The narrator of “Her Blood,” the riveting opening story in Maryse Meijer’s new story collection, Rag, is a teenage pizza parlor employee who must mop blood off the floor after a customer suffers a miscarriage in the ladies room. A virgin, he imagines “having what she had, a place in my body that could splash an entire room with my insides and then let me walk away.” But his regard for the customer’s trauma is a mark not only of his propensity for tenderness but for aggression. Not even the afflicted customer or her boyfriend, whose behavior veers between taunting and haunting the young employee (the customer flashes him a coy smile while stumbling toward the ambulance, then calls him that night to ask what exactly he saw on the floor) seem to know which they prefer – causing, healing, or suffering injury. Their repeated visits to the parlor, during which their flirtation is overlaid with menace and underlain with secrecy, create a backdrop against which the boy ponders the extremes of adult sexuality that beckon him. Like many of Meijer’s characters, the trio in “Her Blood” careens between the poles of their animal natures. By the end of their story, it’s clear that the choice might not be theirs to make.
Meijer is a skilled, persuasive stylist, and her troubled and troubling characters, be they binary, male, female, or ungendered — children, teenagers, or adult — are rendered with a spare but soothing prose that gives their voices and gestures a fluency, lulling the reader into primal submission even when the tension is hard to bear. In “At the Sea,” a kidnapper rhymes and alliterates his abduction of a three-year old: “You drink and drink and she looks at you because you’re not eating, you’re not talking, you stare at the tables or the bottles behind the bar. How old are you now? you ask, and this makes her smile. I’m three! she says, holding up some fingers.” The rag that narrates the title story delights in its use as a murder weapon by describing itself as a “Humble, happy rag. Sad rag. Used, bleached, spoiled, rinsed, dormant,” before taking the side of the victim by appearing deep in the dead person’s throat, allowing homicide detectives to peg the murderer. In “Jury,” a juror for a trial involving a crime against a young girl spends the evening examining his sleeping daughter’s body for signs of the damage he hopes never to inflict, and later in court is attracted to a fellow juror who cuts herself. In Meijer’s hands, woundedness begets only more woundedness. Harm stalks people from all directions, and it’s impossible to tell whether the most grievous injuries occur inside the body or out.
“The body seems essential,” Meijer says in an interview with Maria Anderson at The Rumpus, regarding the creation of tension in her fiction. Blood, urine, saliva, and vomit are awash in Rag, studded here and there with full or broken sets of teeth left lying on the ground. Meat is an aromatic motif. With steak, grease, and fried chicken, the characters indulge their fleshly cravings and desires. In “The Shut-In,” a college-age recluse, convinced there is something wrong with their body, visits the home of a neighbor, also a recluse — but when they take a first look at each other, they are both wearing masks:
“Where are you, I thought, and then I saw it: the shut-in, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Its mask was so much bigger than mine, its round cheeks enormous, the smiling snout tipped in my direction. I stared. The shut-in’s body was thick, the chest flat, wide, the heavy legs bowed, so the thighs didn’t touch. It had the gloves on, socks pulled over the cuffs of its pants, the hood pulled tight around the mask, no inch of skin exposed. I still could not see what was wrong with it.”
Through an unforeseen act, the narrator learns the hard way that their years-long habit of loneliness leads only to more, and surprising, pain.
Meijer’s earlier novella, Northwood, opens with the poet-narrator’s first day alone in a cabin in the woods after escaping her life in the city. In the woodcutter’s cabin and gloamy forest, many readers will recognize the fairy tale motif recently employed by Angela Carter, Carmen Maria Machado and other feminist writers in which animal, human, and other unfamiliar natures collide. If there are still some touches of the fairy tale in Rag, there’s more grit than enchantment in these new pages. The stories take place not in woodcutters’ cabins but in convenience stores, gas stations, grimy kitchens and abandoned playgrounds, and a deceptively refreshing realism arises from the workaday world via details notable for their outward mundanity.
The grueling suburban milieu turns out to be especially potent, despite its bland sex, for the cruelty residing in the ordinary, and the wildness crouching in the domesticated. In “Viral,” a teenage pair climbs a ladder and, through the window of their neighbor’s house, shoots a video of her masturbating with a Cabbage Patch doll. Their gleeful sharing of credit for the soon-to-go-viral video enacts one of Meijer’s favorite themes — how people seek control over others even when their wish is to be controlled. “I’m in the car waiting for my boyfriend to kill her,” the narrator confesses, although the murderous impulse was one she fed him from the start. The ultimate event, which I will not spoil here, leaves the reader understanding that in Meijer’s fiction, any struggle between control and surrender will leave tragedy, monstrosity, or at the very least, disruption in its wake.
Meijer has a twin sister, Danielle, who in their adolescence used to wonder about the tales her sister told: “Where the hell is this coming from?” I asked the same question. Meijer seems to respond to that question in a Kenyon Review interview, saying that the extremes to which her fiction delivers its characters are “all quite literal. I don’t see anything I write as an exaggeration or alteration of the real.”
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[Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on February 12, 2019. 160 pages, $15.00 paperback original]