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Overview
In the manner of Lorrie Moore and Raymond Carver, Galloway's tales explore the psychological aspects of love and the overpowering yearning to communicate. Whether it's the title piece, which tells of a prostitute's passion for her pimp's kisses, or "Valentine," in which a celebratory evening is undermined by minor disappointments and misunderstandings, the stories that comprise Where You Find It assume that powerful feelings always contain a dimension of disturbance.
Upon the collection's much-lauded publication in the United Kingdom, one reviewer was moved to predict that Janice Galloway "will certainly end up in anthologies: not Best Scottish Writers or Best Women Writers, but, quite simply, best."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781416578420 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 09/25/2007 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Valentine
I hate February.
There is no natural excitement about the second month of the year. Valentine's Day makes me embarrassed.
Despite me, the card is always there on the table when I get up, a boxful of something padded with hearts on the front and a poem that I scour with my eyes, trying to get below the surface and feel what it was that made him choose this one, which parts of it are closest to what he would say himself if he ever said things like that out loud. Only he doesn't. People don't, he says. That's what you buy the cards for.
You know that you will always be
The one who's everything to me:
Your eyes, your smiles, your heavenly touch,
Mean, oh my darling, oh so much.
Sometimes the poems don't rhyme.
One word is my essence of you...Forever.
We two...are One.
This morning the valentine is roughly A4 size with a baby blue background and gold border, two rabbits on the front. The rabbits have inflated faces, cheeks all swollen up like they have mumps and the bandages fell off. You can tell one is a lady rabbit because she has longer eyelashes and a pink bow round her neck. He has buck teeth. Nonetheless, their whiskers intertwine. Inside, it says:
I never thought that life could be
As wonderful as this
You mark my hours with happiness
There's splendor in each kiss
And tho it's true I sometimes fail
To say what's really true
At least I have this special day
To tell you I love you
My eyes fill up.
They really do.
I watched a TV program once about howthey made movies. One of the sequences was about tearjerkers, how they fix them up to get you weepy. They demonstrated by showing how even a really terrible script — about a couple on the verge of divorce, in this case — could have music and stuff added in such a way that you'd still get hooked: no matter how implausible, banal or shitty the thing was, the program claimed they could still make you fall for it. So I made up my mind while I was watching that I'd use the information the program was giving me: I would see the devices and not be manipulated by them. I stared out the rising melodic line with plaintive oboe counterpoint, sat steely through a barrage of soft-focus rose-colored filters, single tears glistening on flawless female cheeks, and smirked at the swooping crescendo of synthesized strings. I could see how it all worked and was managing to be really world-weary about it all. Then they did something hellish. Just when you thought you'd survived intact, a door behind the couple opened, flooding the foreground with white light, and a child on crutches pushed himself forward out of the aura calling Daddy in a tiny, reedy voice. It was ridiculous, of course. I saw it was ridiculous. Of course. But the bastards hadn't warned me it was coming. I just keeled over on the carpet and gret buckets.
Conditioning. Give me a cue and I play ball.
This is my valentine, the only one I get.
I kiss the first letter of his name, smudging the signature he has written in blue felt-tip pen and underlined twice, imagining where his skin has traced over the card.
Blue marks on my lips in the bathroom mirror.
I stick the card on the top the TV before I go out to work.
Stella has heart-shaped sandwiches for lunch. She says she bought the cutter to make heart-shaped sandwiches as a surprise for Ross when he opened his piecebox and she thought she might as well cut her own like that while she was about it. She opens one out to let me see. Perfect pink hearts of ham, the grain of the muscle severed clean at the edges of bread. No butter. She is on a diet. For Ross. He told her she was getting fat. I imagine Ross in his factory, opening the piecebox she has prepared and trying to hide what he finds. If he can't hide it then he will talk about Stella as though she is stupid: tell the boys maybe not overtly, but tell them anyway what a liability she is, what an embarrassment. Some of the boys he explains to haven't shaved that morning. Others have tattoos. They're all glad it isn't them with the sandwich problem. Ross eats the sandwiches anyway, the shapes of the hearts hidden inside his hands, just enough to bite poking through. And the boys laugh, irrespective of deeper, more ambiguous emotions. Maybe they want their women to be as little girl cute as Stella. Maybe that's why they laugh, encourage Ross to do the same behind her back: they're worried their women don't love them enough to do something that bloody ridiculous. Stella looks up and asks me if I got a card. Her mascara is in blobs all along the bottom rim of lashes. Stella is hopeless with mascara.
