[In the following essay, Clark analyzes how Beattie's “A Windy Day at the Reservoir” changes perceptions of narrative time, and cause and effect.]

In her book, Childhood and Cultural Despair, Leah Marcus observes that the appearance of childhood as an important literary subject “seems always to be a barometer for important cultural change” （242）. Marcus posits a relation between social and psychic disorientation and a literary concern with childhood, arguing finally that in certain historical periods—the fourteenth, the seventeenth, the early nineteenth centuries—the experience of cultural breakdown leads to an “idealization of the undifferentiated wholeness of the child's perceptions” （242）.

Perhaps not surprisingly, life at the end of the twentieth century generates its own array of compelling and troubled representations of childhood. From the postwar stories of John Cheever and John Updike to more recent work by Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Beattie, Mary Robison, Jayne Anne Phillips, Lorrie Moore, and many others, fictions of childhood offer a sometimes poignant index of cultural disarray: the disintegration of the bourgeois family, the erosion of communities and institutions, and the disappearance of childhood into consumerism, precocious sexuality, and grown-up anxiety. Unconstrained by adult motives and preconceptions, children in stories—even postmodern stories—can be made to function as truth-tellers, pronouncing unawares the dark oracles of daily life. “This is us, excellent,” one of Mark Richard's young narrators explains in the aftermath of a harrowing scene of domestic violence,

a family night out. Not even have we not had to go to Family Fish House to eat but we've come to Psycho Za to snag! Our mom has her hair fixed and has on the too-big red plastic parka with our dad's name on the front. Our dad has said for us to have anything we can think of we want on the list of things to eat. What I'd usually do is split the Maniac Train wreck with my brother but he is still acting funny about eating and stuff, like he's not all the way woken up and his eyes are like old fishtank water. When he cries it's more like a hiss, like how a soft knife sounds when you split a green apple open.

（68）

Under postmodernism, both as literary aesthetic and as cultural logic, however, the idea of childhood is itself transformed: its moment of conception in Enlightenment reason historicized, its wholeness of perception dismantled with the decentering of the individual subject and the denaturalization of realist representation, its domain—the private sphere—colonized by commodity capitalism. If representations of childhood provide a barometer for obvious kinds of cultural fragmentation and late century social disarray, they also register these profounder shifts in the experience of self and world.

In modernist stories of children—James Joyce's in Dubliners, Katherine Anne Porter's in Pale Horse, Pale Rider and The Leaning Tower, Ernest Hemingway's in “My Old Man”—childhood is a site of epistemological uncertainty, signifying in its bewilderments, its potent forms of unknowing, the limits of human and of narrative knowledge. At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, it functions as a place where meaning is produced and articulated; the child's intuitive grasp takes on the weight and the proportions of epiphany; or later, a memory of childhood illuminates the story's present moment. In Porter's “The Grave,” for instance, nine-year-old Miranda and her twelve-year-old brother Paul set out to hunt rabbits and doves. They pause to explore a small cemetery from which the bodies, including their grandfather's, have recently been removed because the land is to be sold. The children scramble in and out of the empty graves, find some treasures （she a screw head in the shape of a silver dove, he a gold ring）, then retrieve their twenty-two Winchester rifles and move on. Miranda, a poor shot and with “no proper sense of hunting at all” （364）, ponders their treasures and her own vague wishes. Paul shoots a rabbit. Skinning it together, they find in the rabbit's belly “a bundle of tiny rabbits, each wrapped in a thin scarlet veil” （366）. “Oh, I want to see,” Miranda says, despite the blood. “She wanted most deeply to see and to know,” Porter writes.

Having seen, she felt at once as if she had known all along. The very memory of her former ignorance faded, she had always known just this. No one had ever told her anything outright. … Her brother had spoken as if he had known about everything all along. He may have seen all this before. He had never said a word to her, but she knew now a part at least of what he knew. She understood a little of the secret, formless intuitions in her own mind and body, which had been clearing up, taking form, so gradually and so steadily she had not realized that she was learning what she had to know.

