I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK:DRUG CHURCH-“Reading YouTube Comments” (2013).

I enjoyed the really noisy chaos of another Drug Church song that NPR played (“Deconstructing Snapcase”), but I really like the name of this one (although I can’t tell if it has anything to do with the lyrics–as the lyrics talk about walking with canes and using wheelchairs).

The song starts with thudding drums and angry vocals which are all about the singer’s ailments.  The chorus is fast and kind of repetitive, but fun to sing along to (decline, decline).  I enjoy the song for its aggressive, distorted sound–not quite metal, although I think it needs a bit more…something.

[READ: July 2, 2013] “May I Touch Your Hair?”

I recognized the name Julie Hecht but I couldn’t place her.  It was only after I read this whole story that I looked back at a review of something else I had read by her and I was pleased to see that I felt the exact same way about her narrator then as I did this time.

Hecht writes fiction with that seems like non-fiction.  Her narrator is first person and everything that she writes about seems very real–opinionated enough that you think she’s telling non-fiction.  Indeed, at times I had to confirm that it wasn’t simply an essay.

This story looks back at the narrator’s childhood.  Much of the story spends time at their beach house looking at all of the families who lived around them there.

There is not a lot to this story except really the narrator’s tone.  Little things come through like “Elinor was in her own upper-teenage world of grown-up girls in college.  She was studious as well as boy-crazy.”  That “boy-crazy” note is a bit of a judgment.  The narrator is very judgmental.  Like: “she got married at a young age, then made the mistake of having a baby right away.”  Or, “My mother told us she’d heard that Elinor had said to her three-year old child, ‘Your parents are young and want to go out, and you can’t expect us to be with you all the time.  We have our own lives.’  This was thought to be a bad thing to say to a child.”  I love that last line.

We learn about Elinor’s sister Dorothy and brother Ricky.  We also learn that their mother seemed happy to be a mother, whereas the narrator’s mother never seemed to be.

We also return to the narrator’s Winter House and meet the local boy Edward (who lived near the narrator’s Winter House).  He helped them unpack and seemed very interested in the narrator’s Toni Doll on which you could perform home permanents.  Her father liked Edward but “This was a before there was a world of non-heterosexuals.”

Later on she tried the Toni Doll techniques on her own hair with disastrous results.  There’s even more information about home permanents and their inevitable disaster–how they often led to taking a day off from school until they “settled.”

I also really enjoyed this quote.  Her mother said she should just introduce herself to strange girls that she wanted to play with by going up to them and saying ‘May I join you?”  “It was impossible to imagine using that phrase.  Even now.  Does anyone dare to speak that way?”

She explains that one of the high points in her life was when they returned to the summer house and she found one of her doll’s dresses.  She thought she lost it, but it was still in the street all those months later (they didn’t wash the streets in the beach town).  Her mother washed it and it was just like new.

The end of the story focuses on a family whose father was a butcher, “that alone was horrifying enough.”  But he also wore loud Hawaiian shirts.  And his wife bore her midriff.  And they all pronounced Yonkers as Yonkis.  There were three daughters, Blanche, Jeanette and Florence.  The oldest snapped her gum (distasteful).  The middle daughter desperately wanted a social life.  And she introduced the narrator to pizza and coke (!).

Through the story you learn more and more that the narrator has taken on many of her mother’s attitudes (“tap dancing is cheap,” bunk beds are “for small spaces with many children–nothing desirable”  “She liked babies.  She didn’t like older children and teenagers. She didn’t like us because we weren’t very young children or babies”).

And yet, her mother was also something of an embarrassment (her large bust especially).  And when she speaks of the desserts her mother made (graham crackers with applesauce and “canned, aerosol, push-button sprayed whipped cream; “sugar sweetened pineapple with Marshmallow Fluff (sic) in the center” and canned peach halves with Reddi-wip in the center) she says, “When I think of these desserts I wonder how we lived to grow up.” Although you can tell by this comment that the apple stayed close: “My mother was talking to…her close friend, who was wearing an old, stretched out, faded black bathing suit–her figure gone forever–apparently not having a moment or the inclination to care about that.”

I keep adding more because the opinions keep coming.  Like this one:

I knew popular music was something to avoid–Patti Page singing “How Much is that D_____ in the Window?” [why does she blank out Doggie?]  There were so many terrible song, but that one is remembered by music-loving people as the worst.

The story ends with the narrator meeting Shirley.  A young black girl who introduced the narrator to mud pies (seriously?).  The final few paragraphs bring up the title, when she asks Shirley if she can touch her hair.  The answer is yes, but Shirley wants to touch the narrator’s as well because her hair is different too.

Of all the people back then, Shirley is the one person she would consider looking up.  Although the last line deflates everything that she just talked about.  Julie Hecht is a pip, man. Good thing she writes so well.  And please don’t let her move next to me.