american gothic as The Bog Wife
and also the dissolution of childhood friendships
Five adult children mired in an Appalachian cranberry bog. An ethereal, ancient compact to care for and subsist off the land. A promise: that the bog would produce for each eldest son a wife hewn from the bog’s pulpiest bits. Until it doesn’t.
So begins Kay Chronister’s The Bog Wife, published by Counterpoint Press on Oct. 1, a moody, textural gothic replete with dank family mystery, a crumbling ancestral home, and many, many descriptions of sphagnum.
Spanning a calendar year, when readers meet the Haddesley children, their father — and precious patriarch — is dying. Their mother has been gone (where?) for over a decade. And to mark the occasion, wayward middle-daughter Wenna has returned home to participate in funereal rites. When those rites — drilled into their heads by their father with religious intensity — don’t work, each Haddesley child is left looking for an answer to explain why.
The thing you need to know about the Haddesleys is they have been insulated from, well, everything. Aside from outdated copies of gossip magazines, little-to-no reference is made to the world outside the bog. The eldest son leaves to run errands, but other than that, only Wenna ever ventures meaningfully away. All their life they have absorbed the same ornate, far-fetched family mythology that at once explains their origins, their duty, and their collective destiny. They don home-made ceremonial clothing, they live off canned goods and the little livestock and garden they manage to keep alive; their house falls into disrepair because it’s never occurred to them to solicit help. The outside world is a dangerous unreality. It is irrelevant. There is only the bog.
There is an obviously ecological-horror question being asked here: What do we do when the way we’ve always cared for the earth no longer works and the earth consequently turns against us? That question unfolds with an enchanting elegance, managing unfurl both quickly and ponderously at the very same time. But me? I couldn’t stop thinking about the church. About stories we tell children to help them make sense of the world. About the shattering power of a parent’s influence.
From this point of view, The Bog Wife is as much a story about distressed land and obligation to environment as it is of deconstruction, a term used by those of us raised in a fundamentalist community who then become adults and find themselves confronted with the unreality they’ve been taught to fear and abhor. It’s a complicated, emotional, and painful process, the unlearning. It’s asking questions that were previously prohibited, finding you no longer accept the origin story you’ve been given because when you look at yourself, really take a slow and steady accounting of who you are and the values you hold, you find that origin story does not describe you. And maybe it never did. Until reading The Bog Wife, I’d never thought about how this experience could be transposed onto other things, things like our attitude toward the earth’s care.
Reading The Bog Wife, I too was transposed. The Haddesleys are fiercely each themselves, complete with eccentricities and immovable opinions and blindspots undergirded by a ferocious devotion to one another. Their realm is hardened and cruel, yet also soft and relenting, laced with glimpses of magical realism that they each attempt, in their own way, to grasp. Reader, I was sold.
At Talk Vomit, we’re getting ready to release our fall American Gothic edition, which will live online. (No print edition this quarter; we’re shifting around a bit again.) As I was reading The Bog Wife, I was reaffirmed in the decision to spend the fall ruminating on what we can learn about ourselves through the banal fatalism and uncanny storytelling the genre relies upon.
“‘Yes,’ said Nora, and she hoped that the transformation was a way of going back — beyond the vanishing point, beyond what she could remember, to the fullness and warmth and completion that always eluded her. All her life she had been so lonely. She did not want to be lonely anymore.”
xoxo
Monica
Here’s another piece from TV: SUMMER, GIRLHOOD, which you can always read on the website, too. This essay is about the author’s experience of being adopted, brought to the United States, and maintaining — trying to maintain — a friendship with another girl from her orphanage. Enjoy.
By Avaleigh Cunningham
Every year during Christmastime, my mom pulls out the old home videos. Years of birthdays, holidays, and camping trips flash on the TV screen. My favorite video, however, was recorded 19 years ago during the week my parents spent in China.
It was an exciting time for them to finally get there after going through months of paperwork to make my adoption possible. I had not even learned to walk yet and neither had any of the other baby girls in my group. In the video, there is me, spiky hair and diaper-clad. Another one of the babies, Li, sits opposite me on a hotel carpet, playing with a toy ball. She is slightly smaller than me and her tuft of hair lays flat in a way that mine refused to. Li is not even my direct cribmate at the orphanage, but our moms must have bonded on the plane. The video goes on for a whole minute of the two of us as we roll this toy ball back and forth to each other. The video is quiet except for some low breathing behind the camera as my dad records cautiously, not wanting to disturb this breakthrough moment of friendship. Li has always been my first and favorite playmate. She knew me before anyone else, and I knew her before anyone else. We slept in the same GuangZhou adoption center for 16 months before our adoptive parents swept us away to the States. Like siblings, we slept, soundly, each night in that facility. Neither of us had a mom or dad anymore, but we were never alone.
Li and I stayed connected by the sheer determination of my mom and Barb, who became fast friends and online pen pals. Whenever it felt like it had been too long, my mom would phone Barb, or Barb would phone my mom, and they would plan our next visit. She would gather my sister and I into the car and drive two and a half hours to their house in Newbury, Massachusetts, having packed enough clothes for three nights. I would impatiently pace around, my legs numb from the car ride, waiting for my mom to get out and unlock the trunk.
Visiting Li was three whole days of excitement. She was hyperactive and she was funny, in a careless way. I could anticipate late nights of sitting in bean bag chairs, watching Barbie movies. Li would make fun of the characters, calling out all the cringe moments. Once, while we were watching ‘Barbie: Magic of the Pegasus,’ she mused, “What if Princess Anika accidentally fell off the Pegasus onto an ice pick and died?” This was followed by her doubling over in laughter at her own joke. First, I looked at her like she was crazy, but soon enough I was laughing, too. I learned to grow fond of her dark humor.
