“Ask Me if I Care” by Jennifer Egan

The New Yorker:  March 8, 2010

Two columns into the story, I feel the way I feel when I’m reading a story written by one of my high school students– that’s how accurately the narration blends disaffected cool with vulnerable innocence.

The first line implies the narrator– Rhea’s– own boredom, or at least the limited scope of her adolescent life: “Late at night, when there’s nowhere left to go, we go to Alice’s house.”  And the paragraph ends with a reference to the fleeting and haphazard thrills she can only hope for, but can never actually control: “Still, if it’s Bennie and me I hope for the back, so that I can push against his shoulder in the cold and hold him for a second when we hit a bump.”  The narrator pretends to have a kind of mundane matter-of-fact-I’m-so-over-this attitude, but her underlying desires creep into the story, in spite of herself.  In passages like: “Alice leads the way upstairs, Scotty and Bennie right behind her.  They’re both fascinated by Alice, but it’s Bennie who entirely loves her.  And Alice loves Scotty, of course,” the narrator resists backstory and seems to assume we, the reader, will find these relationships as fascinating as she does.

And then again, Rhea ambles into her story.  To read it, the telling feels unplanned.  From the opening in scene– peeking in on a friend’s sleeping sisters– the narrator jumps to: “1980 is almost here, thank God.”  It’s a random leap from bedroom to this broadcast of social milieu, and it’s done in a way a student writing the story of her life, or writing the story of someone else’s life, might write it.

In this way, the narrator is very close to the story– so close, the story seems to be unedited. This telling is immediate, as if we the readers get the details as they occur to the narrator. Again, we go from “1980 is almost here” to “At school, we spend every free minute in the Pit,” to “On warm days, Scotty plays his guitar.”  The narrator does not even have enough distance to editorialize the fact that Boomer is always hugging everyone “since his family did est.” Our narrator can acknowledge “We’re sick of [the hippies]” but offers no opinion on the apparent normalcy of electroshock therapy.

This is a very adolescent thing to do.  The narrator’s description is colored by her need to be punk and to be identified with all things punk (the Pit, hating hippies, dog collars, safety pins, shredded T-shirts), so the weight given to different details feels slightly askew. Outlining the various love triangles within the band, the narrator slips in “Scotty’s been quieter since [his mother killed herself three years ago with sleeping pills], and in cold weather he shivers like someone is shaking him.”

And this is how it is for teenagers; lacking life experience, and therefore a kind of emotional distance, the facts of your life are taken at face value.  Only much later can you look back and realize how fucked up, or wonderful, parts of your life may have been.  Everything is so very present.

The present is also a trademark of the telling of this story.  Rhea substitutes “go” for “say”: “Jocelyn goes, ‘Watch, Rhea.  They’ll be blond like her, the sisters.’ I go, ‘According to?’”. This is how teenagers talk, or certainly how I talked in high school.  This isn’t just an accurate depiction of dialogue– it’s a thematic or psychological hinge for the story.  As people tell stories that still matter, stories that still have an emotional resonance, they do lapse into present tense– as if by retelling the story, they are re-experiencing it. Needing to re-experience a particular event shows a lack of emotional distance from the event.  Its importance or impact has not been compartmentalized.  There is no adult consciousness available to categorize the moment.

Of course, this is exactly the story Egan is telling: The story of experiencing so-called adult events, but without the distance or filter adulthood affords.  The heart of the story, or the narrator’s reason for telling the story, is one thing at the beginning and something very different by the end.  When the story begins, the conflict dogging the narrator is about a boy and the boy’s band; the band wants to be good, and the narrator, a lyricist for the band, wants the band to be good.  Although she can’t say so directly, it is clear Rhea needs the band and the identity it allows her to have.  But, as the first graph introduces, she is also waiting for Bennie “who is waiting for Alice, who’s waiting for Scotty…” Her real desires are simple and innocent and plain (like the two sleeping girls and their private school jumpers the story begins and ends with).  But the identity she clings to, perhaps to achieve those desires, gets her something quite different.

Enter Lou, the only love interest outside the interlocking triangle of the band, and the only adult character in the story.  Lou is forty-something and sleeping with Rhea’s best friend, Jocelyn.  Lou is a record executive and a possible entree into the recording industry.  Lou is also Rhea’s entree into adulthood.  He represents the fulfillment of an adolescent fantasy and the traumatic intersection with an adult reality.  He represents how our forged identities, or the identities we try on while trying to become whatever we will become, land us in roles we would never have foreseen for ourselves.  Lou shows how we are both complicit in and innocent of our own undoing.

The climax of the story is a sexual climax.  The climax is so creepy, so beautifully written.  The narrator can only describe exactly what is happening, and it is the juxtaposition of everything in the scene that makes the moment so startling.  (It’s am image I can’t seem to let go of. Haunting.  Stomach-churning.)

Of course, everything in the story is building to this effect. As un-artful, as uncrafted as the narrator seems, everything she says contributes to the impact of this scene.  You think it’s about the band and Bennie, she thinks it’s about the band and Bennie.  Her link to these two things is her attachment to Jocelyn (as Rhea says early on: ‘We stand in for each other’).  It’s this attachment to Jocelyn that leads her to the climactic moment that makes it  impossible for her to get what she wants: the band and Bennie.

In the last few paragraphs, we see this consciousness shifting.  The narrator is asking questions, nothing is taken at face value.  Rhea wonders, “if I’d pulled away fromLou and fought the garbage throwers, would Bennie have settled for me the way Scotty settled for Alice?  Could that one thing have made all the difference? ” **

And, “I can’t tell if she’s real, or if she’s just stopped caring whether she’s real or not.  or is not caring what makes a person real?”

Rhea is on the brink of acquiring that adult consciousness, but she can’t come out and tell us.  It’s her focus, what she sees, that shows this shift to the reader.  In the last sentence of the story, Rhea describes Alice’s little sisters, the sisters that inspired a kind of disdain from Jocelyn and perverse fascination for Scotty in the opening of the story.  At the end, Rhea is clearly separate from the girls: “They turn to us, laughing in their green uniforms.”

Happily, Egan suggests this passage into adulthood is not a loss but a gain (and in doing so, implies an answer to Rhea’s own question*), no matter how dark the passage there may be.  She writes:

We head downstairs and outside, into Alice’s backyard, where I’ve only been in                       the dark.  It’s sunny now, with flowers in patterns and a tree with lemons on it.                       At the edge of a yard, two little girls are slapping a bright-yellow ball around a                         silver pole.  They turn to us, laughing in their green uniforms.

The scene in contrast to many previous scenes is bright, happy.  Flowers, sunshine, trees, lemons, bright yellow ball [the yellow imagery is rampant here], little girls.  I like to think Rhea is realizing on some level that it’s not childhood which is especially sunny.  Rather, it’s the ability to survive and bear witness to one’s own passage from childhood that is bliss, even if this bliss is simply the ability to name and recognize what is bliss for others who may not yet have a name for it themselves.