I gathered up my drink and Other Small Spaces and returned to my bedroom, where I stretched out with the book hanging over my head. More than once, I thought it looked like a guillotine.
In that way, I read “What We Learned,” “Playing Detective,” “The Good Italian Death,” “The Fertilized House,” “Orange Moon,” “An Unexpected Conversion,” and “Deep in the Valley,” the one I first read when I was eleven.
It was eerie how I could relate to each story: the sugariness of childhood disappearing with a series of explosive frights; the youthful compulsion to discover the secrets of other family members, and the aftermath when those secrets are revealed; siblings provoking one another with dares that result in disaster; the adult children of a dead man left to contend with the mess he left behind in a life wrecked halfway through; even a woman’s struggle with herself, with the tricks her mind plays, with the way her body betrays her, until she takes matters into her own hands. Every story resonated, opened the door to my early years, reminded me of my pointed hopes, forced me to consider where I was standing, how I had failed to leap big into the life I long desired, all those ancient and highly concentrated emotions flooding through me.
I was spent when I finished Other Small Spaces. From my bedroom windows, the streetlamps grinned whitely in the middle of rampant nature. The weather had dialed up again, the rain was approaching monsoon conditions, a tidal wave was washing over the street.
It was nearly eight, and I had planned to meet friends at a neighborhood bar, but I stood fixed in place, unable to go through the actions required to get myself cleaned up and dressed, thinking it would be base to introduce my regular life into what I was experiencing. The word reverence came to mind; what I thought I was feeling. I wanted to encourage the flow of such a rare emotion, feel its escalation within me, until there was an eruption, Pompeii, Vesuvius, Etna, the molten reverence prying open the constrictions that held me back, harnessed me, kept me chained up. I wanted to do what I rarely allowed myself to do: take a beat, revel in the unnatural sense of expansion that I had not felt since I created worlds for Henry the Squirrel to conquer with the words I plucked from the air, the only time in my life when I had truly shaped something from nothing.
I found a boxed pizza in the freezer, and turned on the oven, peeled the icy disc from its cardboard backing, thinking about shrinking spaces in which some of Ashby’s characters felt most comfortable; her boy-named women; her recurring motif of water—in glasses, tubs, lakes, the ocean, an emptied pool; the search her characters undertook to find that juncture where they had turned away from happiness or watched as others stole it away. Her damaged people braved on, moved forward, recaptured their lives or started anew, took small steps or bigger leaps to find themselves in another state of being, even should that state be death. In her work, hopefulness accompanied even death. Evan and Karen, Nina and John, Robbie and Luke, Esme and Howard, Aster and Orlanna, the girl deep in the valley who knew she lived in a small box growing smaller still, and all the others I had read about, grew to know intimately, talked to me as I put away the bottle of scotch, happy for having not drunk more.
Ashby’s stories were part of me by then, running through my veins, integrated into my soul, and my connection to her was so formidable that when I closed my eyes I saw myself writing those stories, felt that Other Small Spaces was mine.
I ate the pizza, and then I returned the book to my nightstand and looked at Fictional Family Life waiting to be read the next day. My heart felt large with possibility, and rumbling through me was something that nearly resembled joy. I expected that I would not easily glide into sleep, but I slept as deeply as if I were a child once again, certain of his own outstanding future.
Recording #3
On Sunday, I woke early, bursting with self-determination, and dropped to the floor. Five push-ups, then five more, then ten in one go; sweet pain I had forgotten about. Another ten and I stayed down for a while. Then, with disbelief, a final ten gutted out, barely, but I had proved something, whatever it was, to myself. The muscles in my arms seized, seismic quakes rolling up from brachialis to biceps to pectoralis major, triceps and deltoids quivering, guts rolling; tactile evidence of worthwhile accomplishment, the way my swim coaches had wanted us to feel after practices, the burn of exploit and achievement.
By five a.m., in clean sweatpants and sweatshirt, and with the coffee brewing, I surveyed Fictional Family Life, as I could not do the day before with Ashby’s first collection.
The cover was divided into thirds. The top third was a blue-green globe with countries out of whack: Colombia next to Russia, Russia next to the Eastern Pacific Ocean, with the Galápagos Islands nearby, and Turkey on the other side.
The middle third was an intricate pen-and-ink drawing of a castle encircled by slender trees. There was grass and a pond and a white dog with faint yellow patches in the distance.
The bottom third was a street of identical suburban houses, one with a blue door.
I flipped the book over to another black and white photograph of Ashby. Gorgeous still, but less feral than she had been on the back of Other Small Spaces. A crown of curls, her smile full.
The dedication read: Testify to the creation of lives and the requisite heroism in creating one’s own, and I felt something shift inside of me which I would not understand until much later.
The acknowledgment was enigmatic: You know who you are—JA. I did not know and wished I did.
The collection was also divided into three sections: “The Travels of Boys,” “The Rx of Life,” and “Familial Truths.” Each contained six stories, the shortest ran thirty pages, the longest sixty.