In previous years, I’ve attempted to read the full Stella Prize longlist – that took some effort in terms of coordinating predictions, library reservations and bookshop visits! This year, the longlist announcement crept up on me and I was totally unprepared. Nevertheless, I got my hands on a copy of Lucy Nelson’s short story collection, Wait Here.

The collection of twelve stories is focused on women who ‘…will never be mothers’ – by circumstance, by choice, by loss, or as an act of defiance. Each story in the collection is insightful, revealing the complex inner lives of the main characters. In the past, many of the books* I’ve read about choosing to have children, to not have children, or being unable to have children, are written in such a way that it seems there’s a point to prove or an argument to win – and often there’s not. Rather, it’s simply the way things turn out, with so many factors that contribute to the situation along the way.

As always with a collection of short stories, there are standouts (that said, this is a remarkably even collection).

The first was Chances Are, We Were High as Kites. It’s about two elderly sisters, Shippy and Fern, who’ve been inseparable throughout their lives and make a momentous decision – but first, they host a dinner party for their closest friends. In a mere twenty pages, Nelson captures decades of the sisters’ tender relationship – the warmth, the humour, the shared language and the bits that a person simply tolerates about a sibling. Nelson also describes Shippy and Fern’s individual circumstances – there’s not a hint of ‘spinster’, as they might traditionally be positioned.

The contrast between the sisters is beautifully done – Shippy, practical and forthright, Fern, gentle and accommodating –

Fern was not afraid to use the word emotional. She was not afraid of emotions at all. She ‘sought them out’, is what Shippy liked to say. She deliberately chose the most upsetting movies and watched them repeatedly. The sad movie Fern saw the most times was Steel Magnolias. She was in awe of the way a movie could rip her heart out. She enjoyed the feeling. Every time Sally Field lost it in the cemetery, Fern lost it worse. She felt great afterwards.
“It’s like vomiting,” said Fern. “I love to vomit.”
“She does, she loves to vomit,” Shippy would say.
“The contrast between feeling shitty and feeling better is never so clear as it is the moment right after you vomit.”

Nelson’s style of humour is evident in most of the stories but fully on display in Chances Are. The dialogue between the sisters and their friends is tremendous, as are the descriptions of the characters.

Neither of them was religious but Fern was a little bit spiritual. A little bit spiritual in her case meant that she’d been heard to say out loud that she believed in love and that she journalled.

The Feeling Bones, about a young dancer named Jade, and her mother and grandmother’s experience of pain and injury was in some ways the poorest fit with the rest of the collection (it was structured quite differently and it’s connection with the theme, less direct). However, one line jumped out at me and anything that stops me in my reading tracks is worthy of attention! Jade’s mother had suffered a neck injury that meant she couldn’t turn her head to one side, and, after an incident at a dance –

…she decided then that she didn’t have the neck for whimsical men, so she married a sensible one instead. Jade’s father didn’t really care about beauty. He never owned a single painting. He would never make a woman gasp.

Pages later, as her mother ‘…walked away from the blank and artless walls…’ I read the line that had me pause –

Jade’s mother understood then that all these years she had mistaken scared for sensible and sensible for easy. 

So often we ‘see’ what we are seeking, whether it’s there or not.

The last story in the collection, I Am Five, I Am Twelve, I Am Twenty, initially appears to follow a familiar ‘biological clock’ narrative, however, the protagonist’s thoughts and actions aren’t so straightforward. Again, there is rarely a single ‘decision point’ in people’s lives and she vacillates between wanting a baby and not.

The problem with never saying never is that it’s always saying maybe. It’s living in limbo. There is no death, no break-up, no airport drop-off to mobilise the grieving. The grief doesn’t know when to begin. It lingers and waits, unsure when it will be called on. And the longer it waits, the more it fears what may happen.

Holden’s stories could have veered into the angry, resentful or sad but they are none of those things. Instead, each is thoughtful and multi-faceted. A fantastic collection.

Kim at Reading Matters has also reviewed Wait Here (and picked out different stories).

4/5

I go to the back of the shop and eat my peanut butter chocolate swirl angrily, which is hard to do.

*there are some notable exceptions to this – recent memoirs that come to mind are Childless by Sian Prior; The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy; and Avalanche by Julia Leigh.