Your story in this week’s issue, “The Wind,” is about a mother, Ruby, and her three children fleeing a violent husband and father. When did you first start thinking about this scenario?
A few decades ago, in a ratty booth at some bar in Philadelphia, a person I didn’t know told me a strange and heavy story that I’ve been carrying around ever since. Early on, I didn’t feel as though I could touch it; it was too painful, and it was never mine to write. But time worked a slow magic, and, over the twenty years since I heard it, the story morphed in my brain, and then it changed even more when I applied fiction to it, until at last it became something with a similar violence and flight at its center, but with all its other elements radically transformed. I’m sure the original teller would never recognize their story here, and, at the same time, I hope I honored the truth at the center of their need to tell it, which was so overwhelming at the moment that they needed to give it to some panicky stranger trapped next to them in a booth in the scuzziest bar in Philly.
This is told from the perspective of Ruby’s granddaughter, as she describes the way her own mother, Michelle, who was twelve on the day of these events, would recall what happened. It was, the narrator observes, a story that her mother told down to the last detail, “as though dreaming it into life.” Did you always know you’d use this perspective? What does it allow you to do in the story?
I needed to give this story a very firm bedrock, by which I mean that I needed the perspective to make clear from the beginning of the story that the children would live beyond this terrible day; and at the same time I needed to allow the story flexibility, which comes from the shifting structures of memory, imagination, denial, and supposition. They had to exist simultaneously, the firmness and the looseness, because this is a story about aftershocks of violence, which don’t die down in months or years, but often ripple through decades and distant generations.
As Ruby and her children flee, it gradually becomes clear that she works in a hospital and her husband is a police officer. His violence doesn’t seem to come as a surprise to the people—the school-bus driver, Ruby’s co-workers—whom she and her children encounter that day. They’re met with kindness and support, but that’s never been enough to stop him. How powerless does Ruby feel?
I think that much of the evil of this world comes from people who consider themselves good people, who genuinely love their families and friends and communities, but who act just a little bit too slowly to be of much help, who give just a little less than they should, who don’t want to get involved in other people’s messes, who value their own comfort a little more than the thought of extending themselves as far as they can to insure the security and happiness of others. If this weren’t the case, the U.S. would have universal health care, inexpensive education, and gun laws that actually protect the populace. We would care about people we don’t know. But we don’t, because we’ve made it normal to extend our collective acts of caring only far enough to protect our immediate families and friends. And, in a small town like the one in the story, where everyone knows everyone else’s business, peace is maintained by avoiding speaking openly of things that are considered private business. Ruby is powerless because of the collective hesitancy of caring and this small town’s pact of silence, but also because the authority that she should expect to protect her is, instead, protecting one of its own.