（366–7）

This moment—in which the veil is drawn away from birth and death, their secret and inextricable links in adult sexuality—resurfaces twenty years later as memory and becomes the story's second epiphany. In the market street of “a strange city of a strange country,” approached by an Indian vendor with a tray of dyed sugar sweets in the shapes of small animals （including rabbits）, Miranda feels the scene leap “from its burial place before her mind's eye”:

It was a very hot day and the smell in the market, with its piles of raw flesh and wilting flowers, was like the mingled sweetness and corruption she had smelled that other day in the empty cemetery at home: the day she had remembered always until now vaguely as the time she and her brother had found treasure in the opened graves.

（367）

Like similar moments in many early twentieth-century stories, these epiphanies are predicated upon an understanding of psychic life as prior, continuous over time, shrouded in mystery, submerged beneath ordinary adult consciousness, and glimpsed only as image, symbol, memory, dream.

In contemporary stories, even those with strong ties to their realist and modernist predecessors, the relation of narrative to sources of meaning—truth, memory, knowledge, selfhood—is radically disrupted and with it the role of children and childhood. Fredric Jameson construes these changes, persuasively, as a “repudiation of depth models”—inner and outer, authentic and unauthentic, latent and manifest, depth and surface, essence and appearance, past and present—in a period of accelerating production and consumption （12）. I want to argue here that depth is precisely the dimension in which modernist representations of childhood function; in them, childhood figures the past to the narrative present, inner to external reality （vividly in the first three stories of Dubliners）, authentic and whole to the unauthentic, fragmented world of adult perceptions. More than merely barometric, representations of childhood create the sense of depth in many modernist short stories, establishing its terms and inhabiting its ratios.

In the repudiation of depth, the anxieties and introspections which are the subject of modernist fictions of childhood give way to something different: to a loss of temporal moorings, which I will take up more fully later in my discussion, and to an array of attention deficits evidenced in non sequitur, in extreme brevity, in very fragile and temporary sorts of coherence. Symptoms give way to signs as the presumption of a （usually submerged） connection between present and past, effect and cause, is replaced by a new conception of experience as arbitrary and transient; “I can believe things that I discover in particular moments of fiction,” Ann Beattie commented in a 1990 interview, “and not think that they apply in any larger sense, or that they sum things up” （Centola, 416）. These features, I would suggest, are observable in a great many American stories published between the early 1970s and the present, both in mass circulation magazines such as The New Yorker and Harper's and in little magazines and literary journals. Rather than illustrate by drawing on a wide range of stories, however, I want to look closely at how, in one recent story of more or less neo-realist proportions, Beattie gives voice to these repudiations and transformations.

Beattie makes a good study because her stories are full of children, both true children at the margins of their parents' disordered lives and child-like young people who are adrift or in flight from adult life. The child figures, like fictional children from Henry James's Maisie on, tend to be prematurely burdened （in stories like “Cinderella Waltz” and “You Know What”） with life's worries and dark possibilities. Having lost their innocence, Jane Bowers Hill argues, they function in some stories as redeemers and healing agents “in the tortured, fragmented world adults have made” （198）; elsewhere they are more simply disheartened and disoriented. For Beattie's young adults, living in post-industrial, post-Vietnam, post-sexual-revolution America, the threshold between childhood and adulthood is very poorly marked. Things that once signified adulthood—marriage, children, jobs, houses—are commonly postponed or rejected. Other things persist, sometimes curiously, from childhood: school, toys （octascopes, marionettes, crayons, comic books）, impulses, pastimes. Childishness, variously construed, is everywhere among the young adults in these stories. It turns up in particularly interesting forms in young married women （in “Shifting” and “A Reasonable Man,” for instance） where it represents a real but unsatisfactory alternative to a constricted and coldly rational （and male） form of adulthood; it also appears in young, unmarried men （in “A Vintage Thunderbird,” “Colorado,” and many other stories） for whom it seems to represent nothing more than shipwreck of one kind or another.

