Commentary on "Bambina" by Whitney Pugh

The idea of Whitney Pugh’s short story “Bambina” was interesting; I definitely felt the tension and trouble that Sophie was in. It was also successful how the story started off with action as the characters were set up and the reader was introduced to Sophie.

The dialogue is the main aspect that needs work, as it is inconsistent to the characters and the situations. In the very first scene when Sophie is bullying a kid out of money the kid replies, “Ah, man. Come on Sophie. How am I supposed to eat for the week? My dad’s getting suspicious; this is the third month in a row. What do you even do with all the money?” There are way too many words to communicate that the kid has any kind of genuine fear of Sophie. And even after Sophie punches him in the face he seems to sarcastically or jokingly call for help. After reading the rest, however, the joking manner doesn’t fit the tone of the rest of the story.

If Pugh was going for a mocking, sarcastic fat kid that didn’t mind getting bullied, the dialogue could stay pretty untouched but I would add more scene and narration to make clear the mockery.

Another part of the dialogue that I found unsuccessful was the way in which the story was explained through the conversations. The restaurant owner offers Sophie a cold drink to “cool [her] down since it’s so hot out there” when in reality, everyone in the scene would know the weather and to offer a cool drink would be enough.

Matteo was not a believable character. He wasn’t round and was way too perfect of a savior for Sophie. I think that maybe if Sophie overheard him yelling at the employees and talking less to Sophie, he could remain the hero but feel more plausible. I would also end the story on the way to the police station; trying to introduce the parents on such short notice didn’t work and left me unsatisfied. The mysterious working parents was working for me throughout.

The story has plenty of potential, can’t wait to see the revised version of it.

Dialogue

Roommates talking. Sorry its college kids, I was planning to go out of town this weekend but didn’t end up going.

Stephen walks into the room where Clark is on his computer.

Stephen) What are you doin

Clark) Nothing

S) Dude your rooms clustercussed, you like it like that?

C) I just haven’t gotten around to cleaning it

S) No I mean like the furniture

C) Oh, yeah. It’s functional when its clean

C) Do you want to move this down to the front door

S) That?

C) Yeah the record player

S) Will it fit?

C) Not sure, I haven’t measured it

S) By the time we get it down there we probably wont listen to records anymore and it’ll just get in the way, and I use that table that’s there right now.

C) Aight

S) Dude I may not be able to get my pants off with this one

C) Yeah that’s big

S) She just kept wrapping and wrapping the cast. The doctor said I could have gotten a boot today

C) Ah

S) But its not worth the risk of someone bumping into it.

C) Yeah

1-900

The problem I always find with dialogue is how it often breaks the flow. In the process of writing, the punctuating and he intros to speakers constantly breaks my thought process and direction of the story. What Richard Bausch did very well was create a story compiled completely of dialogue without any break in flow. Bausch created tension and complications and kept me interested and informed of the characters without any narration or any mentioned knowledge of their personalities or problems.

The change at the end is surprising, when Sharon cannot complete the service because John actually accomplished what seemed impossible at the beginning. The change surprised even me, because I felt like Sharon was still capable until the moment that Sharon didn’t feel capable anymore, at which point I also felt very uncomfortable about it.

The story was very poetic and complex and left me wondering if people can really write like that on purpose or if those kind of stories are rare and surprise even the writer.

The Idiot Box

My dad always called it, “the idiot box,” and after reading Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, he left ours on the curb outside our two bedroom house years before I was imagined. Growing up I knew little of television, but as the years crawled on and my parents relaxed and the rules grew soft, televisions started showing up around my house. They were only for movies and rarely flicked on, the cable trucks drove past our house slowly and mystified. Though mostly unused and unkempt, the TV's were there, watching and waiting to strike in the anger of abandonment.

We moved and the idiot box or two came with us, still square and unevenly weighted with one-lipped VCR mouths. The big one was in the basement, crowded out in the corner by the Ping-Pong table where Tom and I had a pretty intense rivalry.

