Best Western by Louise Erdrich, 1990
The magic trick:
Characters living the escape but who need an escape from the escape
There are many short stories whose central appeal is its characters living a lifestyle that seems to be separate from regular life. “Best Western” qualifies, as it gives us a couple working the hotel lounge circuit across the Upper Midwest and the western United States, singing, playing piano, trying to make it. Obviously, this is not a glamorous lifestyle. It’s not necessarily one the reader the longs for. But it’s incredibly appealing for us to read about because, crucially, it’s far from the mundane 9-to-5 we live. It feels like an escape.
OK, so it’s an interesting development then when in “Best Western,” what feels like freedom to the reader begins to feel like a prison for our narrator. She needs an escape from our escape.
And that’s quite a trick on Erdrich’s part.
The selection:
That night at the Garden Court was a high point. I should have known we were heading for a low. The only nature I got to see in those days of marriage was landscaping. It comes back to me so clear sometimes. Moments. Places. There were at the Knight’s Inn, Detroit. I was looking at the boulevard, at the plantings around the parking lot and pool, at the way the flat yew bushes grew between the clumps of candy-striped petunias and yellow snapdragons. I was looking at the soft shapes of pines, when I suddenly wanted so badly to just lie down. It was midday, the parking lot quiet, but Ricky was in our room, in the bed underneath the crossed spears on the wall. He was catching up on sleep. I needed sleep, too, but I didn’t dare go back in the room for fear of waking him.
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