Charity by Cara Blue Adams, 2009
The magic trick:
Creating a realistic and complex context around the mother character so that her behavior – good and often bad – can be viewed with nuance and understanding by the reader
Merry Christmas to you.
Today’s story is pulled from Adams’s amazing You Never Get It Back collection. The collection’s protagonist, Kate Bishop is home from her first semester of college, celebrating Christmas with her mom and sister and extended family. It’s not a particularly warm affair.
“Charity” really serves as an excellent portrait of Kate’s mother, a character who features prominently throughout the collection but really shines here. She carries decades of pain and resentment with her from childhood, and this year has decided that “stiffing” her relatives with donations to charity in their names is the best way to turn Christmas gifts into the next salvo in their ongoing war of leverage and subtext.
This creates an interesting set of situations (does Kate help her sister still buy gifts even if it contradicts their mom’s plan?) and family dynamics. The scene at family Christmas is particularly revelatory as we see that Kate’s mom is actually quite justified in her subtle war on her family. At least that’s how I felt reading it.
Most stories that highlight a parent’s struggles prematurely thrusting the child into a caretaking role inherently cast that parent as being broken or even as a villain.
That’s really not what’s happening here. Kate’s mom in the story is definitely ailing – maybe even broken, if you want to use that term. But she’s no villain. It’s not that simple. She’s oddly strong and resilient, even when she does things that simultaneously come across as selfish or petulant.
This story does an excellent job of creating a realistic and complex context around her behavior and character.
And that’s quite a trick on Adams’s part.
The selection:
We are getting presents for the relatives, I have decided. My mother can’t really have meant that Agnes and I weren’t to buy them anything ourselves, could she? Of course she could; I know this, but I choose to believe otherwise because it would be too embarrassing to show up empty-handed. We pool our money: the hundred dollars I’ve saved from my work-study job in the lab, the twenty dollars my mother has given Agnes to buy me a present. We agree the presents will be from us both. Agnes hands over her share, all in rumpled ones. Then she asks for ten dollars back.
Agnes has an eye for the gaudy and the plentiful. She makes a case for buying everyone a ham-sized set of pink and purple seashell-shaped soaps packed in shrink-wrapped baskets of wood shavings. They reek of cheap perfume. She also likes cheap gold-plated charms shaped like angels.
“Snazzy,” Agnes says. It is her new favorite word. She holds a charm up to the fluorescent lights and the gold glitters.
I talk her into a compromise position: one thing each person might actually want, and the gold charms.
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