I love it when I find sentences and groups of words that are like little treasures.
I found myself writing down almost every other one in this short story By Image Journal's Newsletter's Artist of the Month, Elaine Neil Orr.
Image is also the annual Sponsor of the Glen Workshop
Elaine Neil Orr
Elaine Neil Orr tells the truth about the way modern westerners think. Perhaps because she was raised in Nigeria, she has some critical distance from the American mind. Though the language of psychology allows us to sanitize and dissect our pride, fear, hunger, and self-absorption, the ancient demons have not been eradicated. They live with us even in our quietest moments, among the gentlest and most cerebral of people. In her fiction, Orr paints this phenomenon unsparingly, with a wry, light touch. Her prose is a pleasure: energetic, surprising, and perfectly matched to the mind of her characters. The result is at once comic and devastating. In her story “Day Lilies,” we can laugh at the main character’s narcissism, but her mind is drawn so carefully, her foibles presented with such honesty, that we can’t really distance ourselves from her.
Like Chekhov, Orr isolates small, emotional movements so as to illuminate their cataclysmic significance. Her subject is the ethics of love, not just as an emotion but as a choice that transforms us, a force that can break the spell of contemporary self-obsession.
Read Elaine Neil Orr's Day Lilies, featured in Issue 54
EXCERPT:
As she sat in her office chair looking out the window, she remembered her father’s hands, always
so beautifully groomed, the nails cut across but tapered slightly at the edges and the skin under
the nails the color of opal. How sad she had been in his last hours as the skin turned lavender, almost blue.
But somehow her witness of that change had brought an intimacy with her father that Ellen had not experienced before, this though she had been in love with him all of her life. She had never known exactly how to say, I am fourteen; can you tell me what to do now? In the weeks before his death, she did not say, my father, how can I help you? I am sorry for the distress I caused you when I left my husband. She had never said, Dad, you sometimes frightened me with your requirements.
When she felt her father’s hand on her shoulder, she did not turn around.
“You were so focused as a little girl;
you would stick your tongue out between your teeth when you played.”
“I guess that explains the braces later,” she answered,
remembering how he was the one who took her to the orthodontist....
“You were already where you wanted to be when you were little, suspended in eternity.
Why do you ask so much of yourself now?”
Ellen stood and turned to face her father.
For some reason, she imagined he would be wearing his tan jacket and a blue shirt underneath it.
But no one was there. Only the door she had closed behind her.
She sat again in her chair.
Holding her knees with both hands, she was coming to know what the ancients meant by angels.
They meant beings who are closer to the living after they die than they were before, messengers who still desire to make something right.
Since his death, her father had already spoken to her twice....
Six months since the stroke and Ellen no longer questioned her father’s presence. Sitting in her office she was becoming grateful for his death. Not that she did not weep often and literally hold herself and rock in a sadness larger than the ocean she had crossed as a girl.
At the moment, however, she was annoyed.
Why did you leave?” she asked. She did not mean why did you die? She meant she wasn’t through with the conversation at hand. “What do you mean I ask so much of myself? You asked so much of me. Remember! I need some absolution.
I think I lost something. Was I too ambitious? I don’t know. Tell me.” Her voice was rising and she wondered too late if her colleague in the next office could hear her.
Ellen let her eyes rest in the branches of a tree outside her window. Perhaps she sat for fifteen minutes, maybe only two or three. And then she felt a movement, like a shift in a lock, unloosening something in her most interior self.
Ellen breathed deeply. Her shoulders relaxed. “He’s telling her to ease up.” Now she was almost whispering. “Maybe I could ease up on my students. They have their losses too. Maybe we still have time.” Her father had said she lived in eternity.
Ellen began to wish she had had a grandfather, someone she had known as a girl and who had
died before her father. James and Ben were her grandfathers’ names. But they were dead before she was born, and growing up as she had in Africa, she might not have known them anyway.
Ellen realized that what she had needed for a long time was an ancestor.
How are you going to manage with only living people as guides,
people swayed by the heat or a deadline, people who believed time ran out?
No wonder Nigerians revered their ancestors.
How much can the living know? The idea swelled up in her, large and green.
It was preposterous to wish for people dead. What was more preposterous was to be so alone when the dead—your “late” father, as Nigerians would say—could provide so much perspective.....
Read the entire short story HERE
click right HERE to find out about Elaine Neil Orr's memoir, Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life
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