The Choc-Ice Woman by Mary Costello, 2023
The magic trick:
Slyly building the story of a woman’s life while appearing to tell a different, more specific story of the moment
This one recalls Yiyun Li and Tessa Hadley, which of course is meant as a compliment.
It tells the story of a woman’s life, but it’s sneaky in its delivery. You never feel like you’re drowning in backstory or dry biography.
The narrative in motion here is a woman riding in the hearse to help deliver her dead brother’s body to the funeral home. And it’s not without incident. But the bulk of the text is devoted to what she’s thinking about during the trip. Those thoughts, you can probably guess, build into what amounts to her life story.
And that’s quite a trick on Costello’s part.
The selection:
For two weeks she had been at Denis’s bedside in the Mater hospital, leaving only after 10 p.m. to return to her B. and B. on Drumcondra Road. In the past two days he had not spoken or opened his eyes, and his breathing had grown shallower and shallower. She’d had an inkling last night, and felt that she should stay longer, but the nurse had assured her that he could last for several more days. Before she reached the B. and B., her phone rang. When she got back to the hospital, it was over and he had been moved to a private room with tea lights, a crucifix, and a leaflet for bereaved relatives placed on a side table. They had stretched a flesh-colored band, like an elastic stocking, around his head to keep his mouth closed. She kissed the top of his head and touched his cold hands, his nose, expecting to feel something. She thought of him as no longer alive but not yet dead. She whispered his name, but in the silence of the room it sounded contrived. She tried to summon the past. Denis and Patrick were twelve years older than Frances. Denis had been a fleeting presence in her early childhood. Home from Dublin one Christmas when she was eight or nine, he brought her a red plastic tea set, six Jaffa oranges wrapped individually in tissue paper, and a box of cornflakes, because cornflakes were a rare treat then. Not long afterward, he’d come home for good, and seldom left his room.
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