Grace Paley - The Collected Stories of Grace Paley

GRACE PALEY

THE COLLECTED STORIES

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

NEW YORK

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It seems right to dedicate this collection to my friend Sybil Claiborne, my colleague in the Writing and Mother Trade. I visited her fifth-floor apartment on Barrow Street one day in 1957. There before my very eyes were her two husbands disappointed by the eggs. After that we talked and talked for nearly forty years. Then she died. Three days before that, she said slowly, with the delicacy of an unsatisfied person with only a dozen words left, Grace, the real question ishow are we to live our lives?

In 1954 or 55 I decided to write a story. I had written a few nice paragraphs with some first-class sentences in them, but I hadnt known how to let women and men into the language, nor could I find the story in those pieces of prose. Id been writing poems since childhood. It was poetry that I read with the greatest pleasure.

But in 1954 or 55 I needed to speak in some inventive way about our female and male lives in those years. Some knowledge was creating a real physical pressure, probably in the middle of my chestmaybe just to the right of the heart. I was beginning to suffer the storytellers pain: Listen! I have to tell you something! I simply hadnt known how to do it in poetry. Other writers have understood easily, but I seem to have been singing along on the gift of one ear, the ear in charge of literature.

Then the first of two small lucks happened. I became sick enough for the children to remain in Greenwich House After School until suppertime for several weeks, but not so sick that I couldnt sit at our living-room table to write or type all day. I began the story Goodbye and Good Luck and to my surprise carried it through to the end. So much prose. Then The Contest. A couple of months later I finished A Woman, Young and Old. Thinking about it some years later I understood Id found my other ear. Writing the stories had allowed itsuddenlyto do its job, to remember the street language and the home language with its Russian and Yiddish accents, a language my early characters knew well, the only language I spoke. Two ears, one for literature, one for home, are useful for writers.

When I sent these three stories out into the world of periodicals, they did not do well.

I had been reading the current fiction, fifties fiction, a masculine fiction, whether traditional, avant-garde, orlaterBeat. As a former boy myself (in the sense that many little girls reading Tom Sawyer know theyve found their true boy selves) I had been sold pretty early on the idea that I might not be writing the important serious stuff. As a grown-up woman, I had no choice. Everyday life, kitchen life, children life had been handed to me, my portion, the beginning of big luck, though I didnt know it.

One dark day in our dark basement apartment, a father slumped in our fat chair, waiting to retrieve his two kids, my childrens friends. Just before leaving with them, he looked at me. He said that his former wife, the mother of his children, my friend Tibby, had asked him to read my stories. I probably said, Oh, you dont have to bother. But he did have to. A couple of weeks later he came for the children again. This time he sat down at our kitchen table (in the same room as our living-room table). He asked if I could write seven more stories like the three hed read. He said hed publish the book. Doubleday would publish them. He was Ken McCormick, an editor who could say that and it would happen. Of course, selling short stories was not a particularly hopeful business. He suggested that I write a novel next. (I tried for a couple of years. I failed.)

Well, that was luck, wasnt it? I dont say this to minimize the stories. I worked conscientiously to write them as truthfully and as beautifully as I could: but so do others, yet they are not usually visited with contracts.

I have called that meeting and that publication my little lucks. Not because they werent overwhelming. They certainly changed my life. They are little only for their personal size and private pleasure.

As for the big luck: that has to do with political movements, history that happens to you while youre doing the dishes, wars that men plan for their sons, our sons.

I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the womens movement. I didnt know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation. Others like Ruth Herschberger, who wrote Adams Rib in 1948, and Tillie Olsen, who was writing her stories through the forties and fifties, had more consciousness than I and suffered more. This great wave would crest half a generation later, leaving men sputtering and anxious, but somewhat improved for the crashing bath.

Every woman writing in these years has had to swim in that feminist wave. No matter what she thinks of it, even if she bravely swims against it, she has been supported by itthe buoyancy, the noise, the saltiness.

Since writing The Little Disturbances of Man, I have often left home. I have received great gifts from my political work as a pacifist and feminist, traveled on political tasks to Vietnam during that war, to Sweden, Russia, Central America, and seen China and Chile and reported on these meetings. Therefore, some of the people who work for me in Enormous Changes and Later the Same Day have had to share those journeys with me. Some, of course, are still quite young, having been born in the seventies or eighties.

But many of them are still the companions of my big luck. Starting from the neighborhoods of my childhood and my childrens childhood, in demonstrations in childrens parks or the grownups Pentagon, in lively neighborhood walks against the Gulf War, in harsh confrontations with ourselves and others, we have remained interested and active in literature and the world and are now growing old together.

G.P.

THE LITTLE DISTURBANCES OF MAN

(1959)

I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasnt no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh. In time to come, Lillie, dont be surprisedchange is a fact of God. From this no one is excused. Only a person like your mama stands on one foot, she dont notice how big her behind is getting and sings in the canarys ear for thirty years. Whos listening? Papas in the shop. You and Seymour, thinking about yourself. So she waits in a spotless kitchen for a kind word and thinkspoor Rosie