Julia Ridley Smith’s “Sex Romp Gone Wrong” Doesn’t Just Tease; It Delivers https://ift.tt/szaCdOp
I’d be a liar if I said the title of Julia Ridley Smith’s debut story collection, Sex Romp Gone Wrong, didn’t influence my decision to pick it up. Like many people, I’m driven by sex, and it makes me overlook all kinds of shortcomings and defects. Fortunately, Sex Romp Gone Wrong has few, if any, of those. It’s a wonderful book.
“At the Arrowhead” is the most powerful story, and while there is shagging and a cheap motel in it, sex isn’t front and center. Instead, Sharla, its protagonist and a caregiver for the elderly, carries a profound loss, a common theme in the collection. Sharla attends to an old man, Mr. Nichols, whom she coincidentally knew as a child. Old and frail, he doesn’t recall her, and she doesn’t bring up their shared past. Mr. Nichols played a role in the tragedy Sharla can never let go of, and now she wants him to pay for it.
Sharla’s mother was the housekeeper at the Arrowhead, a midcentury motel down on its luck, and she and her two young children inhabit one of its rooms, the brother and sister sharing one of the two double beds. The story has a patina of memory but richly conjures an impoverished childhood in Virginia in the 1970s: Sharla being teased by other children as she gets off the school bus in front of the worn-out motel; Sharla saving quarters gifted by motel guests, usually men, and spending them on salty feasts at the diner across the street; Sharla swimming in the cool waters of the motel pool, pulling her brother along on an inflatable ring.
Smith takes her time crafting the mood of Sharla’s past. She leads us into her childhood world, alternating it with glimpses of Sharla’s present life and her string of failed marriages. The voyeurism is sheer delight for the reader. Then, like most good storytellers, Smith punches us in the gut as she reveals the one thing Sharla can’t forget and won’t forgive.
Often, in Sex Romp Gone Wrong, there is that one thing, the thing that haunts a significant character. Another thing all the stories share is luscious attention to everyday detail, the kind that puts us right there in the room with the characters Smith so deftly portrays.
The narrator of “Et Tu, Miss Jones?”, Adelia, finds herself trolling antique markets after the death of her parents. “Having been raised among old things, I found the sight and smell of antiques soothing, and the wet spring after my mother died, I was drawn to wander the shops on South Elm, talking to the dealers who’d known her and my father when they were healthy and funny and sexy and bright.” She is drawn to one dealer in particular, who hustles music lessons on the side with “long patrician fingers, spatulate at the tips from years at the piano” and a friendship forms. Still reeling with grief, she is seeking something. People, generally women, are always looking for things in these stories: a substitute father, a distraction, absolution, love.
There’s sex in this collection too, and plenty of it, both good and terrible. “Delta Foxtrot” details an extramarital affair with a sense of humor evocative of the marvelous Lorrie Moore and then, like her, ties it into something larger and sadder. A fun girls’ getaway at the beach, in “Don’t Breathe, Breathe,” turns south in the midst of the group sharing anecdotes about losing their virginity. When one of the middle-aged partygoers reveals that she was raped her first time, all the rocking chairs on the porch go still. Whispered confessions ensue. But the narrator holds tight to her own burden, her own teen rape, wrapping it in misplaced shame up to the end: “And yet I blamed myself, as though I’d hooked my own lip and said, Pull, everybody. Pull.”
A favorite writing teacher, one particularly enamored with short stories, once told me never to approach a collection with the expectation that all, or even most, will be good. He’d said one, two tops, is all you can reasonably ask for. If one is incredible, does it matter if the rest are not? The reward is still in there. Not every story in Sex Romp Gone Wrong carries the emotional heft or grace of “At the Arrowhead,” but a surprising number of them come close and are destined to be read again and again. Romp doesn’t just tease; it delivers.
FICTION Sex Romp Gone Wrong
By Julia Ridley Smith
Blair
Published February 6, 2024
0 Commentaires