“Traditional Somethings”:
The Persistence of Ààlè
in Nigeria
by David T. Doris

December 15th, 2004
by Joanna Solfrian

The Ventriloquist’s
Daughter
by Susan Morehouse

The Ventriloquist’s Daughter
    Susan Morehouse

Be in front of all parting as though it were already
Behind you, like the winter just gone by.
   —Rilke, from Sonnets to Orpheus

In West Virginia, where the blue belly of the autumn sky presses against hot hills, and goldenrod steeps in the meadows, a girl sits in her school’s library with an oversize book of myths in her lap. Sun slants from the high windows upon a page open to Eurydice’s story. It is a story, like Persephone’s, of a girl newly grown and lost, stung by an adder prematurely into Hades’ realm where her beloved Orpheus, the story-singer, will come to fetch her, striking a bargain with the gods that he cannot keep. Each time the girl in the library reads this story, she feels an anticipatory hope: Maybe this time the story will end differently. Maybe the tricky gods finally made a bargain they can’t win, maybe Orpheus won’t turn to claim Eurydice before he should, maybe Eurydice won’t fall back into darkness, and there really are happily ever afters. Absently, the girl smooths her thick braid with her fingers in the quiet, brown room. This was her story to grow up on: lost girls whose just-sprung grace impels them into flowered meadows where the grasses tug at their waists until the deep earth splits and they are suddenly gone.

I grew up in West Virginia with my mother, stepfather, sister, and brother. We lived in the country with horses and cats and a goat and a dog. In the afternoon, after school, I would saddle my horse and ride down dirt lanes past farms where matted German shepherds ran out to bark, past little houses and fields, past an old still jutting back into deep woods, past an abandoned cottage with wavy glass windows, to the end of the world, so it seemed, where silver thorn trees led the way down a hillside toward a creek and a mysterious village in the valley below. In the evening, at home, I would put my horse away, check the water in the trough, an old bathtub on legs, working at chores until dusk fell and my mother called from the house, her voice so like mine we were often mistaken for one another, “Are you there? It’s time to come in.”
    I remember the twelve-year-old who believed that if she just read them more carefully, the old stories would yield to her longings and no one would be lost, or left behind. As though it was a problem with her reading and not the dangerous territory of the stories themselves. I didn’t understand then that the gods don’t make bargains they think they will lose. No one does. When I first began to write, my romances were all mother and daughter. I remember in graduate school how mature all of my companions seemed, writing stories of love affairs gone wrong or gone almost right and then wrong, stories that no doubt mirrored our social lives. I thought then that when I matured finally I, too, would have something to say about romance, assuming that was the only subject of true stories.

Continued in volume 42, issue 1, winter 2006