The Pleasures Of Television by Rebecca Bernard, 2022
The magic trick:
A story that aches
I picked this collection up randomly, seeing it one day on the Local Authors shelf at my library. I still don’t know where Rebecca Bernard is from or what her connection is to the Washington D.C. area. Certainly, “The Pleasures Of Television” isn’t DC-centric. But it doesn’t much matter. The point is that this turned out to be a really great find. I love this story and will certainly be keeping an eye out for more of Bernard’s work.
The story – set in a small-ish, faceless-ish, quiet-ish town – introduces us to two young adults: our narrator and her friend Beau. Their lives aren’t all that exciting. Their ambitions aren’t all that large. But they have each other, and they have their hobby: people watching. It’s what they call television.
The story strikes an exceedingly endearing tone. But things change. This is an author in complete control of her material, and she drips and drops bits of information here and there, perfectly placed to shape the reader’s feelings. Soon this isn’t something you’d only call endearing; it’s downright sad. It’s a story that aches, which really isn’t a very common characteristic for a piece of writing. It’s that combination of endearing and sad. Ache.
And that’s quite a trick on Bernard’s part.
The selection:
At the time, I don’t know that I thought about it like voyeurism, seeing folks in their so-called naked states, but that was what came out later when me and Beau made the mistake of telling his older brother one night over a case of Ice on Beau’s dad’s front porch.
By that point we’d Watched TV maybe five or six times, mostly sitting in the car in the Winn-Dixie parking lot and watching the little old ladies push their carts. The way their faces, some of them, look real determined whereas others of them look mostly lost or confused. And then one time at the Sonic when we reclined back real far in our seats and watched Tiffany Moses and Andy Smith on what we decided had to be a date, even though Tiffany, last we knew, was dating Zack Mason of Mason Auto Repair. Beau said this was what in-love looked like, and I thought maybe or maybe it was just desire. All big lipped and uneven and desperate.
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