NEW
Library Project
Volume 2, Number 1 - Fall 2003
Seeking
Questions in Margins of Text
by Anndee
Hochman
Once, we spent a fruitful fifteen minutes
discussing the word “it.”
I was leading a People and Stories session at
Covenant House, a shelter and support center for young men and women. In a
drafty 4th-floor room, girls aged 15-21 pulled chairs into a
circle to read Rosario Morales’ story, “The Day It Happened.”
The story, told through the eyes of a
12-year-old girl whose apartment window becomes a vantage point for
neighborhood drama, recounts the day that Josie, a young woman in the
building, decides to leave her abusive husband.
But we didn’t know that yet. We were deep into
the four words of the title. “What could the ‘it’ be?” I asked.
“Something that changed her life,” said
Gabrielle.
“Something significant,” said Tira.
“Something bad,” suggested Denise. “If it
was good, [the writer] would have said it.”
“Why not just say it?”
“She leaves it open,” said Denise.
Gabrielle nodded. “She makes you think.”
At Covenant House, participants were making
rough passage through their teen and early adult years. They were hungry
for maps to the future. And yet, session after session, it was not the
“moral” of a story that intrigued them most. What snagged interest
were, rather, the “it” moments—times when an author withheld a
detail, suggested rather than explained, allowed shadows to drift across
the text.
These young women knew about shadows—taboos of
sexual abuse, teen pregnancy, drug addiction or jail time that lurked in
their own lives. They knew that the most important things are often the
hardest to say.
In Morales’ story, neighbors help Josie with
packing, prayer and moral support. Denise wondered where the neighbors
were earlier, when the couple fought; Tira suggested that domestic abuse
is “the thing everyone knows but doesn’t talk about.”
Several weeks later we read “Fat,” by
Raymond Carver. In this story, a waitress tells her friend about an obese
customer she served on a recent night. Silences and enigmas proved to be
rich turf for discussion: Why don’t the waitress and the fat man have
names? Why does the man call himself “we”? And what about the ending,
when the waitress says, “My life is going to change. I feel it.”
“Is that it?” one of the girls said,
flipping the last page in search of something more. They often hunted for
the next chapter, uneasy at first with lack of closure at a story’s end.
But slowly, ideas began to bubble forth. They speculated about the
ambiguous conclusion: the waitress would seek out the fat man as friend or
lover. No, she would renew her commitment to her narrow-minded boyfriend.
On the other hand, perhaps she would leave him. One girl tried to persuade
us that the waitress must be pregnant.
Over time, the girls gained comfort with untidy
endings. At its best, People and Stories affirms this untidiness and
encourages readers to examine the margins, knowing even as we look that we
will find more questions. Knowing the only true “next chapter” is the
one we create.
That night, Tira pointed to the waitress’s
response when her boyfriend scoffs at the fat man: “Rudy, he is fat, but
that is not the whole story.” Tira looked slowly around the circle,
holding each of us in her gaze. “Everyone has a story that’s more than
what you see.”