Karen Brown
Little Sinners and Other Stories
University of Nebraska Press, 2012
Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction
“Swimming”
“Swimming”
is an enigmatic story that dramatizes one of the major lessons of “Little
Sinners,” both the title short story and the collection as a whole: “In all
stories are the seeds of what we cannot say out loud—that we are corporeal,
left to the mercy of the body’s urges” (14).
Like John
Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” which this story directly references and with which it
shares close kinship, Brown opens the story with a panorama of an upscale,
middle-class neighborhood on the morning after far too much drinking. “Memorial Day in Sunset Bayou begins and ends
with drinks in an organized circuit of the neighborhood. The following morning everyone awakens to
some form of destruction” (17).
The second
paragraph introduces us to Elise, whose story this is, and the narrative
focus. On Memorial Day, “Elise felt the
pull of repetition, the ease with which she was drawn, like everyone, as if
into the spokes of a wheel. The day had
a history for them” (17). It’s this
history, full of infidelity, swimming pools, and deceiving appearances, that
makes the heart of the story. To over
simplify a bit, the story revolves around an affair that Elise had with a
neighbor’s husband named Joe Trevor at a Memorial Day party the same year she
and her husband moved into the neighborhood twelve years earlier.
There is a
lot of moving about in this story, both in terms of place and in terms of
time. Elise and her husband, Will, start
Memorial Day on a neighbor’s lawn (Gina Beldon), where there are mimosas and
Bloody Marys at nine in the morning.
Then the party moves to their own backyard swimming pool.
Brown embeds
a sliver of the story that Elise is going to relive as a story told by one of
their neighbors. It was called the “story
of the nighttime swimmers” (19). One night
a neighbor saw and heard an unknown couple laughing and splashing around in the
Miller’s pool. “There had been a man and
a woman, clearly without clothes. In an
embrace,” but she “couldn’t tell who they were” (20).
The story
of the nighttime swimmers transitions into a memory for Elise of her first
Memorial Day in the neighborhood, when she started a year-long affair with Joe. Elise and Joe go night swimming in their
neighbor’s swimming pools on the last night of the affair. They are never caught, although Elise’s two
year old spots them kissing in Elise’s own pool. Each year Elise has to relive this moment of
her life.
About half
of this story is told in flashback. On a
structural level, after the opening iterative paragraph, the story focuses on
the present for about 11 paragraphs, transitions to the past by means of the
story told in the present, and stays in the past for about 15 paragraphs. Brown transitions back to the present by
means of describing Elise pretending to clean up, just as she had 11 years
before, waiting for Joe to say something to her in private (he never did). The story stays in the present for 10
paragraphs or so, and then dramatizes the last night of the affair; then it’s
back to the present for a couple of paragraphs.
For what it’s
worth, here’s my little chart (yellow is past, blue is present):
Paragraph 1: general survey
Paragraph
2: Elise and Wil in the present
Paragraph
3: New neighbors, Elise and Wil’s 12th yr.
Paragraph
4-6: Present: in scene at 1st party (Gina Beldon)
Paragraph
7: Present: transition to Elise and Will’s
Paragraph
8: The Story introduced (Miller’s house vacated)
Paragraph
9-10: Present: the story
Paragraph
11: Present: The story exaggerated
Paragraph
12: Past: “The first year Elise and Will had moved to the neighborhood….”
Paragraph
13: Past: 1st Party
Paragraph
14: Past: 1st Party infidelity
Paragraph
15-23: Past: In-scene dialogue
Paragraph
24: Past: strings of meetings (Mona sees them in the pool)
Paragraph
25, 26, 27: Past: (Relationship with Mona)
Paragraph
28: Present: pretending to clean up, switches to Past: 2nd year party, pretending to clean
up
Paragraph
29: Present: end of the party
Paragraph
30-35: Present with husband, Will
Paragraph
36: Present in room at night
Paragraph
37: Present sees daughter and boy in pool
Paragraph
38: Present in room,
Past: last night with Joe in hotel
Paragraph
39: Past, night swimming
Paragraph
40: Past, second party, affair over
Paragraph
41: Present, in daughter’s room
Paragraph
42, 43: Present, talking to daughter
Brown is an
adventurous, challenging writer and infuses this story with an apparently
dangling storyline that I want to mention.
There’s a new couple to the neighborhood (in the present). Elise overhears the husbands discussing the
new wife (18). The couple is introduced
early on and never really developed. Are
we to understand that they represent history repeating itself? In other words, is this couple Elise and Will
twelve years ago?
To support
this reading, the theme of repetition of the past, introduced early on (in the
quote above: “Elise felt the pull of repetition” [17]) and maintained in the
transitions from past to present, also concludes the story. It’s a heart-rending scene. After the party
in the present, in her own room, Elise sees her thirteen year old daughter in a
swimming pool with a boy. She watches
them briefly, goes back to her room, remembers when she and Joe swam in the
neighbors’ pools, then goes into her daughter’s room. Brown doesn’t give any motive in this scene
and leaves it to us to deduce what’s going on in Elise’s mind. Certainly, in one reading, Elise is horrified
by the inevitability of repetition and her powerlessness in its face. But Elise’s daughter, Mona, casts a new light
on infidelity, on secrecy (as a two year old child, Mona had seen her mom
kissing Joe in their pool), and ultimately on the fact that we are “left to the
mercy of the body’s urges” (14). She
says to her mom, “You saw us…. Weren’t we happy?” (27).
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