Of course, I say.
Boxed?
I don't tell her I think it's a waste of money. She'll think I'm a killjoy or else I haven't got one and I'm lying and being sour.
I've not had mine yet, she says. It'll be there when I get back with the roses. Yellow roses. Always gets me yellow. Romantic and just that wee bit different.
She sinks her teeth into the bread, shearing half-moons clean through the ham center.
A big softie.
I suffer a sudden need to get out of there and brush my teeth. Otherwise I will walk around all afternoon with egg mayonnaise rising up the back of my throat like drain emissions. I leave trying not to hear the noise of chewing, Stella mashing her hearts to paste.
We leave work in a gaggle of five and squash into the same car. After twenty minutes or so, the tower blocks poke into view. You can see ours from the road, blue towel hanging out the skylight. They drop me off and wave, glad of the extra space. I wave, too, till they're out of sight, then start running. I run because I am wearing his jersey and need to get it back in the drawer before he comes home. If he finds out he gets moody and says I put his jerseys out of shape. He says I punch tits in the front, as though my breasts are leather darning mushrooms. I run up the stairs with the key on a keyring he bought me the week I moved in: tiny, delicate keyring with a white porcelain fob and my initial in gold filigree. I tried to keep it safe by leaving it in the drawer with my earrings but he got huffy. I bought you it to use, Norma, he said. So I use it, knowing one day I'll have to tell him it's lost. The door doesn't feel secure when you open it: loose on the hinges. I keep meaning to do something about it but it causes bad feeling: if I pick up a hammer he thinks I'm trying to prove something. He's right. I'm trying to prove the door needs fixing but he won't buy that. He'd rather I asked him. He'd rather I nagged. Like his mother.
I'm always first back. Last out and first back. That means any mess that needs facing is how I left it so mine to clear up. Curtains not even drawn. On the way to open them I bump into the Moroccan table he carried all the way back from Fez which does not respond to cleaning as we know it, then reach and pull. Lots of stour on the sills and a clear view of the binstores for the whole block appear together. Over the binstores today, a flat stretch of sky is rising beyond the tops of the other buildings. Between the two furthest tips you see hills. Birds perch on the TV aerials before they wade back into the thick blue paste, settling on irregular air currents from the launderette vent. The polarizing stuff in the window always makes the view look nice: bright and cheery. It's the thing I like best about the whole flat. I sometimes watch the clouds up here for hours. Not today though. Today I choose to tidy up. Behind my back, two out-of-date papers opened at the TV pages, a jar of brine with no olives left inside and an empty silver poke of posh crisps need cleaning. Chili with a dash of lemon flavor. Wee flecks, orange-dusted mosaic chips, tip out when I pick it up. I brush the slurry with the side of my hand, gather the debris. Share, he said, we'll share. I get rid of the bits and take off his jersey with one hand, haring for the bedroom.
GET THEM OFF. YO. Catcalls and whistles. GET THEM BLOODY OFF, DARLIN.
I'm in the bedroom waving his jersey out the window when I hear this yelling, but it's only the guys from the bakery. They keep up the catcalls and I ignore them. We've done this umpteen times. No sign of the car. The jersey must look like a bloody flag, though. Maybe he wouldn't need to be this close to see it, a red rag, giving away my every move. But I wave the jersey out the window all the same, its scarlet sleeves catching and flicking bits of paint off the frame like giant dandruff while the guys whistle and roar some more. YO. I hope it will cool down and lose the smell of me. I don't know what I smell like, but he says it's distinctive. He says he knows when I've been in a room. GET THEM OFF. I leave traces behind.
The immersion light goes on when I press the switch: dependable. It's an expensive way to heat water, but at least this way there'll be plenty for him coming home, and if there's plenty of hot water, he'll have a bath before he thinks of doing anything else. Like opening drawers and raking through his jerseys. He works in a glass office and sweats when it's sunny. That's all I know about what he does. That and the lunches: he always tells me what he's had in the canteen. Good grub, he says, subsidized. What stumps me is what else he does in there, what it looks like. I imagine a glass office, maybe slotted into the middle floor of five, him sitting at a drawing board and trying not to notice while the sweat burrows like insects through his armpits, the thick furze at his crotch. There are stains in ovals on his back and where the arm seams join. All the seams of his clothes seep. His tie is slewed to one side, top button on his shirt undone showing the hair at the base of his neck. Every so often he moves one leg behind the other, widening his knees to let his body breathe. His skin bristles with the slow movement of sweat beads. He frees the watch strap and rubs the damp wrist, goes back to what he was doing. Usually I imagine him holding a pen, but I'm not sure what he's meant to be doing with it, what he's writing. Maybe he isn't. Maybe it's a pencil and he's drawing. I don't know what he does all day. When I ask him, he says it's not interesting: he doesn't come home to talk about work. I know it involves pens though. He's never done pinching mine. Sometimes he's there from eight in the morning till after midnight. Whatever it is, it takes up lots of time.