One night it was raining and thundering and we had just put on the Scooby Doo Halloween episode with the screaming banshee. Sitting shoulder to shoulder in the bean bag chairs, my sister, Li, and I each held our hands in front of our eyes and watched the show through the gaps in our fingers. Right when the banshee let out her first terrifying scream, lightning hit an electricity pole outside and the power went out, taking the TV and all the lights in the house with it. Li screamed like a maniac and ran around the room before jumping on top of my sister and I. We cried out at the jabs of her elbows and knees as she laughed at our pain, and soon enough, we were laughing with her.
Either Barb was prone to neglecting the heating bills or they preferred colder temperatures. The knit throw blanket kept on the sofa became my lifeline. It was no big deal. I got used to the shivers and sneezes that racked my body every time we visited. I was too distracted by how much fun I was having to care. I envied Li and how free she was to do whatever she wanted. Her toys would be scattered all throughout their house and Barb would be in no rush to scold her to put them away. After all, it was just the two of them who had to deal with the mess. White walls and windows with no curtains allowed for natural lighting in every room. It was always so bright. Mornings never felt so much like mornings than they did at Barb and Li’s house. I can close my eyes and find myself back in their kitchen, sitting next to Li. Early rays of sunlight cause us to squint as I stare at Barb’s ashtray on the kitchen counter, still somewhat groggy from sleep. The faint smell of cigarettes a visceral memory. My mom used to smoke but quit pretty early on in my childhood.
Our toaster strudels pop out from the toaster and I drift back into reality. We hop down from the wooden stool and retrieve the strudels. Placing it on a ceramic plate, I’d squeeze frosting from a plastic pouch and spread it with my finger.
“Do you see that?” Barb whispers to my mom as Li enters the kitchen for her fifth popsicle of the night, despite Barb’s suggestion a few minutes prior for Li to “take it easy.” I wasn’t supposed to hear it, but I did. Barb kept her kitchen stocked with Toaster Strudels, Slim Jims, ice cream popsicles. All of Li’s favorites and everything I would consider special treats.
“I don’t know what to do, Terri. She doesn’t listen to me. Whenever she comes back from her dad’s, she lays in bed and cries for hours.”
I pretend like I am still engrossed in the movie we were watching, but really I can hear their whole conversation. “I try to talk to him but he just tells me that I am no better and that she needs to be disciplined more.” Before that moment, I never knew that Li’s lifestyle could be considered anything but fun and free.
On the car ride home, my mom gave my sister and me a talk.
“Li has been having a hard time with school and friends,” she said. “I think it would be best that, next time we visit, you two don’t talk a lot about your friends from school because it might upset her.”
From then on, mom would preface our visits with pieces of advice. A few years later, during a drive up there, mom said, “Li’s been struggling with her weight and acne. Be careful about what you say.”
When we arrive, I am on edge.
“Ava, honey you look amazing! You’ve grown so much.” I stand there awkwardly as Barb praises me. “Your hair is so long and beautiful, and those jeans are so cute on you!”
I smiled nervously, hoping Li did not hear it.
That visit, I noticed that it took longer for Li to warm up to me.
“I wish I had clear skin like you,” she said, later. I didn’t know how to respond to this.
“Have you watched any new TV shows lately?” I asked. She gave me a hesitant look and said, “Yes but you probably haven’t heard of them. They are kind of weird.” I sensed she was embarrassed by not having mainstream interests. That she feared I wouldn’t want to play the same as we once did, that I had grown up and become normal and she hadn’t. I assured her that was not true and showed her my phone, still full of the app games that we liked to play together — Minecraft, Fun Run, Harry Potter trivia. I told her that if we get bored with games we could alway watch old Barbie movies. I could see her face brighten and a smile form in her cheeks. I grinned back and convinced her to stay up the whole night playing our nerdy games and watching kid movies. We were getting a little too old for these activities, but being with Li was an excuse to act five years younger. “Quiet down in there, I’m trying to sleep!” Barb shouted from the other room at around one in the morning.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that would be our last visit to see Li and Barb. My friend was no longer up for visitors. Instead, I catch myself typing her name in search bars and sending texts to a number no longer in use.
Li is an only child who grew up being given anything she asked for, no matter how many toys and treats she already had. With each request of hers came a scoff and a dramatic eye roll from Barb. Li already had enough trouble when it came to her weekly visits to her dad’s house. I don’t know all the details, but mom told me a few years ago that her father was intensely critical. Mom explained that this was a problem because he would even criticize her for things she can’t control, even though he is — was — the one paying for her shitty therapy. Realizing that she was dealt the short end of the stick has given luck a bittersweet taste.
As the years passed by, the toy ponies and Barbie CDs that covered every surface of Li and Barb’s home were replaced by unfinished homework left on the sofa and therapy bills piling high on the kitchen counter next to Barb’s overflowing ashtray. I still wish I could go back in time, find myself back in their house soaking in the sunlight after waking up from a night of Scooby Doo marathons. I think if I tried to visit them now it would not be the same. She and I would struggle to find common interests and my shivering and sneezing would diminish whatever fun I could muster out of her. The mornings would still be bright, but I doubt she would wake up early enough to spend them with me. Instead, Barb would be there, sitting at the counter, finishing up her first smoke of the day. My teeth would chatter and I would get full-body shivers from how cold it always was in that house.
Avaleigh Cunningham is a 21-year-old student studying writing and film at Emmanuel College. She was born in China and then grew up in Waterford, Connecticut.