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Amy Bloom: "By-And-By"

Every death is violent.

The iris, the rainbow of the eye, closes down. The pupil spreads out like black water. It seems natural, if you are there, to push the lid down, to ease the pleated shade over the ball, down to the lower lashes. The light is out, close the door.

Mrs Warburg called me at midnight. I heard the click of her lighter and the tiny crackle of burning tobacco. Her ring bumped against the receiver.

"Are you comfortable, darling?"

I was pretty comfortable. I was lying on her daughter's bed, with my feet on Anne's yellow quilt, wearing Anne's bathrobe.

"Do you feel like talking tonight?"

Mrs. Warburg was the only person I felt like talking to. My boyfriend was away. My mother was away. My father was dead. I worked in a felafel joint on Charles Street where only my boss spoke English. 

I heard Mrs. Warburg swallow. "You have a drink, too. This'll be our little party."

Mrs. Warburg and I had an interstate, telephonic rum-and-Coke party twice a week the summer Anne was missing. Mrs. Warburg told me about their problems with the house; they had some roof mold and a crack in the foundation, and Mr. Warburg was not handy.

"Roof mold," she said. "When you get married, you move into a nice prewar six in the city and you let some other girl worry about roof mold. You go out dancing."

I know people say, and you see it in movies, cascades of hair tumble out of the coffin, long, curved nails growing over the clasped hands. It's not true. When you're dead, you're dead, and although some cells take longer to die than others, after a few hours everything is gone. The brain cells die fast, and blood pools in the soft, pressed places: the scapula, the lower back, the calves. If the body is not covered up, it produces a smell called cadaverine, and flies pick up the scent from a mile away. First, just one fly, then the rest. They lay fly eggs, and ants come, drawn to the eggs, and sometimes wasps, and always maggots. Beetles and moths, the household kind that eat your sweaters, finish the body; they undress the flesh from the bone. They are the cleanup crew. 

Mrs. Warburg and I only talked about Anne in passing and only about Anne in the past. Anne's tenth birthday had had a Hawaiian theme. They made a hot-dog luau in the backyard and served raspberry punch; they played pin-the-lei-on-the-donkey and had grass skirts for all the girls. "Anne must have been a little old for that, even then. She was a sophisticate from birth," Mrs. Warburg said. I was not a sophisticate from birth. I was an idiot from birth, and that is why when the police first came to look for Anne, I said a lot of things that sounded like lies.

Mrs. Warburg loved to entertain; she said Anne was her mother's daughter. We did like to have parties, and Mrs. Warburg made me tell her what kind of hors d'oeuvres we served. She said she was glad we had pigs-in-blankets because that's what she'd served when she was just starting out, although she'd actually made hers. And did one of us actually make the marinara sauce, at least, and was Anne actually eating pork sausage, and she knew it must be me who made pineapple upside-down cake because that was not in her daughter's repertoire, and she hoped we used wineglasses but she had the strong suspicion we poured wine out of the box into paper cups, which was true. I told her Anne had spray-painted some of our thirdhand furniture bright gold and when we lit the candles and turned out the lights, our apartment looked extremely glamorous.

"Oh, we love glamorous," Mrs. Warburg said.


OK. Once more, annotated:

Every death is violent. (Bloom is a great fan of Jane Austen, whose two-hundredth death-i-versary we celebrate this season. Austen wrote the most famous epigrammatic first sentence in literary history: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." It's a great sentence--dry, clinical, de-familiarizing. There's very little romance in it; it's as if an alien were observing human behaviors, human needs, and reporting back to the mothership. It also lays out the beginnings of all, or much, of Jane Austen's comedy: That "want of a wife" is a summons to the (not-consistently-romantic) Enchanted World, the comedy of errors, that forms Austen's main preoccupation. Bloom likes a crisp, bold Austenian opening. "At 2 AM, no one is to blame." "My father's wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place to see what might be in it for us." And "By-And-By" follows this tradition, with a short, startling observation. "Every death is violent."

