Sex Appeal by Lucia Berlin, 1988
The magic trick:
A marvel of a story that is nonchalant in its conflicts
We have a weekend double of very short stories from Lucia Berlin for you.
Flash fiction has never appealed to me much. Even as I marveled at the efficiency of language, I usually forget everything about them within an hour of finishing the last sentence. They create momentary feelings, nothing more.
Here, though, is a writer who creates these miraculous three-page miniatures where there isn’t just the feeling of a brief poem, there are memorable people, character development, even plot!
It’s amazing stuff.
There is something more at work here too, and it’s a magic trick I surely can’t quantify. I’ll try but it’s mysterious to me.
Take today’s feature, “Sex Appeal,” for example. In it, our 11-year-old narrator joins her older cousin for dinner at a golf tournament where the cousin is trying to win the attention of a recently divorced man.
The story – and this is true, I believe, of much of Berlin’s work – has a rye nonchalance even as it addresses dark issues. The story establishes its reality of women prized for their appearance and sex appeal as a tool for social climbing with a smile if not an outright laugh. So you’re reading along, amused. And that’s when she gets you. The scenario changes – or maybe it moves in a direction that feels less like amusement and more like horror.
It leaves you questioning every level of society.
And that’s quite a trick on Berlin’s part.
The selection:
Rickie Evers was in town for the National Golf Open, and Bella Lynn was bound and determined to go out with him. She made reservations for dinner at the Del Norte. She said I should come along, that eleven years old wasn’t too young for me to get some lessons in sex appeal.
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