“As a literary device, the retrospective stance is complex,” Jamie Quatro says. “On the one hand, it gives you enormous freedom. . . . But there has to be a present-day urgency compelling the return to the past.”
,” is about a middle-school girl named Anna. Her mother has been taking frozen yogurt to a sick boy whose family belongs to her church. We later learn that the story is being told decades later, from the perspective of the adult Anna. When did you first start thinking about this story? Did you know from the outset that you’d tell it from this vantage point?
This is part of what I love about retrospection: the dual lens, or dual consciousness, it lends to a narrative. “Here’s what I thought then, here’s what I think now.” How do those two ways of seeing align? How are they incompatible? This is where unreliability can come in: the way memory betrays us, and we betray memory. One of my favorite Alice Munro stories is “,” in which the protagonist, Meriel, looks back on a one-night stand she had as a young woman.
One day, Anna goes with her mother to see the sick boy, Benjamin. She’s shocked to discover he’s a grown man. Judging from the music Anna listens to, the story is set in 1983 or 1984 or so, and Anna realizes that Benjamin is suffering fromcrisis? Can you remember what the atmosphere was like in the nineteen-eighties when cases—and deaths—first started making headlines in the mainstream news?
There’s something in what Anna’s mother says about the mountain ranges surrounding Phoenix—safety versus threat, sunshine versus natural disaster—that resonates with the man in the tub, and with the dead toddler in the coffin, and the sex worker in the condemned house. Enclosures might be safeguards, but they’re also sites of suffering. The generations of body shame passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter to granddaughters add another layer to the way Anna perceives the body.
So there’s a kind of radical, and even progressive, stance in the women’s willingness to perform the baptism against the strictures of the church. In some ways it’s a reclamation of the role of women in the New Testament. The resurrected Christ entrusted the gospel message to a woman: Mary Magdalene, the “apostle to the apostles,” was in fact the first preacher. And, other than John, it was the women, not the men, who remained with the body on the cross.
What the adult Anna is attempting to come to terms with—the reason she’s looking back on these childhood episodes—is this sense that she’ll never measure up to her mother. She still feels that she can get her mother’s approval and love only by describing her own acts of service. This, in turn, creates self-loathing: “Why am I still trying to prove anything to my mother?” Of course, Anna’s issue isn’t really with her mother, but with how she thinks about God.
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