To Do by Kate Walbert, 2019
The magic trick:
Showing how different points in life connect by using a flurry of vignettes from three chapters of a woman’s life
This story is simpler than it may at first appear, when you are taking in vignettes seemingly at random through different points in our protagonist’s life.
They are not, of course, random. Essentially, it boils down to three chapters of her life. One: Constance as a 13-year-old, playing tennis, covering for her mom’s drinking. Two: Constance visiting her mother at the retirement home. Three: Constance as a divorcee, hanging out with friends one night in the aftermath of her mother’s death.
There are fairly obvious connections to make between the chapters. But the swirling vignette style of the story does its best to obfuscate those – much in the same way life does.
And that’s quite a trick on Walbert’s part.
The selection:
It all had to do with saying something, Constance told herself, with continuity and mothers, lists and identity. In short: are we the sum of what we’ve crossed off? Or are we only what we still have left to do? Her mother’s death wasn’t the point. People died every week at that place, every day of the year. Mothers. Fathers. In her mother’s retirement community, they printed—embossed—the names of the newly dead on ivory card stock each morning and propped the card as if it were a menu on a tiny easel outside the dining room. Dinner specials, her mother called them. Death du jour.
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