“Emergency” by Dennis Johnson
This short story was extremely interesting to me. As a nursing major, I found it startling that Georgie and the narrator, who were the orderly and clerk of the hospital, were allowed to work there when they were both clearly under the influence of heavy substances. Didn’t the pharmacists within the hospital notice that drugs had gone missing? Granted, the setting of the story is in 1973 and many things have changed since then, but it was clear that even the nurse knew Georgie was either mentally disturbed or on some kind of drugs by her statement, “I hope you didn’t do that to him,” whenever Terrence Weber came in with a hunting knife in his eye. The doctor also said, “That person is not right, not at all, not one bit,” in regards to Georgie singing before prepping Terrence for surgery (or what would have been surgery had Georgie not taken it upon himself to pull out the knife). However, I almost found it even more disturbing that the doctor seemed so nonchalant about the situation. When he first peeked into Terrence’s room, he asked, “What seems to be the trouble?” after seeing the guy lying there with a knife sticking out of his face. A few moments later, Georgie shows up with the knife in his hand, and everyone, including nurses and physicians, just stands there in pure shock. The first person to speak up was an ICU nurse who only announced that Georgie’s shoelace was untied. This led me to believe that the entire staff was on drugs, considering that any nurse or physician in their right mind would immediately go see about the patient if an orderly were to pull out an impaled item. Their driving trip after work proved to be just as entertaining. When the narrator said, “It was one of the moments you stay in, to hell with all the troubles of before and after. The sky is blue, and the dead are coming back,” at the beginning of the escapade, I received a strong sense of gratitude for the simple things in life that I often take for granted every day. Soon after, they headed to the fair and the narrator seemed to have an epiphany when he realized exactly how much acid he has taken after seeing a famous guru being interviewed about his drug use. Later, whenever Georgie ran over the rabbits, it was obvious that they were not sober after he reversed the truck to “camp in the wilderness” and “breakfast on its haunches.” This campout was almost disastrous until they “got their eyes back,” or sobered up, since it had started snowing and they couldn’t find the truck. On their way back the next morning, they picked up one of the narrator’s old roommates who was AWOL, and told him they could get him to Canada. From there, the story ended abruptly as Hardee asked what Georgie does and he answered, “I save lives.” This was a very odd response for an orderly, especially one of Georgie’s caliber.
“Home” by Jayne Anne Phillips
Right from the beginning, I got a distinct sense of melancholy from this short story. It was written so that conversations flowed without quotation marks, although indentations were used whenever the speaker switched so that it was still easy to differentiate the speaker from the listener. At twenty-three years old, the narrator is living at home with her mother. Her mother is very old-fashioned, with nearly out-dated views about sex, which posed a conflict between her and her daughter when an old lover comes to stay with her. The barriers of their relationship became apparent from the very beginning whenever the mother explained how much time, effort, and love she put into caring for her mother whenever she was sick near the end of her life. She said that guilty people should feel guilty in reference to people who neglect their family when they need them the most. The narrator goes on to say, “My mother has often told me that I will be sorry when she is gone,” inferring that her mother doesn’t feel like her daughter is doing everything she can to take care of her mother, who we later find out has had breast cancer, which reinforces her obsession with determining whether news anchors and television figures have cancer or not. I found the part where the narrator dreamed about her father standing over her with an erection to be very disturbing, maybe hinting at some sort of sexual abuse in the past. The narrator and her mother openly talk about sex, though they have varying opinions about it. Daniel, one of the narrator’s ex-lovers, comes to town to visit the narrator, and her mother is very impressed by him, stating to her daughter, “You’ve known some nice people, haven’t you?” However, her feelings changed abruptly the next morning when she hears her daughter and Daniel having sex upstairs. The story ends in the mother/daughter confrontation after Daniel heads back home and the mother returns from church, feeling completely disrespected and betrayed in her own house. I feel that she has every right to feel this way. Regardless of how her daughter feels about sex, she should respect her mother’s opinions when living under her mother’s roof.
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