"Pummelling"
Short Story Saturday - 'Thursday', by George Saunders
Having read the start over, I’m still guessing as to what George Saunders is laying out in his wonderful short story, “Thursday.” This passage is from the top:
On the bright side, it was Thursday.
“Gerard, yes, hi, hello,” said Mrs. Dwyer, the nurse’s assistant sanctioned to hand over the Perlman headpiece and the big green pill and the smaller red one that activates the green one.
“How was the week?” she asked.
“Same,” I said.
“Oh, gosh, sorry,” she said.
In Treatment Room 4, she checked with the calliper to make sure the pressure foot of the Perlman was seated correctly.
It was.
She seemed a little nervous today.
“Green first,” she said. “I know you know that.”
I took the green.
“Good,” she said. “Now the red. Then the agua.”
I took the red. Drank the water from its pre-measured vial.
“Sit, wait, enjoy,” she said. “May this bring you healing.”
“Thanks,” I said.
My guess is that Saunders drops us into Gerard’s world without explanation or apology. A treatment facility—the Perlman headpiece, the calliper, the pre-measured pills. Clinical and procedural, yet strangely tender. The nurse follows her script: “May this bring you healing.” Gerard follows his: “Thanks.”
We don’t know what the treatment is. We don’t need to. Do we? What we know is that Thursday is the bright side. That “same” is the honest answer to how the week was. And that whatever Gerard is about to return to—home, family, the ordinary chaos of his life—this room, this ritual, is either the best part, or the worst.
Assuming the treatment works—Gerard drifts back, not randomly, but specifically. Plymouth Street. Summer. His sister Clara beside him on the lawn, thirteen and ten, watching clouds. Saunders renders the memory with an almost unbearable tenderness—the robin on the fencepost, the Nabisco vanilla on the air, the distant lawnmowers “cross-bellowing like enraged crewcut men in dispute.” Pure Saunders.
But it’s more than nostalgia. Lying there, Gerard felt—genuinely felt—that his generation would be the one to finally fix things. That all of human history, the sandals and sabres and ravishments, had been leading to this moment. To them. To Clara and him on the grass.
“Or so I felt, lying on my childhood lawn beside my sister, Clara.”
That last line is the whole story in miniature. The “or so I felt” doing all the quiet, devastating work.
And then Gerard comes home. Home to my favourite part of the story.
Soon I would go inside for a drink. I knew this. I had done so back then and therefore must do so again. I was, mostly, the boy I had been that day: thirsty, sweet, self-pleased, ignorant of the future, the right side of my face slightly more sun-warmed than the left. But I was also, fractionally, the older person I was now, cringing at the thought of what he, that boy, would find inside.
Which was: Dad pummelling Mom (joyfully, playfully at first, then with increasing rancor), while Uncle Rod pummelled Dad (in an attempt to quell Dad’s pummelling of Mom) and Aunt Staci also, somewhat performatively, pummelled Mom. (It was unclear what offense Mom had originally committed.) Clara had followed me in and was cowering near an upended coffee table. Now and then one of the adults would step away from the brawl to ingest more of his or her drink. It was all as confusing as it had once actually been. And yet I knew dimly that, within the hour, all would be well, Rod, Staci, Mom, and Dad restored to conviviality, gleefully flinging chairs down from the second-story deck as if to celebrate the intensity of the earlier round-robin pummelling, while Clara and I, in an attempt to reëstablish normalcy, played a terse game of Chinese checkers in the mayhemic space that was the post-pummelling living room: couch tipped on its back, several broken light bulbs lying there, like ivory eggshells out of which exotic baby birds of light had just burst, among a loose flotilla of eight or nine pink party hats, which had come from a neat, hopeful stack, a stack now jammed beneath the radiator, as if it had tried and failed to escape.
Noteworthy were the adjustments our young minds were already making. On the first level: shame was upon us, of course—embarrassment, resentment of this mode of being, awareness that others in our peer group likely did not live in such a low and volatile milieu. On a second level, perhaps contradictorily: denial that this pummelling was odd or indicated any defect in our family. We were, that is, stretching to see this behavior as a manifestation of our parents’ enviable lust for life; the other children and their non-pummelling parents were mundane squares, never moved by passion into this higher realm of uncontrollability.
We were trying this attitude on for size, one might say.
And, alas, I saw now, we were in the process of being molded. Pummelling would, ever after, be one of the choices available to us. Pummelling had been put on the menu, so to speak. To some, pummelling was unthinkable. To Clara and me, henceforth? Quite thinkable. We had seen these people we loved and respected engaged in it, and therefore, forevermore, pummelling would be something we ourselves might consider doing should we be placed under sufficient duress.
Because this was such a signal family event—a moment of peak emotional intensity—I would often, in the years to come, find myself waiting, as it were, for an excuse or opportunity to pummel someone, in much the same way that, I would imagine, a young person raised by virtuoso musicians might, on first finding an instrument in his hand, feel that the moment had arrived for him to begin pursuing the family business.
As for Clara, in the future, she would, more than once, find herself being pummelled and not objecting to it, in the belief (the seed of which had just been planted) that being pummelled did not mean she was unloved and, in fact, might very well mean the opposite.
It was bitter, being back here.
I could have wept for those two children, sitting still as bunnies before that ancient, long-ago-landfilled Chinese-checker board as, the supply of chairs up there having apparently been exhausted, couch cushions began raining down from the deck.
The drink Gerard knew he’d take as a boy leads him inside. And inside is where Saunders changes gears.
What follows is rendered in Saunders’ signature deadpan—the word “pummelling” repeated so many times it becomes both comic and confronting. Dad pummelling Mom. Uncle Rod pummelling Dad. Aunt Staci, somewhat performatively, pummelling Mom. Clara cowering near an upended coffee table. Adults stepping away from the brawl to refresh their drinks.
Then—within the hour—everyone restored to conviviality, flinging chairs from the second-floor deck as if to celebrate.
Saunders doesn’t flinch, and he doesn’t explain. He just shows you the living room afterwards: couch on its back, broken light bulbs lying there “like ivory eggshells out of which exotic baby birds of light had just burst,” pink party hats scattered across the floor.
Pummelling—is there a better verb or word for the action? Priceless.
“It was bitter, being back here. I could have wept for those two children.”
The distance between the lawn and the living room. Between the vanilla air and the upended coffee table. Between who we thought we’d become and what we were quietly being made into.
Saunders doesn’t tell you what the Perlman headpiece does. He doesn’t need to. Thursday is the bright side because Thursday is the only hour Gerard gets to lie on that lawn beside Clara before he has to go back inside.
Go and read Thursday. Then read it again.
Nick
You might need a sub from the New Yorker here. If you have trouble, let me know in the comments and I can email you the pdf.
