A few years ago, Julia Slavin developed a huge crush on her teen-age lawn boy. When he arrived, tan and buff, to cut her grass, she would wriggle into a miniskirt, blast Jane's Addiction on the stereo and freshen her glossy pink lipstick. She counted the days between cuttings.
This unrequited experience morphed into the first story in her new collection, "The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club.'' Except, in the book, the woman swallows the lawn boy. Whole. They have a few weeks of constant sex, romantic dinners, fights and making-up. And then one day she wakes up on a bloody slipcover and poof, he's gone.
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| Associated Press Julia Slavin has turned personal experiences into stories in her new collection. |
One story, "Covered,'' explores the plight of a middle-aged man plagued by a childhood security blanket that refuses to stay in the attic, ruining a love affair and forcing its owner into a botched sea burial. "Blighted'' tells of a divorced woman who has an affair with her endangered oak tree and eventually gives birth to a crop of acorns. Without dipping wholly into science fiction or the surreal, Slavin brings these inanimate objects to life, generating sympathy for the needy blanket and admiration for the oak tree's machismo bluster.
"It's a lot to ask of someone to suspend their belief in that way,'' Slavin says.
"I do challenge people with some of the subject matter, but I do it in a non-threatening way.''
Her characters are humorously drawn, foible-filled regular people struggling with the age-old issues of love, death, jealousy and loneliness. It's just that some of the objects of these emotions happen to be unusual or taboo. The lawn boy story, "Swallowed Whole,'' essentially delivers a tale of illicit lust by way of ingestion.
"For me, the best way to write about passion and its enormity is through that metaphor,'' says Slavin.
Despite the story's grotesque theme, Slavin has fun with her subjects. Light moments crop up on nearly every page, such as this scene at a French restaurant: "I felt his hands slide down the back of my ribs as he fell asleep. I ordered a plum tart so he would have a treat waiting for him when he woke up. I'd forgotten how much teen-agers need to sleep.''
When she reads this before an audience, Slavin says, hardly anyone chuckles. "It's funny,'' says Slavin. "But it's not really funny.''
The youngest child and only daughter among five children, Slavin, 40, describes herself as "a complete washout at school. I had one of those diseases with initials that when I was growing up just meant screwing up'' that would now be called attention deficit disorder or something similar. She credits her father, a psychologist, with helping her "find a road to the unconscious that one needs to find when one is writing,'' and her mother, a Southerner, for showing her the "gift of idiom'' through stories she created especially for her daughter starring a character called Little Miss Nothing.
The stories in "Woman'' feature many sexual scenes, so Slavin says she didn't sleep well the night she gave it to her parents to read.
"After my mother read 'Swallowed Whole' she said, 'I guess I'm not going to send this to your Uncle Sonny,'" says Slavin with a shrug.
"Many writers are paralyzed by the thought of their parents in the room, looking over their shoulder. You have to get through that or you'll get nowhere.''
Slavin, who with her long, dark-blond hair and black tank top looks more a California beach girl than a Washington mother of two, planned to be a playwright when she moved to New York after graduating with an art history degree.
"In three days I saw what it was like to be poor,'' she says. "I didn't write a word for 10 years.''
She got a job at ABC, eventually working her way up to producing "PrimeTime Live'' with Sam Donaldson. By 1992, Slavin felt burned out by the long hours and was eager to try writing again. She persuaded her husband, a lawyer, to relocate to suburban Chevy Chase, Md., near her childhood home in Bethesda, Md.
Here she retreats to her study to write in the mornings, a process she describes as lonely and tedious. In the afternoons, she ferries her children to the local park or playground.
Not long after the move, she published her first story. "Rare Is a Cold Red Center'' aches with loneliness and longing, themes that thread through most of Slavin's works.
Narrator Corky voluntarily lives in a halfway house, works at a downscale chain restaurant and fantasizes about a slightly cross-eyed girl who eats there twice a week: "Thursday she comes in. I feel clumsy and crazy, looking at her hair, watching her laugh at something her friend said, imagining she's laughing at something that I said.''
The day his luck seems to turn - he gets a promotion and discovers the girl's name - Corky can't handle the possibility of success. He busts out of town, leaving behind his job and any possibilities with the girl.
"He's a very nice guy who means well but who has all of the failings that we all have,'' says Slavin, who says Corky is the character most like her.
"We're all flawed. There's only so much you can do about that but try to do better.''
A New York Times review of "Woman'' described Slavin as "alive to the beauty of imperfections.''
Indeed, she seems to sketch people who, through human error and insecurity, sabotage their own shot at happiness. But as told in Slavin's sensitive, natural prose, their choices make them human, not simply pathetic or contemptible.
"I don't despise those characters at all,'' says Slavin, referring to two narcissists having an affair (while one grossly disintegrates, body part by body part) in her story "He Came Apart.''
Readers and critics apparently don't despise her characters, either. "Woman'' is in its second printing. "Red Cold Center'' won GQ magazine's Frederick Exley Fiction Competition; another story snagged a Pushcart Prize.
The Washington Post described her as "a major discovery'' whose "writing gets into your bloodstream like a fever.''
Although she spent a decade in Manhattan, none of her stories take place there. Perhaps they wouldn't seem as unusual in a place as out-there as New York can be.
Instead, leafy, quiet suburbia calls to her characters.
"It's a place I'm very familiar with,'' she says.
It's a place where the grass always grows and teenage boys usually mow it. It's a place of the possible.
09-21-99
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