Still, my interest here is less in the sociology of childishness than in the narrative dynamics of repudiation. In “A Windy Day at the Reservoir,” Beattie withdraws—in three or four decisive moves—the elements of narrative depth perception. First, she strips the past of explanatory power. Memory sheds no light on the present moment; the past and childhood itself are without epiphanic force. Second, she renders the past as non-narratable, refusing the therapist's work and the storyteller's of establishing a coherent narrative, of articulating a narrative logic between the symptomatic （neurotic, hysterical） present and the traumas or repressions of the past. Third, she figures metaphorically the flattening out of past and future: the future into a drawing, the past into a still photograph. Finally, she renders the present tense as inescapable and overwhelming and represents a range of responses from lassitude to joy.

The plot of Beattie's story is slight. Fran and Chap, a childless married couple in their thirties, house-sit for several weeks in Vermont for their friends, Pia and Lou Brunetti. In the course of their stay, they realize what they had intuited earlier, that the Brunettis' marriage has “caved in” （206）. During the vacation, Fran draws pictures and tries on Pia's clothes. Chap gardens, fights mosquitoes, thinks a little about the Brunetti marriage and somewhat less about his own. He becomes acquainted with a neighbor, Mrs. Brikel, and her grown retarded son Royce. At the end of the summer Royce drowns in the town reservoir, liberating his mother to live like an adult for the first time since his birth twenty-six years before. Fran “runs off” with a lover, who in turn leaves his wife and small son （233）. Chap moves to Boston and becomes a surrogate parent to the Brunettis' son Anthony, who suffers from attention-deficit disorder. Anthony's real parents, meanwhile, go their separate ways—Lou to California to practice architecture, Pia to Italy following her rise to fame as a feminist author.

Like many contemporary stories, this one situates a vivid, even poignant, memory of childhood in a moment where we might expect an epiphany, a clarifying insight into a character or a relationship. It is Chap's memory, the only one he has in the story, though he claims total recall from the age of five. Noticing that radishes have begun to sprout in the Brunettis' garden, he recalls having grown vegetables in a big cedar tub on his mother's porch. “He suddenly remembered his heartache—heartache!—” Beattie writes,

when, on one of his infrequent visits, his father had pulled up radish after radish, to see if they had formed yet. Only swollen white worms dangled below the leaves. After his father pulled four or five, Chap reached out and put his hand on his father's wrist. His father stopped. His father had been perplexed, as if he had been guaranteed a prize simply for reaching out and pulling, and had gotten nothing.

（191）

The relation of this recollection to the events of the story is tentative at best, a metaphorical suggestion about uprootedness—like everyone else in this story, Chap is deracinated—but it is never elaborated into insight and it never, for all the seriousness with which it is offered and received, contributes to any kind of wholeness of character or coherent relation of present to past.

Fran's single memory of childhood has even less substance and even more fragile moorings. Wondering if there will be a farmers' market, firehouse dinners, or special celebrations in the Vermont town they are visiting, she recalls:

In the town her grandmother had lived in, they had an annual celebration to commemorate the day the library opened. She had gotten her first kiss in a rowboat on the lake in that town on the seventeenth anniversary of the opening of the library.

（186）

I will say more shortly about the flatness and unreality of Fran's recollection. At this point, however, I want to point out the disconnectedness of both of these childhood memories, neither of which is ever spoken aloud and neither of which is tied to any living person, Fran and Chap being both parentless and childless. The memories make their way into the story as flotsam, as photos fallen out of a lost album. They stand for little except the story's refusal to be case history, to narrate the symptomatic present and its imagery into a coherent relation to the unconscious, the past, the inner, the deep. The connection Freud saw between his case histories of hysterics and fin de siècle short stories is almost completely absent in stories like this one a century later, its very categories of cause and effect, event and symptom, unconscious and conscious, repudiated.