“Tha-a-nk you,” Tom said to my bookshelf as he retrieved the purple marker from it dainty and tauntingly. “Ah, what’s that make it, twenty-four games to eighteen? Hm. Want to lose again?” He made a tick mark on the inside of the bookshelf to indicate his win before he dared to make eye contact with me, at which point he laughed and ran.

I chased him on our newly stained concrete floor that was so slippery my grandmother wasn’t allowed down there without help. We slammed into walls and ran in place like we were learning how to ice skate. Fighting was nearly as impossible as it is in a dream.

“I’m gonna kill you! You’re not even good you’re just lucky!” I screamed as I slid and knocked over the plastic tea set where my little sisters practiced psychologically questionable activities including persons that were not present.

“Heee! Hoo hooo!” Was his only reaction while he dodged and ducked my projectiles.

Tom bolted for the dodgeball that we both saw at the same time. I mostly slid in place but he patiently shuffled and picked up speed until he was close enough to slide the rest of the way. When he was only a few feet away he locked into a slide and began reaching, but just as he touched it, his feet faced the ceiling and he was on his back, still sliding. Like a minor league player who knows scouts are watching he theatrically smashed into the knee height table that was holding the idiot box.

His almost immediate groans let me know that he wasn’t badly hurt so I laughed, thankful to the gods for the justice they served on the menace. As Tom rolled and groaned I slowly made my way toward him to check on him and accept his rematch, but the idiot box had other plans. Balancing just on the edge in zero gravity, the last bump from Tom’s roll set it free like a child’s first jump into the deep end.

I didn’t notice until I heard the crash, “Tom!” his head was just between the broken glass of the TV and the concrete floor. The moaning had stopped. Tom was knocked out cold.

The Secret

 

The growth was getting bigger and slowly eating away his flesh at a sorrowful rate, fast for cancer, but not very fast when compared to most everything else. That’s why my roommate didn’t come back to live with me after Christmas break, he was being slowly eaten by himself. I audibly thanked him every morning as I scooped dark roast into his coffee maker and wandered around the living room free of the TV that he took home. His absence left me feeling so alone that I craved to be annoyed.

I moved back in to my small two-bedroom house earlier than most of the college town and entertained myself by watching the neighborhood closely. To make it more exciting I obscured my vision with a blanket covering all but a tiny slit on my face, or stood in the hallway far enough back so I could barely see through a crack in the blinds parts of bodies or wheels of cars passing. Sometimes I laughed a little, shimmying on the ground like a water moccasin. I’d slither on the tile floor wearing nothing but a huge down comforter and whisper stories to myself, laughing when my desperate plea for excitement was satisfied by imagining anyone knowing what I was doing.

The way I was acting was that of insanity, but nothing is insane when you are completely alone.

Eventually, however, even that started to bore me and my hobbies matured in their strangeness. My only real case of stalking was that of Donna Holland. Up to that point I’d been safely disconnected from everyone I watched because I didn’t truly care what they were doing so I was bold and innocent. But unlike the rest, I was mortified at the thought of this new girl seeing me watch her. It wasn’t her age or sex that threw me, the neighborhood had an average age of twenty-two years and was pretty evenly peppered with all the sexes. The only way to find out what it was about her that paralyzed me was to watch her more; it was a catch-22 that kept me occupied and alert all hours of the day. I cracked my window and laid still on my bed, clothed and under a blanket, listening to my new neighbor move in. That was when I first heard her name,

“Are you Donna Holland?” The middle age man in grey pants said with the key to the single bedroom house next door.

 “That’s me,” Her voice sang sardonic and bored with extra time spent phonating the vowels. 

The stalking went on for days, and kept me on edge because Donna wasn’t a girl of routine. Sometimes it would be in the morning that she would take the little yapper named Scout for a walk, but often it wouldn’t be until the afternoon or late at night. She trimmed her shrubs, softly whistled Neil Young tunes I recognized, and was always coming and going like rain clouds in her deep red jalopy.

