Goodnight, Beautiful Women by Anna Noyes, 2016
The magic trick:
Unifying two ideas that should be contradictory
Happy Mother’s Day! Today’s feature from Anna Noyes follows yesterday’s portrait of mother-daughter relationships in Maud Casey’s excellent “Days At Home.”
In truth, this story maybe winds up being more of a eulogy for a stepfather, but I read it the same afternoon (randomly) as the Maud Casey piece, and I think there are a lot of similar ideas about mothers and daughters and the ways life never goes quite as you’d hope.
This story does something magical that I can’t explain. So my magic trick note here will simply be pointing out the effect. Good luck figuring out how to actually do it in your own writing.
The plot focuses on an odd road trip undertaken by a family of three – mom, stepdad, and our teenaged protagonist back home from boarding school. The family seems happy. Or something like happy. They are odd, full of anxiety, deferred emotional (and probably literal) maintenance. But they seem happy. They interact with each other in a way that seems to integrate their idiosyncrasies into love.
But then – and this very much is a spoiler – the mother suddenly tells the daughter one night that she needs to leave her husband. The marriage, and this life of theirs, no longer works.
And this is where the aforementioned magic really shows itself. Based on what I’ve just told you, the family appeared happy, right? This revelation that things are in fact irrevocably broken should run totally counter to that, right?
Right?!
Well, it doesn’t. Somehow, both things feel true. They seemed happy during the story’s first half. But this notion that it all has to end now also seems right.
I don’t know how the author wrote it so that both things make sense, but she did, and that’s quite a trick on Noyes’s part.
The selection:
In the bedroom Mom’s standing in front of the mirror in her red cowboy boots. They’re crumpled, streaked with dust. She wore them for months after she left Dad. She wore them out dancing, brought men home in them. For a while before Bert, Mom and I lived in an Airstream by a rock quarry. Late at night I could hear the boot’s heels clicking sharply against the quarry’s pink granite.
She’s wearing the same clothes as the day before, her sweater slipping off one shoulder. “Well, would you look at her,” she says, stooping to spit shine the leather.
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