Other times I imagine him walking along a sunned-out corridor, one hand balled into the right trouser pocket, jacket slung over the opposite shoulder, watching his feet as he walks. Occasionally, he kicks something on the floor that isn't there, a mimed football tackle that pulls back its power at the last minute. Just working off a little energy. When people go past in the corridor, he nods and keeps going. Maybe he's going to the canteen and that's why he's so relaxed. The canteen has glass doors that slide back automatically when he's within inches of slamming against them, but he doesn't flinch or slow down at all. He knows this place like the back of his
Oops.
Shirt on the floor. Didn't see it this morning.
I pick it up, breathe deep. His clothes are always nice to touch, aromatic because he's so clean. Even things he touches smell nice. I slip the jersey into the second drawer, shaking it a bit so the layers of things in there resettle. Mine are in the drawer above his. My things smell of deodorant. I shut the drawer and stick a T-shirt on over the bra, then head for the kitchen. A half-eaten bit of toast I left on the work surface hits the bin, the door to the still-open food cupboard slamming shut. At least tonight I don't have to think what to make out of two tins of tomatoes, pickles, anchovies and yards of herb jars. I don't need to think at all. We are going out. I'm just thinking it would be nice to sit down for five minutes, maybe make a cup of tea, enjoy the sun coming through the T-shirt making goose pimples on my arms, when for some unaccountable reason I turn round, zero back in on the living room and find one more thing to tidy away. Another paper I missed first time round. I've been working all day, but that's no excuse for sloppiness. Plenty of women work all day and have kids and a man to run. My mother tells me I don't know what tired is. So I pick it up: not consciously but something makes these decisions for you. I don't normally bother with newspapers, but I read this. It says SUICIDE PACT FAILS. Underneath, a story about two pensioners who went out in a car, doused themselves in petrol, then ran the thing into a wall at 60. They both survived. Not intact but breathing. Ten miles or so up the road to where I am sitting reading this. A kind of village with an open park and lots of trees. Ten miles up the fucking road.
The sound of car brakes shakes me free. Car brakes in the parking area six floors down. He's home.
I imagine him, winding up the near-side window and collecting his Evening Times from the empty passenger seat, reaching into the back for the jacket he'll dangle from one finger to come upstairs, sauntering with his eyes scrunched up because his hair needs a cut. He'll be walking upstairs now with his eyes screwed small, maybe resting finger and thumb of one hand on either side of his nose, trying to shake off tiredness, happy to be back. My heart jumps when I hear the sound of footfalls coming closer, and when he appears on top of the landing, all my nerve endings blister. I can't help it. I'm crazy about him. Wholly and terminally, raddled with love.
He appears and I smile, meaning it.
He walks in smiling back, presents spilling from under his arm.
I get flowers, something chocolate (usually heart-shaped) and a bottle of wine, dry white. The wine is a compromise. He prefers red. I prefer sweet, but he can't bring himself to stroll into Thresher's and ask for that. He's got pals in there, for godsake. Also the white is a tradition from the days we didn't know any better, the days we used to stay in and have lazy sex all night after we'd eaten my specialty with the packet of frozen prawns and strawberry mousse, a magazine recipe that claimed aphrodisiac properties, though in a self-deprecating way so you knew not to take it too seriously. My only specialty. It recurs. The magazine page is spattered with pink bits, fatty blobs that show I have been that way before, but I keep it all the same.
Not tonight though. I'm not cooking tonight.
I nod at his card, waiting on the sofa. He opens it while I watch, then sets it on the TV next to mine. They both threaten to fall off, not designed to sit upright: too full of satin and foam. Anyhow, he seems to like it. We kiss. The tips of our tongues touch.
I've not had time to wrap it, he says, fishing something else out of the poly bag. A flat, black box. I give him an oblong box covered with stars. We open them at what is meant to be the same time, but I'm holding back. I know what he has since I bought it, but I want to see his face. I'm just like Stella. He always looks the same when he opens something from me: pleased and shy. It lasts till he works out what the folded cotton really is. A pair of thermal drawers. He holds them flat in one hand, not wanting the legs to dangle, thin and empty, where I can see.