Classes started back and soon the town appeared, going into a mad frenzy with all the hard working ants bustling and biting the shoe that stepped on their mound. But all I could ever think about was Donna and our lonely companionship.

It wasn’t so much that she was beautiful, but she was. She had a particular nose that looked broken, an accent to her soft cheekbones and small neck. She had deep brown hair and walked like a thought, always humming and singing to match her mood.

- - - - -

I never meant to kill her dog, but with all that time to think I did devise a wonderful plan; I couldn’t have anticipated how awfully well it was going to work. The sun was just beginning to set over the neighborhood at the quiet pocket of time near the end of day when everything is soft and slow and trancelike. The little yapper Scout was roaming around our adjoining yards and streets and reminded me of myself, just looking for something to excite him. I waited. Scout finally smelled his way into my yard and I snatched him like a bear to a trout and brought him behind my house to the garage.

As the loud metal door mechanically closed behind us I fumbled to knot each of his front feet to the two ropes already attached to the opposite walls of the garage. He didn’t fight much, only gnawed at my garden-gloved hands in annoyance in between yaps as I secured the ropes to his legs. With the ropes tightened he looked like he was trying to give the concrete floor a giant hug, but the noises he began to make didn’t match that body language.

The way I was acting was that of cruelty, but nothing is cruel when you are completely alone.

I tightened the ropes so that Scout’s face was yapping with his jaw on the cold concrete, front legs stretched wide attached to the small cords. He was yapping like hell and his head would bounce with each unique yelp; I made sure to avoid eye contact.

            Donna would be home any second now, so I made one more check to see that everything was in place before I walked in a sorrowful trance to the driver’s side door. With Scout slowing to a thoroughly confused howl, I cranked my old coughing engine and highlighted “R” with a determined, though absent, right hand and let off the brake, rolling over Scout’s curly haired front left leg. It was a tight squeeze with the garage door closed to dampen the barking, but after less than a second I was sure I had cleared his leg and begun something I could never take back.

An unexpected twist in the plan was the decision as to how humane I was going to act, for surely if I kept with my mood at the time, slowly and meticulously working, I would have soon been a deranged psychotic. On the other hand, if I embraced the natural empathy I felt for Scout and raced around frantically I could have quickly messed everything up. I settled for simply getting him untied and talking calmly, promising him that his sacrifice would not be in vain. His pain forced him to relax in my arms while I gently held the ice to his leg and we waited for Donna.

Thankfully for all of us, she was only four minutes away, but we waited an extra two for good measure before running to her front door. I knocked frantically, embracing my empathy, and waited the realistic twenty-six seconds that it takes someone to actually come to the front door. When Donna finally came to the door she looked at us then immediately back into her living room, as if to say that the Scout I was holding couldn’t be her Scout, and that he must be around here somewhere. That all happened in the split second before I said,

“Hey! Sorry, I live next door, that one, and uh-”

“Scout!” Donna said as she reached for him.

“Yeah he uh, he got hit by a blue Chevy about 20 minutes ago, I was getting my mail and I saw everything.” I was talking too fast, surely she knew everything, I knew I was done for.

“Oh Scout!”

The hairy mess used what was left of his energy and yelps to scramble with his three working legs out of my arms toward her.

Donna gently took Scout and brought him uncomfortably close to her face before saying, “What were you thinking?” Looking up at me she calmed her tone and said, “Thank you, thank you for- I have to take him to the emergency room, this looks awful.”

Knowing it was probably too soon but taking advantage of the situation I offered,

“If you want to just hold him I could drive y’all to the animal hospital in town, its only like twelve minutes away.” I was doing it again, being way too obvious, what sane person wouldn’t just round to ten or fifteen minutes?

“Oh would you? We can take my car, I’m new I don’t know where anything is.”

The way that people accept charity in a time of crisis is refreshing.

“I have my keys right here, just come over we’ll take mine.” I said already moving in the direction of my house.

“Um, yeah, yeah okay,” She followed after a pause, “I’m so sorry, I’m Donna thank you for all of this.”

