Read a looooong-ish short story, 'Annunciation' by Lauren Groff, published in The New Yorker in the February 14, 2022 issue. It plods along steadily. It seems to speak about the lives of every other young woman searching for her way in life. The story takes a lot of inspiration from the author's life, and some parts, parallel some of it.
We followed the life of a college graduate who moved to San Francisco to start a new life, with nothing much in her pockets or wallet. Readers move with her through her temp job in a consultancy firm that is digitizing children's files for the city's social workers and child services, her first rented home in a little cottage owned by an eccentric old lady who then passed away from an accident, then to her first job as an administrative assistant at Stanford, her mother's visit and her setting up her own family.
We are offered a glance to 'events' and decisions that might have shaped her life thereafter, and regrets she might have to deal with. Don't we all have these? The narrator feels a particular pang of guilty towards Anais, a troubled co-worker who prefers to keep her secrets, secret. The narrator was young, and didn't realize what her actions might have caused, even as it came from a place of concern.
This should have been the end of it. I should have let the distance sit between us. But I had not yet learned wisdom, and silence had not yet sunk into me as deeply as it later would. That week, I was sitting out in the noontime sun with the social worker, Shelley, eating cut fruit with mint, and talking about Anais, about Luce, about the Vanagon.
Just between you and me, I confided, I think she’s an excellent mother, but I’m worried about her daughter. I think it’s not impossible that she doesn’t take the girl to get her shots. The preacher she listens to doesn’t believe in vaccines.
And Shelley nodded slowly, smiling, which at the time I took to be agreement with my assertions of confidentiality, but which I came to understand did not commit her to anything like silence, or discretion, or inaction.
It's suggested that the narrator requires solo trips away, even when she has the children to mind, like the one she took all those years ago upon graduation to feel that true sense of freedom, of self. She didn't want to be her mother who couldn't even come to her college graduation because the husband and a family of younger siblings needed her supervision. I don't think she's close to her siblings either.
I do enjoy this story because it feels so normal. This is a life we can identify with as long as we live in a city. We can probably understand some of the narrator's struggles too, as a young adult, and as an older woman who has seen some things. As far as plausible urban fairy tales go, this sort of works.
In fact, there are often times when my life seems so small that the darkness in me has no outlet, and it keeps circling, faster and faster, tighter and tighter, until it seems that there is nothing but darkness, endlessly spinning. My emergence from these times is painful and very slow. I have to go far away to recover myself. My family has weathered these flights of mine before; they have learned to accept them, because in the past I have always returned, and, when I do, I am a mother who sees her children fully.
.....................
In these hills I finally feel again that deep yearning, not for anything in particular but for the wild whole-being gladness that I knew for the first time in the cottage covered in moss and ferns and the shadow of the oak tree, where my freedom overwhelmed me.
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