Very funny, he says.
I know something about the present has disappointed him. I interpret that he'd rather I was interested in what I've been given. Already I'm tearing the pale blue tissue, trying to rustle a lot so he knows I'm thrilled. One of the pieces between the layers touches my hand, soft enough to make my skin feel it's melting. I pull out something shiny, red nylon with a black panel, splay pieces on the settee. It's a suspender belt and bra, a pair of knickers trimmed with fluffy stuff, like tiny feather boas. Our faces look much the same then. Neither of us knows what to say. The evening is in jeopardy, so we pretend this isn't the case at all, just float in separate directions and begin getting ready for going out. We haven't got all night.
The water is cool but okay. I fill my bath up to the mark he hasn't washed off after his and lie back, getting sad at the sounds of him getting ready elsewhere in the house. What he has to put up with, me being such a hard bitch and everything when he just bought me a present. After all, it's the thought that counts.
The fluffy stuff sticks to my skin cream. Two strands like ferns adhere to my upper thigh. I don't look in the mirror, but it seems to fit as much as this sort of stuff ever does and the feather bits don't bumphle the material as much as you'd think. I dress fast, looking over my shoulder and listening, hoping to christ he doesn't come through. Maybe I want it to be a surprise.
The restaurant is somewhere we've been before: intimate concern run by two Italians with Scots accents. The waiter gives me the obligatory smile when he helps me to my seat, tells me I look nice and I smile back. Can't help it: I'm so bloody eager to please. He sits opposite, managing his own chair, and leans towards me in an anticipatory way. He likes good food. We get mildly drunk. Through the dessert and coffee we start sharing the looks that indicate sex. A particular kind of sex. I run my hand along the inside of his trouser leg with one hand under the table and he has to squirm while his brandy is being poured, barely able to stay seated while the erection forces a hump in his trousers. My hand shifts. Watching his face trying not to flicker when the waitress asks him if he enjoyed his strudel gives me a thrill of power. I'm making this difficulty, I'm altering his behavior and it means he wants me. He wants me. I need to feel that's what it means.
On the way home, I hook the three-inch heel of one of my shoes onto the dashboard. He looks twice, undoes his fly as the car decelerates, then stops the car and fucks me in a layby till the car windows run like rain on the inside.
I get more excited by this kind of display than I'd be prepared to admit when I'm sober.
Afterwards, I blush hauling my breasts back inside the feather and satin contraption, ashamed for something I can't quite pin down. He clears the inside of the windscreen with the back of his jacket sleeve and looks at me. I keep my eyes on the roof vinyl, listening. Sirens. I can hear sirens, far away like remembered noise, too distant to be definite. Maybe there's an accident someplace. I ask if he hears it and he says no. He says I imagine it and maybe I did. I get maudlin afterwards, volatile. It's what I'm like.
The parking space waits for us, a dry oblong on the wet concrete behind the Chinese. The launderette grille hangs on visible strands of condensation, dry ice. When we get out of the car, our breaths appear too, making low fog over the bonnet. There will be frost tonight. At the foot of our steps, I find an empty box and I fold it carefully for the bins rather than do it tomorrow. He doesn't notice these things. His collar flashes white semaphore from the top of the steps and I hear him reach for the keys. He opens our door and goes inside. This is our home, how we live. He is in there taking off the tie and loosening the trouser band, trying to feel relaxed. We have already had sex. Further touch is unlikely. I stall at the foot of the stairs, not wanting to, then hear his solution. Dirk Bogarde being earnest about something in a late-night movie. We always have the TV. Tonight it has cards on top.
And tho it's true I sometimes fail
To say what's really true
At least I have this special day
I can always go into the kitchen and make tea.
Up the stairs, my turn to lock us in for the night. The sound of actors speaking on TV, my heart bursting with wanting to give more, not knowing what it is, how to give it. And sirens. I hear the sirens he thinks are not there coming closer.
Copyright © 1996 by Janice Galloway
Table of Contents
Contentsacknowledgments
further acknowledgments
valentine
where you find it
sonata form
a night in
test
after the rains
waiting for marilyn
hope
bisex
peeping tom
baby-sitting
someone had to
a proper respect
the bridge
tourists from the south arrive in the independent state
he dreams of pleasing his mother
last thing
not flu
proposal
six horses