“I’m Stu. No problem, really.” I opened the passenger side door of my car that was already waiting in the driveway. “Hop in.”

- - - - -

We moved quickly and were in the waiting room before long. We sat like two children whose parents were long lost friends deep in conversation but brought their kids along so they could play, naively thinking that the next generation would “hit it off.” We just stared at the wall.

I didn’t anticipate how upset Donna would be, knowing how flippant and careless she seemed I couldn’t figure how she could have invested so much love in the tiny yapper. I trusted the rest of the plan to my instinct, and with her standing and sitting and mumbling and pacing I remembered the little orange bottle in my glove box. I only caught a couple of the words that softly escaped her, “Leash… she was right… responsibility…” as I slipped out to the car and back without her noticing.

“Hey, Donna? I just grabbed these from the car, they were my old roommates and he would sometimes give them to me when I got stressed out. It’ll really make you feel better.”

“What are they?” she looked up from the crack on the floor and said more sternly than I predicted.

“Oh I don’t know, antidepressants or pain killers or some-”

Before I could finish she took the bottle and two white pills were in the back of her throat, then gone. She immediately stood up and continued pacing. I stared at the bottle for a few seconds before following suit, then resumed my staring.

“Would you like some water while you wait?” A young nurse said politely behind the front desk, “Sir?”

“Hey Stu.”

Donna’s voice snapped my daze and brought the nurse’s question out of my subconscious, “Oh, no. I’m not thirsty, thanks.”

“Just let me or Cindy know if you need anything at all.” The nurse said with a southern smile.

“Okay,” I nodded once and tried to match her grin, “Thanks.”

The waiting room was just as free from other human bodies as before, but slowly began to feel much less empty. Donna eventually sat down, I think she even smiled a couple times as she told me stories about Scout, then about her past year, then her whole life. She calmly took care of the paperwork and asked me to hold Scout, laughing at his tiny bandage and talking all the more. When we pulled into my garage she didn’t even notice the broken ropes staring at us from low on the ground; we were chest deep in a conversation about selfish friends and food and professors and countless other topics I can’t begin to remember in full. We never mentioned the drugs and just enjoyed the effects, pretending that the evening was truly as enjoyable as we were experiencing. Scout yap-whined off to sleep and we drifted closer on the couch; I was completely removed from the idea that I had created this moment and I closed my eyes to embrace the present.

I woke up the next morning to Scout’s yaps and was lying on the floor cozy and neat next to Donna, curled perfectly to me in her silence and beauty. Apparently even in our pill-state we knew we didn’t quite want to share a bed yet so we just rolled onto the floor and dreamed. Our conversations were distant and confusing in my mind like a TV on in another room. I laid in this place of togetherness for long precious moments before I scooted away to a neutral position and waited for Scout’s morning yaps to take effect.

She finally stirred then rolled onto her stomach, surprisingly in my direction, and yawned with her head buried in her crossed arms. Right as the yawn was verging on completion she chuckle-grunted, then let out a little laugh.

“Stu, what in the world happened last night?”

Not quite knowing how to react but seeing that Donna was not running away I let out a weak laugh, my thoughts still working at morning-speed, and said, “Your uh, your little buddy had an accident? Then we took a bunch of drugs?”

Donna laughed more into her arms then looked up to call Scout over; he just whined and kept pitifully trying to figure out how to get around with the pain in his wrapped leg. “I have class at ten.”

“Yeah,” I said slowly “I had class at nine.” I unknowingly slid my arm toward her and took her hand.

She looked up at me with loose eyelids, then shut them softly. When she rested her head back on her left arm, our love affair had begun.

