Chapter 6: In Which I Admit I Never Liked My Name, Provide a Bit of Russian History, and Recall a Certain Ice Cream Store

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archive list on the right sidebar, going from the oldest to the newest.

 

The story-cycle is one of the rarer genres, not quite flora nor fauna. It doesn’t require from readers the dedication a novel demands, yet isn’t quite the unconnected series of tales that makes short story collections so easy to pick up and put down.

 

 

Some of our most powerful works are formed in this way: The Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights, and Dubliners are ones that immediately come to mind. More recent examples include Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place. Perhaps the iconic American example is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Published in 1919, it was eligible for the 1920 Pulitzer Prize but surprisingly failed to make its mark (losing, sadly, to “no award”). Perhaps its non-traditional structure was simply too modern for the still staid Pulitzer committee members. Fortunately, the committee mindset evolved over the years, in plenty of time to recognize Olive Kitteridge, a story cycle from Elizabeth Strout that won in 2009.

*****

Here is one of the stories that formed me:

In 1881, in the Russian city of St. Petersburg, Ignacy Hryniewiecki, (pronounced Ignaty Grinevizky) a member of the People’s Will movement, threw a bomb at the feet of Tsar Aleksandr II. The explosion removed parts of both legs and ripped open the Tsar’s stomach. Later that day, in the confines of the Winter Palace, the leader who had twenty years earlier freed the serfs, died. His heir, Aleksandr III, did what many others had done before him: he blamed the Jews.

My birth name, I should tell you, is not Charney, but Schuchman, a name I never much liked. With its odd yet rhythmic spelling (S-C-H/U-C-H/M-A-N), the obvious opportunity for vulgar rhymes, and the alphabetical guarantee of rear-row seating assignments all through my school years, I always felt the name hung uncomfortably, like a too-large t-shirt.  In my early twenties, when I formed one-half of a musical duo that trudged around the San Francisco Bay area, I decided to change it and, with a sentimental nod to family history, chose “Charney.”

My great-grandfather and his brother were two of the millions of Jews threatened by the new Tsar’s policies, policies that led to a decades-long series of pogroms and the eventual removal of some two million Jews. I don’t know precisely where my great-grandfather was from, but I do know that the family’s last name was Charney and that it was a time when travel (or escape) for any Jew was exceedingly difficult. Pursuing a tactic more common than history tells, the two brothers acquired the identification of two men from a Russian Orthodox family, men who had recently died, men whose last name was close to the name I was born with. The two brothers somehow made it out of Russia and wound their way through parts of Europe where they managed poor passage to America. They came through Ellis Island, eventually making their way to Jersey City. Both soon married and, by the time of my grandfather’s birth in the 20^th century’s earliest years, had settled into the lives of ethnic Americans.

I thought my name change would be a charming homage. And it might have been, except that the family legend wasn’t true. It was, instead, homemade, something invented to amuse a small child who one night refused to fall asleep. And yet, imagine: with just this simple story comes a changed life.

*****

Story cycles makes us uncomfortable because of their inherent incompleteness, their requirements. They leave wide spaces between the lines and we’re expected to fill them in, sequencing where no sequence exists, finding patterns and hidden pictures and missing pieces like we did all those times as kids while sitting in a doctor’s office with half-torn Highlights magazines. We strive, whether knowingly or not, to make sense of broken narratives.

But isn’t that life?

*****

Here’s another one:

In the summer of 1972 I went steady for a very brief time with an incredibly attractive girl named Stephanie. (“Going steady,” for those too young to remember, was a bit like today’s “friends with benefits,” only you were more than friends and there were almost no benefits.) She and I would meet at the Gardner Park pool a few days a week to swim, meet with friends, and occasionally sneak behind the hot dog stand for a few chaste kisses. It was a time of early exploration but not much more, and five or six weeks later it was over. No drama, no scene. We were just two kids who bounced off each other briefly then went our separate ways.

Then things changed.

Steph’s family, the Geller’s, owned a local Baskin-Robbins store, one that I and my friends frequented and that my step-father patronized at least twice a week in order to replenish our freezer’s ever-diminishing supply of Jamoca® Almond Fudge. I showed up to school on just one more ordinary day to find Evy, Steph’s sister, glaring at me. “Stop calling the store. It’s not funny,” she said. “Calling over and over like that. We don’t like it. So just stop, okay?”

I had no idea what she was talking about.

A couple of days later I stopped for ice cream on the way home from school. Steph wouldn’t even look at me. Her parents refused to serve me. Someone had apparently decided to make prank calls to the store using my name, calling repeatedly, two or three times a day, and for weeks.  Nothing I could say or do would convince them it wasn’t me, and I was never allowed in the store again.  My stepfather asked me about it because the Gellers had asked him about it. I think he believed me only because I pleaded with him, and because he knew I wasn’t a very good liar.

I never found out who had made the calls, and the Gellers—mother, father, and daughters—never returned to my life after high school. I moved away, and the friendships were never close enough to expend any effort. They are a story: setting, plot and characters requiring no resolution. Yet here I am, nearly forty years on, and the story sticks with me. It must have had an effect or why would I remember it? Perhaps, recursively, this incomplete story, this incomplete accusation, drives my compulsive need for completion, for answers, to everything I begin, everything I question. But even if that’s so, is the story remembered because of the way I am, or has the story created the way I am, and so forces its own remembrance?

*****

Our lives are built that way, though, aren’t they? Built like story cycles, with characters arriving and leaving, many without proper exposition, barely threaded into the weave. Many, like Pirandello wrote, in search of an author. With answers lost and found, and resolutions (when we can find them) built from loosely coupled suppositions. If we left those stories alone we would find our lives untidy, and so we build from them the novel we’d prefer we were, the one filled with interesting characters spread over long years of narrative arc, alternating tension, joy, and sorrow in equal amounts. But it isn’t that way. It’s erratic and gap-filled, written in pencil, and with more blank pages than we know.  

We ourselves are story cycles. Our lives. Our friendships. Our careers. Mostly we will be forgotten. Mostly we are the spaces between what’s written. Yet all the meaning we have—of ourselves and of others—comes from those stories and spaces. We attempt narrative, cementing the cracks, filling the holes with whatever we can. We would much prefer the neatly clean and unidirectional, the hero’s tale that, while perhaps not epic, is a tale well-enough told when we tell it to ourselves. And so that’s what we do, but that’s not who we are.

Read since last post:

·         The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1983)

·         The Fixer, Bernard Malamud (1967)

·         Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout (2009)

Currently Reading:

·         The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson (2013)

·         The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)

·         Honey in the Horn, H. L. Davis (1936)

COUNT: 26 read, 61 to go