For the Brunettis, even the illusion of organic unity between past and present, mediated by memory and distorted or obscured by symptoms, is gone. In the face of marital breakdown, living outside of their native Italian culture, Lou and Pia begin collecting: duck decoys, hand-tinted photographs, glass insulators, silver candlesticks, salt and pepper shakers from the fifties, Scottie dogs, high heels from the forties, replicas of the Eiffel Tower. “It looks like one of those antique shops,” Fran notes, “that's set up to look like somebody's house when actually everything's for sale” （185）. As objects, the past can be accumulated, dismantled, discarded in ways that childhood and memory, however remote from the present, never can be. Unlike recollection, collection holds out no promise of insight or narrative cure. It is also worth remarking—as Fran's comment hints—that in these collections the past takes on the perfected commodity form, stripped of use value, reduced to pure exchange value.

The first and final point of connection between the Brunettis and Fran and Chap is the story's only real child, Anthony Brunetti. As the story disables memory and drains away the illuminating power of recollected scenes, it turns its gaze on childhood and childishness in the present tense, elaborately linking Fran with Anthony. At first, Fran compensates for her involuntary childlessness with her work as a teacher and with a generalized “feeling,” even a special “intuition,” about children; it is she who recognizes Anthony Brunetti's attention deficits and steers his parents to a doctor who can provide appropriate medication. At the same time, however, her childlessness metamorphoses into a kind of childishness. She gets sick with mononucleosis, “a young person's kissing disease,” Beattie calls it, though the kisses she receives from Chap are an unlikely source, “little” and childlike, fond kisses “smack in the center of her forehead” （188）. She quits her job and stays home, sometimes drawing pictures, sometimes thinking what she would like to be. “Like a teenager,” Beattie writes, she sketches “her face with and without bangs, to see if she should let the wisps continue to grow or have them trimmed,” deciding finally “to let the hair grow; soon she would have it all one length—the stark but simple way she liked to see herself” （198）. In Vermont she considers Anthony's toys and leafs through his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics instead of reading War and Peace or the book by Richard Rorty she has brought with her. Even more tellingly, she plays dress up, “as excited as a child” putting on Pia's clothes, her shoes and earrings, her perfume; she imagines what Pia might say, how she might act. She remains ignorant of Pia Brunetti's mastectomy and the grown up sense of mortality it might confer; in her childlessness she is immune, in another way, from any real sense of time's passage and intimations of mortality. As others mature at the end of the story—Chap into surrogate fatherhood, Pia into authorship, Mrs. Brikel into liberated and newly realized adulthood—Fran is said only to have “run off,” a child's kind of departure, although she goes with a lover.

Throughout the story Fran is closely identified with Anthony, first by her intuitions about him and then by some shared habits and ways of being. They both spend a lot of time drawing. They are the ones who ask the story's ontological questions, and suggest in their wonderments and preoccupations the radical instability of selves and worlds. “What if the ship doesn't ever leave port,” Anthony says as he is about to set out on a cruise with his unhappy parents, “but the people on it all disappear?” （183）. Later Fran takes up Anthony's question. “What if they never came back?” she wonders:

She wrote the question in her notebook. It was a notebook covered with lavender cloth Chap had given her for Valentine's Day; since then, she had been keeping some notes, making a few sketches of things she had seen or done during the day. …

She thought for a moment about people who had disappeared: Judge Crater; Amelia Earhart; Mrs. Ramsay. Though it was cheating to count Mrs. Ramsay among the missing: she had died—it was just that the reader found out about her death abruptly, and so reacted with great shock.

（198）

Linked linguistically, as the last two letters of her name become the first syllable of his, Fran and Anthony are further and finally linked in Beattie's plot by the fact that Anthony replaces Fran in Chap's life, taking the child's place once the childish wife has run off.

