Alexander MacLeod writes about protagonist Amy's angst when visiting her boyfriend Matt's only relative in the city that they're living in — an elderly lady Greet Walker, with a four-month-old newborn in tow.
This is his story 'Once Removed', published in The New Yorker for the issue on February 7, 2022. It's a story from his upcoming new short story collection titled 'Animal Person' (expected release in April 2022).
Greet is an elderly lady living on her own. She is Matt's father’s mother’s oldest sister. Matt's great-grand-aunt. Matt explained that this was a visit that had to happen. She was up since six in the morning cooking for them; they couldn't possibly disappoint her. The story began with,
She did not want to visit the old lady.
Amy studied the stroller, then the bags, then her boyfriend and the baby. She checked her phone: 11:26 a.m. It was time to go. Ninety degrees, ninety-per-cent humidity, and, according to Google, more than an hour each way. Each stage had its own icon, like the Olympic events, and all the separate minutes were broken up, then totalled at the end. walk 10 min, train 36 min, bus 15 min, walk 9 min.
Nothing could be worth this much effort on a hot Sunday afternoon.
Amy and Matt have been together for 12 years, currently living in Montreal, and just had Ella. So they're tied together forever, regardless. Both had to make adjustments to understand each other's family and the place they come from, the family values instilled, etc. Matt really wanted to move back to Nova Scotia to live in a house by the cliff, but Amy, having grown up in Ontario, did not want that. It's a small community with extremely complicated relationships and it's hard for Amy to keep up.
Ironically, Greet is estranged from the family too, presumably on 'some scandal in the fifties or sixties', hence she's living on her own in this city in a seniors' building. Matt described her as 'a force of nature'. Ella was four months old and the elderly lady suggested tying her to a chair with books stacked around, and they could all eat together. I blinked. Even I would not do that! Amy was stunned. But Ella seemed comfortable, and suddenly could hold up her neck to support her head, hitting one of her first-year signposts.
Greet wanted them here, and yes she fed them lunch, but she really wanted something else, something more than a simple hello and bye. She wanted Matt to help her neighbor Reggie to remove her brass chandelier, and take it to her home. At least she had a cordless drill and a proper toolbox. Of course old folks wouldn't tell you that. They would tell you 'it's a little job' and when you get there, it's a major thing. That is exactly what older folks do.
There seemed to be some sort of acquiescence at the end of the story, on Amy's part, because she somehow had a glimpse into Ella's 'future', of how it might turn out — the stories she can tell, or not tell, or if ties bind will keep one's relationship warm and close. This story is a great narrative of a slice of family life, of relationships within a larger family. The author has captured all of that going on in a short piece.
In a separate interview with the author on 'Resentment and Empathy' in this story, the author said that,
The story is interested in the back-and-forth between resentment and empathy. It’s a question that keeps coming up in lots of our lives: How can we rise above our resentments, above our own sense of being disrespected, mistreated, or misunderstood, and connect with this “other” person? I wanted Amy to feel hard done by in the beginning and then, by the end, maybe recognize something profound in Greet, a connection that she could never have imagined before. Greet is nothing to her in the morning, just a polite in-law responsibility, “her boyfriend’s father’s mother’s oldest sister,” but the dynamic shifts as they move through the day, and perhaps, by the late afternoon, there is a kind of empathy developing in the spare room.
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