Never Have I Ever and Sustaining Wonder
"Good Girls," the first story in Isabel Yap's (amazing) collection, Never Have I Ever, is about a manananggal named Kaye who breaks off the top portion of her body to fly around at night and eat human fetuses. It's also about Kaye's roommate, a troubled human teenager named Sara, who once dropped a baby and can't stop thinking about death. In the story, we get inside of both perspectives.
I'm interested in how Yap handles belief and mystery in a way that prolongs our sense of wonder throughout the story.
We begin with the manananggal's perspective, but it's also in the second person–a "you" voice: "You've denied the hunger for so long that when you transform tonight, it hurts more than usual." Notice the lack of equivocation. You are not feeling hungry or thinking you are hurt; you have denied the hunger and it hurts. The assured tone of the narrator quickly convinces us this is not a dream or a metaphor, but really happening.
The second person also creates a strange intimacy–the authority of the voice is extreme when it's talking about "you." It might even create a slightly uncomfortable relationship to the story. Some readers complain about the forced intimacy of the second person, but I think that's a huge part of its appeal. It's unwelcome but undeniable. Maybe it's akin to knowing what you don't want to know. Consider the brain space that opens–the contradiction of resisting truth or knowledge. That's going to be important in just a moment.
It also matters that the story opens with Kaye. The first character we meet doesn't have to be the most important one, but it happens frequently enough that the reader is primed for it. We're ready to meet our main character, eager to be sympathetic to her. Our default is to believe her experiences. And so we do!
But, my, are those experiences strange. While I love knowing they are real and actual, I also want to be reminded of the strangeness. I want to feel the horror of this girl/monster. I don't want it to be oh-no-big-deal that she is flying around with her guts hanging loose; I want to thrill at how terrifying that is.
And losing this sense is a real risk! Wonder, horror, shock–the sensations are necessarily fleeting. We can creep up to the edge of the unbelievable. But as soon as the impossible is confirmed, well, it's not impossible anymore, is it? And so the sensation abates.
But Yap keeps the horror fresh through the perspective of Sara, the human roommate.
When Kaye tells Sara, plainly, what she is, Sara both believes and doesn't. She plays it cool in the way of a teenager, but also sits inside the possibility. That's the space I love to inhabit in a story like this one.
Internally, Sara's "gut churns, and a voice in her head goes no, no, no." The reader doesn't know if Sara is responding to fear of Kaye, annoyance at her lies, or the uncanny coincidence of rooming with someone else who is hung up on babies–all possibilities exist, paradoxically, in the same space. And yet Sara is deliberately chill. "Try me," she says when Kaye challenges her to pronounce the word for what she is.
Later, when Kaye says, "You don't believe me, do you?" Sara says, "You're so weird." Is Kaye weird because she's a monster or because she pretends to be one? Sara is deliberately ambiguous.
This comes about very naturally, I think, from the teenage awareness that believing the wrong thing, or refusing to believe the right thing, could make her seem uncool. Sara doesn't want to commit to believing–or to not believing–Kaye. So she is guarded in her response.
The amazing thing is when we learn that Sara is holding the space for both belief and disbelief in her own head as well as out loud!
When [Kaye] talks about her monster self, Sara just holds the thought apart from her brain. It's too weird. It's almost funny, how earnest Kaye is about it.
First, notice how similar this is to the contradictory space we might experience at the second person voice of Kaye and its coercive intimacy–the sense of both rejecting and being unable to reject what is told.
Then look at the paragraph immediately following.
Sara recounts her sister's wedding in Vegas, which they couldn't really afford, but it was cool to act touristy and kitschy, posing next to the unsexy French maids in the Paris Hotel casino. It was stupid and that's what made it fun.
It's a seeming non sequitur, but of course in a story, there is no such thing, only hidden connection, perhaps one that even Sara doesn't quite understand. The narrator doesn't explain how one thought is linked to the other, but invites the reader (through sequencing and proximity) to consider why Sara's mind jumps to the memory at this precise moment.
And so I draw a parallel between the memory and the now. Kitsch and performance–they sit on the edge of real and fake, both at once, made possible through sheer force of will. I perceive that Sara is doing something akin with Kaye's stories, that she is not only holding them between belief and disbelief, but is doing it purposefully and even enjoying the strange space that is like pretending.
I think Sara's will holds open the space for the reader as well–to sit between belief and impossibility, in that vanishing sensation of wonder–for longer than is otherwise possible.