Going Away Shoes by Jill McCorkle

Frank O’Hara writes of life “. . . held precariously in the seeing / hands of others, their and my impossibilities. Is this love, now that the first love / has finally died, when there were no impossibilities?” The women in Jill McCorkle’s most recent collection, Going Away Shoes, are surrounded by such impossibilities. Each of these stories is about a woman disappointed by love in its many forms, stuck uncomfortably between hope and the kind of daily drudgery that makes lives scrape and buckle.

In the title story, Debby devotes her life to caring for her sick mother; her younger sisters blather about salon appointments and promise to send her on a cruise someday. “Remember The Love Boat?” the sisters say. McCorkle describes the woman’s desperation in 3rd-person, but the narration is very much from Debby’s perspective, blind where she is blind and clear-eyed where she has accumulated the self-knowledge that seems a prerequisite for the dirty, bedpan-changing work of a caretaker.

Debby resents her nasty, distracted mother, who still talks about how embarrassed she was when Debby once wore white shoes after Labor Day, but her fantasies about letting her mother die are tempered by moments of real emotional intimacy. McCorkle doesn’t philosophize from above. Instead, she speaks with Debby’s voice. When the narration gets saccharine or clumsy—the story ends with Debby imagining herself as Sisyphus and calling herself “the cobbler of her own heart”—it is not a failure of the author’s but an unflappably honest representation of how Debby must see herself in order to stay alive.

The collection gets sharp and focused in “PS,” a pissed-off letter from a woman to her marriage counselor, annoyingly named “Dr. Love.” Her husband has become a self-righteous religious fanatic on top of being “Jerry Barnes, Toyota Dealer, who in grade school was told that he scored in the genius range on some stupid aptitude test and has spent his whole life doing things like Rubik’s Cube to prove it.” Jerry and Dr. Love are on the same wavelength, and their stories and games seem to extend outward forever, an indestructible wall of narrative and Liberace-inspired home-office decor that dwarfs her.

But she talks back, if only to fight boredom, and her anger becomes almost political, resilient, celebratory. When she buys too much sugar and Jerry yells, “Do you know how many bags of sugar are in that pantry?” she fantasizes about answering his accusations with, “Do you know how you bruised my arm when you grabbed me so hard during sex the last time we had it?” and writes,

“I hope you will remember that whatever I was, I was not apathetic. Bored? Oh dear God, yes, I was bored much of the time, but whenever I said I was bored or lonely or tired, it was my own voice saying it.”

McCorkle concludes the book with the strongest, strangest story of all, “Me and Big Foot,” about a woman who lives alone finding a truck parked outside her house one snowy day with a note that reads, “You, cute-looking owner of the little scrappy dog, please don’t tow or complain. I need you. Please. I’ll be back soon.” She finds a man’s boots in the truck and he becomes her fantasy boyfriend, “created in my image and then roughed up in a way I have always found attractive,” an earthy, romantic, health conscious artist with seasonal allergies and a love for bourbon. The boots go outside the front door. He becomes a legend in the town; her friends claim to have seen him at the store “with two cases of wine and a huge whole ham hoisted up on one shoulder.”

McCorkle keeps the story on the edge of reality, just as her character shapes her fantasy to be hyper-masculine and sexual but unable to touch her. She fetishizes his muddy boots and his scent, despite or because of his lack of corporeal body. It is a spooky, painful, lovely end to the collection, and it asks complicated questions even as it reminds us that women like these are speaking right now, showing us where it hurts, telling us what they need, making it happen it whatever ways they can.

Reviewed by Katelyn Eichwald

Going Away Shoes by Jill McCorkle
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Cloth, 272 pp, $19.95
ISBN: 1565126327