Bulletproof Girl by Quinn Dalton

Knowing Women
Bulletproof Girl
by Quinn Dalton

As experiences go, I would classify Quinn Dalton’s new short story collection, Bulletproof Girl, as pleasantly unsettling. The stories are not ostentatious, but they are undeniably penetrating, and it is in figuring out exactly where and when they lanced into you that the pleasure resides. The book’s 11 stories describe 11 women whose lives, voices, and styles are refreshingly separate from each other. There is just one common bond: embattlement.

Dalton’s women are like castles under siege, their sturdy exteriors beset from all angles. There are asshole boyfriends, difficult ex-husbands, overbearing mothers (both passively and actively), catty friends, difficult children. There is a rapist. There is a married man moving in on a teenager’s mother. The mood of these stories tends toward affliction, with a hint of malaise, yet Dalton piles tragedies--new and old--atop her characters as softly as snow, and were it not for her expressive pen, we might entirely miss their pain.

Yet, as the title implies, each of Dalton’s protagonists is resilient. None of her stories are wholly without redemption, or at least hope, and a couple of them manage, by story’s end, to reverse the equation entirely. The beauty of these stories is in how skillfully Dalton takes us within her protagonists’ strong exteriors to watch the complex ways in which these women reason against themselves, their hang-ups, and difficult pasts, and see-saw their way toward strength.

These are not feel-good stories. They are intelligent and sincere and sparse. With some notable exceptions, they follow this pattern: Dalton quietly lays out her facts like a psychic laying out cards, giving just enough away so that we understand the protagonist, her milieu, her embattlement. The cards are moved, words are spoken, and we begin to see connections as we comprehend this life that Dalton has pulled back the curtain on. And then the last cards are laid down and we are left to stare at them, pregnant with understanding that has perhaps not matured, that requires a closer read and some reflection.

Take, for example, “Package.” The nameless, lonely narrator, whose husband left her for another woman, has been sent a package by her 93-year-old grandfather. He is old and set in his ways and pays extra so that she must leave work and go down to the post office to sign for it, a small imposition, but an imposition nonetheless, which bothers her and which she bears silently. When she arrives there is a mix-up and the package is not ready, and the bother of appearing again at the post office is too much, so she demands that they just deliver it. The next day, to the narrator’s surprise, it has been delivered: a large leather trunk duct-taped shut. When she opens it, she finds a series of beautiful dolls her grandmother collected. The narrator suddenly remembers back to when she was a little girl, when she playfully cut one of the priceless dolls’ hair, and her grandmother, who “stared at them for thousands of hours before she died,” never let her touch them again. Now she is grown up, one grandparent dead, the other not far behind, and all she has left are the dolls, which she can do with as she pleases. Joylessly, she lines them up on the couch in her empty home, staring at them, wishing for a “sign of life,” and on a moment’s reflection we realize that she watches them like the children she has not had.

One of the standout pieces is “Midnight Bowling,” set in the late ‘70s. The protagonist is a 17-year-old young woman named Tess who has just graduated from high school. She is poor and from a rural town. Tess wants to attend college, but her father died of AIDS over a year ago and her mother has retreated into an eerie fundamentalist religion that she wants to pull Tess into. It is up to the teenager to find her own way out of her childhood trap while preserving within herself the true memory of her father, whom Tess was able to understand through their mutual love of bowling, and whom everyone else has forsaken as a drug addict.

Tess is artfully portrayed as brave yet uncertain, awakening to the adult world just a little too soon:

My parents took me to Disney World on my eleventh birthday, the only time I’ve been out of Ohio. My dad chain-smoked and bought me foam Mickey Mouse ears and called me Minnie all day, even after I lost the ears on the Space Mountain roller coaster and cried, while my mother sat down every few feet, putting her head between her knees to keep from passing out in the heat. I used to keep a list of the best days of my life, and this was at the top. I didn’t want to leave, even though I was old enough to know that there were people inside the costumes and the park closed at night. “Just leave me here,” I remembered saying to my father. I can still see his face tilted down to mine, almost close enough to kiss me. I thought he was as happy as I was. But now I think his expression looked something like defeat.

The story ends with a beautiful, fitting gesture that brings everything full-circle and conveys an understanding of Tess’s future.

If these poignant stories are the main course of Bulletproof Girl, there are also strange side-dishes. “How to Clean Your Apartment” is told entirely in the second-person, and consists of directions for getting rid of old memories that are organized index-style.

Wardrobe
      role of Fate in women’s, 3.43

There are good-luck clothes and bad-luck clothes, and you know that both must be handled with cautious respect. Good-luck clothes can lose their charm if you wear them too often. Bad-luck clothes can become good-luck clothes, given time, but you have to be willing to risk it, give them a second chance. Take, for example, the red dress you bought for that trip you took with the environmentalist, vegetarian, wine-collecting Silicon Valley programmer. . . .

The story is playful, the crisis a little lighter than in most of Dalton’s stories, but she still does an excellent job of making the femalenss of her narrator understood. “You” drinks a fifth of Jack to help her get through the cleaning. As she purges, she wrestles with sentiment and fear, knowing that she needs to get rid of the items that clutter her apartment and, through their associations, weigh down her mind. “You” also fights a day-long battle not to give in to the man she just broke up with, a man whom it kills her to think doesn’t care a thing for her any longer.

One other strange story is the 5-page long “Graceland,” which reads like the freed id of Dalton’s other protagonists. It starts: “I killed my husband’s boss four years after he fired him.”

There is something of the supernatural here, and I’m tempted to read it as a fantasy. Here’s the encounter that starts the wife on her revenge.

But then he has to look at me, up at me actually, because I’m wearing heels and pressing my left tit into his right shoulder, leaning into it. . . . I grab his scrotum and the tip of his penis tightly through his seersucker pants, confirming that the equipment is, in fact, in proportion with the rest of the man, and I squeeze.

Note how the heels and breasts--normally signs of femininity--are reversed, made into weapons. Interestingly, the narrator concludes that her “weakness” is a “lack of patience, or flexibility, or shame,” the exact qualities which, in excess, hobble the women in Dalton’s other stories. We never learn why the narrator lacks these qualities or why she can so easily transgress society’s boundaries. All we are told is that “when a woman learns to like fighting, she doesn’t do it for sport or to make a point. It isn’t a form of communication, the way it can be for men. It’s attempted murder every time.” Strangely, this feels like enough.

That last story highlights something Dalton has managed to do in Bulletproof Girl, something that isn’t easy. She’s investigated the ways women can become strong, but she’s avoided a common pitfall of this genre: a hokey, or even worse, condescending, tone. These stories simply feel sincere--there’s no room for anything else. Well, except a good reader.

Comments

[Dan Wickett]

Great read Scott. I've read most of the stories on an individual basis in Lit. Journals, esp. those that you've mentioned and couldn't agree more about Quinn's abilities.

Thanks.

[tayari]

I agree that Quinn Dalton is formidible writer. I've read this collection through three times and each time I find something that I have missed. I've been eagerly waiting to see someting *big* happen with this book. In the meantime, I think we should start a word-of-mouth grassroots campaign to get this fine collection the attention it deserves!

[panasianbiz]

I stumbled across your blog while I was doing some online research. I have not read Quinn Dalton before, but now I will definitely be adding this collection to my "to read" list!