Guests by Mary Terrier, 2019
The magic trick:
Looking at a particular person as a way to recall a particular time in the narrator’s life
This is going to be an overly bold statement and one that is probably unfair and mostly ill-informed. But those are the best kinds of sentences to type into the internet, right?
This story – “Guests” by Mary Terrier – runs laps and laps and laps around most of the stories The New Yorker has published during the last five or so years. The comparison springs to mind because it’s certainly in the recently favored TNY realm of millennial realism. It’s just better. It’s funnier when it’s funny. It’s sadder when it’s sad. It has more teeth. So much of the current TNY ennui fiction I’m thinking of now just kind of floats along in this ethereal ennui. And “Guests” does as well but only to an extent. It’s sharper, I don’t know how else to say it. It has more of a point.
Anyway, irresponsibly vague comparisons aside…
“Guests” does something interesting in that it mixes the temporary with the lasting. It essentially is the story of a time period – the several months right after our 11-year-old protagonist’s mother has died of breast cancer. But instead of focusing the plot on the protagonist and her feelings outright, it centers itself on the dad’s new girlfriend (a former high school student of his who is still not out of her 20s). In many ways, this becomes her story. But because she’s a temporary part of the family’s life, her brief connection to the protagonist winds up standing in as a symbol of that time period of raw grief.
It’s a very well-done story; a skillful intersection of people and time.
And that’s quite a trick on Terrier’s part.
The selection:
The month after our mother died, our father began bringing women home. It felt like a behind-her-back kind of operation. “I’m going to have a guest over tonight,” is what he would say.
David and I stayed out in the living room, turned up cartoons, burned toast, kicked our feet up over our heads. I worked long division. At some point a woman would emerge to drink a glass of water or fix her hair in the kitchen window’s dark reflection.
The guests left behind nubs of lipstick in gold tubes and leftover food, paper pouches of cold french fries, chicken legs in clamshell Styrofoam boxes. They left tampons blooming through toilet paper in the trash can, like tiny mice they’d killed, the cotton tails pink with blood.
I guess when you think about it, everything we do is behind the backs of the dead.
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