Pitch Memory by Ethan Canin, 1984
The magic trick:
Showing without showing
This story starts with the narrator’s mom being arrested for shoplifting at J.C. Penney’s the day after Thanksgiving. So here we are. Thanksgiving on the SSMT website. An obvious choice!
It’s really a ridiculously good piece of writing. Just read the first three or four pages and take it all in. The narration is so supremely well executed, bouncing between backstory, setting-setting, character introduction, humor, poignancy. It’s just like Canin was on fire for the half-hour or whatever amount of time it took for him to hold that magical momentum long enough to churn out this opening. It’s phenomenal.
I don’t even love the central image at work here – the titular pitch memory. The narrator recalls singing as a young girl with her sister and mother. They would get frustrated with the narrator’s lack of perfect pitch. If you don’t have it instinctively, just try to memorize the sounds and learn that way, her mom suggests. I mean, it’s pretty good. It’s an interesting idea to extrapolate out.
But what really gets me in this story is the masterful way Canin can show you something about the character not only without telling you… We all know show don’t tell. But it’s like he shows you without showing you.
Consider this paragraph. It’s the one that wraps up the little pitch memory vignette.
“Now, nineteen years later, on our first night together, in the living room of my mother’s house, we sing. My mother is between us and we are facing the large plate-glass window that looks onto the bougainvillaea bushes and the sidewalk. It is just evening, and as we sing it grows darker outside so that the living room window becomes a mirror. My mother notices this and puts a hand on each of our shoulders.”
Are you kidding me? What a bit of writing. So subtle but so damning.
And that’s quite a trick on Canin’s part.
The selection:
“Mom wants me to buy clothes,” I said to Tessa.
“Maybe you should.”
“I don’t need clothes,” I said. “I have clothes. I have two hundred skirts, maybe three hundred blouses.”
“Be serious. She worries.”
“She keeps trying to give me a hundred-dollar bill.”
“Take it.”
“I won’t take it.”
“The least you can do is let her buy you some clothes. You don’t ever have to wear them. Put them on, get a picture taken, and send it to her. Then sell them.”
“She’s stealing again,” I said.
“What?”
“Mom’s stealing again.”
“How do you know?”
“Look around. The bathroom closet’s a supply warehouse.”
“She worries about things running out.”
“Why does she give me hundred-dollar bills, then?”
“She worries about you, too.”
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