LITERATURE: Glimmertrain

Done with Glimmertrain Issue #44, and found a wonderful, wonderful piece by Mary Relindes Ellis called "A Dirty Woman."  It is the best in the issue as far as I am concerned, and the one that stands out for its story, imagery, handling of time and giving character to three woman when only two exist in the present of the story.

First person pov, a woman who is visiting with her grandmother in a nursing home.  The timeline is linear over a period of probably a little over a week–one visit to the next, and then her grandmother dies.  It is background filled with flashbacks that present the narrator as a child, her grandmother as a strong independent, self-righteous but good woman and the narrator’s mother, a willful beauty who brings up her three children–two girls and a boy–alone after her philandering abusive husband leaves them.  But it is the narrator’s mother who sits as a battleground between the old woman and her granddaughter.  It is the mother who is "a dirty woman."

The warmth and personalities of each of them come alive in the reflections of the narrator, and the contrast between not only the mother and grandmother in their wild natural versus prim and proper pasts is made evident as well in the span of time that has changed them.  The mother has died, and the grandmother is dying.  This too, the old woman seems to hold against her daughter–that a child should not die before its mother–along with the knowledge of past indiscretions that she refuses, until the very end, to understand and forgive. 

The hardness of the grandmother is a shell that toughened with time, one that her daughter could not penetrate, and one that her granddaughter has never struck out of respect.  At this late stage, angered by the old woman’s stubbornness, she does lash out in defense.  It still seems useless, until the last visit, when the woman’s physical decline is matched by the fraility of her determination and she breaks down in tearful regret. 

There is strength, there is joy, there is humor and sadness within this short story, all wonderfully brought together in an expose of three women who have each been powerful in themselves, yet soft in their love of each other in a way that shields were not so much for self protection, but to protect each other.

Well written, a good story, and I’m glad I read through the issue to reach it at the very end.  Mary Relindes Ellis has a debut novel out and available at Amazon, titled "The Turtle Warrior."