The iris, the rainbow of the eye, closes down. The pupil spreads out like black water. It seems natural, if you are there, to push the lid down, to ease the pleated shade over the ball, down to the lower lashes. The light is out, close the door. (Here, we have some more de-familiarization, and some uses of metaphor. Who is this weirdo who sees an iris as a "rainbow of the eye," a dead pupil as "spreading black water," the eyelid as "a pleated shade," the closed eye as "a shut door"? As Bloom once said of a narrative voice in a class I took: "This is a person I'd like to have lunch with.")

Mrs Warburg called me at midnight. I heard the click of her lighter and the tiny crackle of burning tobacco. Her ring bumped against the receiver. (This a great, thrilling leap. It's like the space between lines two and three of Lorde's "Green Light." "We order different drinks at the same bars. I know about what you did and I wanna scream the truth." Whoa! Who is this "you"? A good writer, says Hilary Mantel, leaves gaps for the reader. A good writer trusts that her reader is at least as smart as she herself is. We are given Mrs. Warburg without context, and we want to read on; we already know that this narrator is a weirdo, and so we're eager to hear why she's talking to someone at midnight. The use of "Mrs." conveys information: We're dealing with a young narrator, who seems to have some respect for the person she's speaking with. That use of "Mrs." is deliberate. And then the references to the wedding ring, the crackle of tobacco, the click of the lighter--all are signs that the narrator is listening with strange intensity. Sonic imagery teaches us a bit about the narrator, and about her bond with Mrs. Warburg. All of this is done so subtly.)

"Are you comfortable, darling?"

I was pretty comfortable. I was lying on her daughter's bed, with my feet on Anne's yellow quilt, wearing Anne's bathrobe. (Fabulous lines! Why is the narrator in Anne's bed? And why is the narrator speaking to Mrs. Warburg so late, and with the weird pleasantries, the "are you comfortable"--? The tension is building.)

"Do you feel like talking tonight?"

Mrs. Warburg was the only person I felt like talking to. My boyfriend was away. My mother was away. My father was dead. I worked in a felafel joint on Charles Street where only my boss spoke English. 

I heard Mrs. Warburg swallow. "You have a drink, too. This'll be our little party."

Mrs. Warburg and I had an interstate, telephonic rum-and-Coke party twice a week the summer Anne was missing. Mrs. Warburg told me about their problems with the house; they had some roof mold and a crack in the foundation, and Mr. Warburg was not handy. (And: BOOM! We are in Shirley Jackson terrain. Talk about artfully burying the lede! Why is Anne missing? Is the narrator's unexplained, perverse fixation on the mechanics of death in some way a response to Anne's disappearance? Of course it is. I love that Mrs. Warburg is possibly encouraging an underage girl to drink with her at midnight over the phone. When you write, you want to uncover bizarre, counterintuitive relationships. Always look for the counterintuitive. So, for example: Tom Perrotta once wrote about a high-school election as if it were as earth-shattering as a national election. Edward St. Aubyn was raped by his father, and opted to treat the material as comedy. Joan Rivers observed that her aging, saggy vagina resembled "gray rabbit slippers"--and chose not only to disclose this to the public, but also to do it in a deadpan manner. Robyn wrote a song directly in response to Lena Dunham's "Girls," inspired by the trailblazing complexity of the relationships, the Dunham-anian world in which break-ups are not break-ups, friends are not quite friends, and great allies are sometimes very consistently, superficially insufferable. Kumail Nanjiani says that any setting in which people have a catastrophe on their plate for which they are wholly ill-equipped--is inherently comedic. There is dark, dark comedy in the image of a young girl wrestling with her dead friend's dotty, possibly alcoholic mother. It takes chutzpah to dream this up. That's why good writers win national attention.)

"Roof mold," she said. "When you get married, you move into a nice prewar six in the city and you let some other girl worry about roof mold. You go out dancing."

