Mojave Rats by Kirstin Valdez Quade, 2015
The magic trick:
Using the mother’s point of view but giving the reader a precise portrait of the daughter
Two excellent short stories from Kirstin Valdez Quade for your weekend.
Up first, “Mojave Rats,” the story of a woman and her two daughters – one a 7-year-old, the other an infant – stuck in their trailer home with no heater and dad out investigating desert rocks for the weekend.
“Chekhovian” gets thrown around a lot to the point of being meaningless, but here it may actually be pretty close to appropriate. Like in a Chekhov story, what happens in “Mojave Rats” won’t sound exciting. The heat goes out; a neighbor girl visits the trailer; the mom gives her old dress away to the neighbor girl.
At the same time, though, what happens means everything. That seemingly boring plot may not excite, but it reveals the crucial crisis to the characters and distills it down to a single inflection point. Chekhovian, yes. I suppose “Munrovian” fits as well.
So what you find is that you’ve been reading a story that mostly embodies the mother’s point of view – her backstory, what she’s thinking. But because the story does such a precise job of presenting the conflict between mother and daughter, we receive the mother’s perspective but leave knowing the eldest daughter’s character maybe even better than that of the mom.
Amazing stuff.
And that’s quite a trick on Valdez Quade’s part.
The selection:
“You can’t give it to her!” Cordelia cried. “You said it could be mine!”
Monica folded the dress into a square, the cold silk slipping against itself, handed it to Amanda.
Amanda shoved it into her backpack.
Cordelia’s eyes filled with angry tears. “I don’t really think it’s ugly.”
“We’ll talk about this later, Cordelia.”
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