- - - - -

Our relationship started about as slowly as a falling piano; we were never apart. After she joked about turning off her power because she was never home we began spending more time there, not really caring where we were but unable to get enough of each other. Scout was our dysfunctional family’s child with his belongings spread over two homes, but our relationship was nothing of the sort. Months passed in unison with the sports that we didn’t really care about. We’d go to basketball games and share popcorn; we were good at sharing, and it was never the obnoxious selfish service to earn points. We truly cared about each other but respected ourselves, laughing at and helping all of our friends’ relationships that always seemed to go wrong. It was that sort of connection and honesty that gave me the bitter cringe whenever I thought about the ropes. Why couldn’t I have just knocked on her door and asked her out? Or even just returned Scout unharmed? I had to tell her. She deserved it.

I let myself be tortured by the thoughts of Scout for months on end, Donna only making it worse by being so patient with my guilt related moods. One night I had a dream that Scout told Donna everything, then stood by her side barking and laughing as she shot me again and again in the chest. If it wasn’t for the excessive treats and caressing, I’m sure Scout would have found a way to tell Donna somehow.

            Donna was good with mornings and always got weird at night, so I finally decided one morning that it was about the best opportunity I’d ever have. We’d been together for over a year and had made it past many benchmarks and checkpoints; Scout was running and yapping like new and his only visible scar was his inability to enter a garage at his own will. I asked her to come sit down. Mid whistle she put down her oatmeal, floated into the living room and plopped next to me on the couch, graceful and true like a pillow dropped on a mattress.

“What’s up, Stu?” She was the perfect mixture of attentive and relaxed.

“Donna, okay. So when you moved in I was really lonely,” She nodded. “And I would keep an eye on things- I was stalking you, really. I watched your every move from when you moved in with your parents to the day I knocked on your door.”

She just smiled and dismissed it, somewhat flattered, “Well I don’t really blame you, we both got here when it was still a total ghost town.”

“No, listen. I saw Scout in my yard while you were gone and I took him into my garage and tied him up and ran over his leg. I did it so I could have a reason to meet you, I know you’re going to hate me but I just couldn’t go any longer with you not knowing.”

Donna just stared with her eyebrows raised and clenched at the same time like a disgusted cartoon.

“Donna. Donna I’m so sorry.”

Donna stared for long drawn out seconds, maybe even minutes, but she just stared at the wall and I looked at the ground. Finally she shook her head and sat up, “Stu, I knew you were weird, but that,” She looked down, ashamed, “That’s just insane.”

I resolved that it must be over, what was I thinking? That she would just smile and move on? All I said was, “I know. I just, I don’t know.” I started thinking logistically: who I could call to help me move all her stuff out, whether or not she would press charges for animal cruelty, what I was going to happen to our plane tickets to Switzerland.

I almost stood up to walk away when she started more softly than before, “Listen Stu, I don’t know how to say this, I mean I forgive you, I’m not even thinking about Scout really. There’s something I have to tell you, I just never thought I’d have the chance but now that you’ve been so honest with me I feel like I have to, I just wasn’t prepared to do it now.”

She had acknowledged my darkest secret for just seconds and had already forgiven me and moved on, what in the world could be on her mind? “You don’t have to tell me now if it’s too much.”

She showed a face that even I had never seen before and just kept staring.

With the infinite patience that she deserved, I said, “Really, it doesn’t have to be now. Whatever’s best for you.”

Donna took a deep breath, “No, no, it needs to be now.” She leaned in close, and whispered. Scout had wandered outside, and she whispered to me something she had never even told her showerhead.

- - - - -

I felt like I was at the animal hospital again, except this time I was Donna, or even Scout. I got up from the couch and walked to the bathroom, Donna was a faint echo in another part of my consciousness. I choked on my breath and tried to throw up in the toilet but nothing came out; the patient tap on the door turned to pounding and the explanations turned to desperate one-liners.

“I didn’t know you then!”

I climbed out the window, everything in a haze around me.

“I thought you loved me!” Slow, rhythmic pounding on the door. “I can really explain! Please let me explain!”

That was the last I heard before I crawled out the window to wander the cracked sidewalk path past unkempt overgrown yards. The whole walk felt as if it was underwater, sounds were mere deflating balloons and I only breathed the little I needed of the apathetic morning air. I don’t quite know how long she banged and screamed but when I finally came home I told Donna that it was probably best if she slept at her house.