I know people say, and you see it in movies, cascades of hair tumble out of the coffin, long, curved nails growing over the clasped hands. It's not true. When you're dead, you're dead, and although some cells take longer to die than others, after a few hours everything is gone. The brain cells die fast, and blood pools in the soft, pressed places: the scapula, the lower back, the calves. If the body is not covered up, it produces a smell called cadaverine, and flies pick up the scent from a mile away. First, just one fly, then the rest. They lay fly eggs, and ants come, drawn to the eggs, and sometimes wasps, and always maggots. Beetles and moths, the household kind that eat your sweaters, finish the body; they undress the flesh from the bone. They are the cleanup crew. (Well, we can't talk or think about Anne's disappearance, obviously, so let's focus on other things. The scourge of roof mold. The actual science of the decaying body. This reminds me of "A Portion of Your Loveliness"--the daughter fixating on the Holocaust because she can't bring herself to fixate on the fact of her parents' divorce.)

Mrs. Warburg and I only talked about Anne in passing and only about Anne in the past. Anne's tenth birthday had had a Hawaiian theme. They made a hot-dog luau in the backyard and served raspberry punch; they played pin-the-lei-on-the-donkey and had grass skirts for all the girls. "Anne must have been a little old for that, even then. She was a sophisticate from birth," Mrs. Warburg said. I was not a sophisticate from birth. I was an idiot from birth, and that is why when the police first came to look for Anne, I said a lot of things that sounded like lies.

Mrs. Warburg loved to entertain; she said Anne was her mother's daughter. We did like to have parties, and Mrs. Warburg made me tell her what kind of hors d'oeuvres we served. She said she was glad we had pigs-in-blankets because that's what she'd served when she was just starting out, although she'd actually made hers. And did one of us actually make the marinara sauce, at least, and was Anne actually eating pork sausage, and she knew it must be me who made pineapple upside-down cake because that was not in her daughter's repertoire, and she hoped we used wineglasses but she had the strong suspicion we poured wine out of the box into paper cups, which was true. I told her Anne had spray-painted some of our thirdhand furniture bright gold and when we lit the candles and turned out the lights, our apartment looked extremely glamorous.

"Oh, we love glamorous," Mrs. Warburg said. (Another Jane Austen theme: An eye on social mobility. Austen--in "Emma," for example--took a particular interest in money, status, "breeding," manners, and the way that these phenomena continuously insist on surprising a shrewd observer of human behavior. It's touching to imagine Bloom's young characters painting their furniture gold, fixing up their pigs-in-blankets, aspiring to be something they are not--at least not yet. It's especially striking because, of course, Anne will now never get the chance to become her mother. Mrs. Warburg dodges this thought: "We love glamorous," she says, ironically, because it's likely a grown woman sees gold spray paint as something other than glamorous. The use of the royal "we" suggests that Mrs. Warburg is play-acting, that she has access to some wit, and, again, that she is a bit of a weirdo. Lastly, Jane Austen was interested in manners as a gauge of morals: Manners and morals are inextricable. Tiny details reveal deep, hidden rivers of character. So: A little girl shrugging off the grass skirts presented to her on her tenth birthday. This tells us not just about costumes, but about Anne's internal make-up. The narrator calls herself "an idiot," by contrast, and we sense that she is going to win something important from these phone conversations; she is going to mature, a bit, through her chats with the thorny, complicated Mrs. Warburg. Out of tragedy: Growth. A dead corpse may be sad to you and to me, but to the beetles, it's an opportunity for development. Manure leads to new plantings, new soil. It's hard to accept this, but it's true. Bloom makes the observation--the sad and the hopeful are continuously mixed together--without doing any major underlining. That's a big part of what makes these opening paragraphs capable of producing tingles-on-the-spine!)

And, lastly: You can get this story in Bloom's most recent published collection. What are you waiting for? And she has a new book en route, apparently. Very excited! If that isn't already clear!

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