In a larger sense, however, and more important to my argument, Fran and Anthony are linked as fitful occupants of the present tense, people for whom past and future are strikingly one-dimensional and unreal. Anthony, whose fitfulness is diagnosed and medicated, draws the future as a stack of cubes and pyramids, labelling it prominently “The Future” （to which Fran adds, in a teacherly way, a date, May 5, 1985）. Fran shares with Anthony the traits of distractibility, restlessness, and impulsiveness which are the diagnostic hallmarks of attention deficit disorder; and her sense of the past is as flattened as his of the future. Her one memory—the kiss in the boat—is no more vivid than a photograph shot from far away, a romantic cliché, unrelated to the entanglements and passions of adult life.

Fran is also associated in detailed ways with the story's other adult “child,” Mrs. Brikel's grown retarded son Royce. Like Fran, he stays home all day, draws pictures, dresses up （he puts on his grandfather's top hat for his walk to the reservoir）, moves restlessly, acts on his impulses. Like Fran and Anthony, he occupies the present tense almost exclusively, unable to make much meaning out of the past or to gain much sense of the future. Royce's thoughts on the last afternoon of his life articulate vividly his childish experience of the present, as he moves from restive commentary on passing television images into something like jouissance:

“Get on home, Loretta,” he squealed. There were many things the Beatles ordered people to do that he liked to hear. “Don't leave me standing here” was another, though he could never get the cadence of that one right, so he just shouted it … “Get on home, Loretta,” he said again, to a cat crossing his path. The cat could have run away from a Dr. Seuss book. Come to think of it, he could be the man in The Cat in the Hat because he had put on a top hat for his stroll. A walk was a stroll if you went slower than you normally walk. He slowed down even more, putting the heel of one red-laced high-topper against the toe of his other shoe, and alternating feet so he moved forward one footstep at a time.

John, his second-favorite Beatle, was dead. Royce stopped to practice the Heimlich maneuver on an imaginary victim of choking. Then he metamorphosed into Batman and the bad guy fell to the ground, knocked unconscious.

（226–7）

Royce and his moment disappear, leaving barely a trace—“The hat was found floating,” Beattie writes, “like a hat in one of the comics Royce loved so much. The shoes were found first, then the hat” （231）.

Finally, the story itself disappears with hardly a trace. The families disintegrated, the collections dispersed, the rambling, illogical Brunetti house forsaken, only Mrs. Brikel remains to give voice to some lingering questions—“Who knows whether he made a sound?” she thinks, considering Royce's drowning—and to truisms which highlight the story's refusal to yield a deeper or more authentic kind of meaning （236）. “You had to give up something to gain something. … Some individuality for the common good,” she thinks （234）. And later, “People are quick to forgive” （236）.

In the end, Beattie's representations of childhood are elaborately tied to her sense of time, and time's undoing. I want to conclude by suggesting the logic of this undoing. First, as I have already argued in somewhat different terms, Beattie collapses generational time, making children of adults （Fran and Royce） and giving children a kind of precocious gravity and a premature ontological intensity. Second, she flattens historical time, appropriating its imagery—of photographs, of memories—while repudiating its depths. Meanwhile, she suspends rational time—the time of labor, of production and consumption; in other words, nobody works in this story. This suspension raises an array of utopian and childish possibilities even as it obscures the story's enmeshment in the commodity culture of late capitalism. Finally, Beattie radically deforms narrative and generic time by suspending cause and effect, depth itself, and thwarting the epiphany toward which the short story in its twentieth-century forms almost inevitably makes its way.

Works Cited

Beattie, Ann. What Was Mine. New York: Random House, 1991.

Centola, Steven R. “An Interview with Ann Beattie.” Contemporary Literature 31.4 （1990）: 405–22.

Hill, Jane Bowers. “Ann Beattie's Children as Redeemers.” Critique 27 （Summer 1986）: 197–212.

Jameson, Fredric. The Postmodern Condition. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Marcus, Leah. Childhood and Cultural Despair. Pittsburgh: U Pittsburg P, 1978.

Porter, Katherine Anne. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

Richard, Mark. The Ice at the Bottom of the World. New York: Knopf, 1989.