With a short, bashful moment of eye contact she barely said, “I really want to talk.” Her eyeballs were maroon and she was sitting on the ground with her legs in parallel V’s like a sad dancer. I wiggled the toes in my shoes, my feet were sore, I could have been gone hours. As she untangled herself to rise, keeping sight of the floor all she said was, “Stu.” She said it in a sort of way that wasn’t an inquiry or a demand but only a statement.

I avoided her successfully for three full days until she started figuring out my tricks. She would wait under the windows I snuck in, nattering words like a motorcycle engine between her tears until I walked, crawled, or climbed silently into my house.

She started losing weight, I stopped hearing Scout yap, and she would often sleep under my bedroom window for days; I slept in the bathtub. I decided after finals that it was best that I move back home. I packed a few things in the trunk and checked the backseat for any signs of Donna. Thinking of Sal and Dean but feeling none of their freedom, I took off with a wheel in my hand and four on the road.

The way I was acting was that of bitterness, but everything is bitter when you are completely alone.

Lydia Davis - Television

Lydia Davis’s story sadly confirmed what I’ve learned to be true: that my parents were right when they always said, “You’ll thank me when you’re older.” I was raised without television or video games and spent a good part of my childhood thinking up strategies to convince my parents to cave. They never did, so I was always disconnected from what was going on in TV shows or inside jokes about cartoons or Disney shows that everyone else grew up with. But now, many of my friends who innocently watched kids shows growing up haven’t grown out of it and default to noise and moving pictures in front of their glazed eyes whenever they have what they would consider a dull moment.

            That being said, I couldn’t personally relate to television aspect of it, but I do often waste time, and related to the absent feeling of depression. “It is not that it is what you want to be doing, it is that you are passing the time. You are waiting until it is a certain hour and you are in a certain condition so that you can go to sleep.” I have experienced that meaningless wandering internally and externally. Doing menial things until I can end the day.

            Growing up in the 21^st century, I’ve been around plenty of television, whether I owned one or not; the way that she told the story worked because it felt like I was skipping through channels, never quite entertained or satisfied enough to stick around. The slightly different sentence structures and the switch back and forth from first to second person gave the affect of channel surfing and indecision.

Scene from Louis

Louis shut the taxicab on his failed date and mumbled loudly, because it was New York City after all, “Of course.” Thoughts filled his mind of the I train to the J train and if he could make to the 16^th street subway station in four minutes. Right as he was raised his hand to hail a cab instead, he saw him, the kid that ruined his night, slapping fives and parting with half of his entourage. Louis waved the taxi away that had stopped on the curb next to him, zipped up his coat and pulled down his hat. He watched the kid in the letterman jacket running out of jokes and walking more seriously, as with the fatigue that comes from being cool.

Louis followed him and his remaining friends, thoughts not racing through his mind but crawling in and festering one at a time. He thought of waiting until the kid was alone and choking him from behind or grabbing him by his hair and throwing him into the brick side of a building. He thought about that until he scared himself, and decided against it more to spite his date than from the brutality of the idea. He thought of calling the police and making up a story and imagined the kid getting roughly apprehended and pushed into a police car while he protested with watery eyes. He thought of paying some big homeless man to beat him up. Of all the thoughts that came in and out of Louis’s head, the only one that remained consistent was to follow the kid.

Eventually the kid was alone, in the only way one can be alone in New York: internally. The kid managed to softly chuckle to himself a couple times as he walked, remembering different moments from the night that were especially funny or made him look exceptionally good. The streets turned softer, streetlights flicked on and off, and houses sprung up as Louis continued to follow. The kid finally arrived home at a small white house with a broken gutter and sprung up the stairs like he’d done since his family moved there when he was eight. Louis stopped one house before and straightened his hat. His knees locked and he thought for a few seconds about retreating home. Then he walked through the grass, shuffled his feet up the steps and landed four quick knocks on the front door.