers?
The fat man’s story.
This man has twelve daughters, says the fat man. All of them lookers. Nice gams. He’s a rich man but he doesn’t have a wife. He has to take care of the girls all by himself. He does the best he can. The oldest one is still living at home when the youngest one graduates from high school. This makes their father happy. How can he take care of them if they move away from home?
But strange things start to happen. The girls all sleep in the same bedroom, which is fine, no problem, because they all get along great. But then the girls start to sleep all day. He can’t wake them up. It’s as if they’ve been drugged. He brings in specialists. The specialists all shake their heads.
At night the girls wake up. They’re perky. Affectionate. They apply makeup. They whisper and giggle. They eat dinner with their father, and everyone pretends that everything’s normal. At bedtime they go to their room and lock the door, and in the morning when their father knocks on the door to wake them up, gently at first, tapping, then harder, begging them to open the door, beside each bed is a worn-out pair of dancing shoes.
Here’s the thing. He’s never even bought them dancing lessons. They all took horseback riding, tennis, those classes where you learn to make dollhouse furniture out of cigarette boxes and doilies.
So he hires a detective. Me, says the fat man—you wouldn’t think it, but I used to be young and handsome and quick on my feet. I used to be a pretty good dancer myself.
The man puffs on his cigar. Are you getting all this? the girl detective calls to me, where I’m sitting up in the tree. I nod. Why don’t you take a hike, she says.
Why we love the girl detective.
We love the girl detective because she reminds us of the children we wish we had. She is courteous, but also brave. She loathes injustice; she is passionate, but also well-groomed. She keeps her room neat, but not too neat. She feeds her goldfish. She will get good grades, keep her curfew when it doesn’t interfere with fighting crime. She’ll come home from an Ivy League college on weekends to do her laundry.
She reminds us of the girl we hope to marry one day. If we ask her, she will take care of us, cook us nutritious meals, find our car keys when we’ve misplaced them. The girl detective is good at finding things. She will balance the checkbook, plan vacations, and occasionally meet us at the door when we come home from work, wearing nothing but a blue ribbon in her hair. She will fill our eyes. We will bury our faces in her dark, light, silky, curled, frizzed, teased, short, shining, long, shining hair. Tangerine, clove, russet, coal-colored, oxblood, buttercup, clay-colored, tallow, titian, lampblack, sooty, scented hair. The color of her hair will always inflame us.
She reminds us of our mothers.
Comments
"The Girl Detective” is still available from the Wayback Machine—it was originally published by the now-defunct on-line magazine Event Horizon.
(Not to say everyone shouldn’t buy Kelly’s book anyhow, ‘cause the other stories in it are pretty excellent too.)
Hi Dave. Click the post link and download a nice PDF of the whole Small Beer affair. (But as you say: everyone should buy the book now.)
Kelly Link is great! I can’t believe you hadn’t read this one yet. The second one is good too. “Pregnantly affectless” is just right (as is “deeply uncanny"). I’m not into Barthelme though. Maybe I’ll give him another shot (I forget what I read of his).