Flash Focus: Like a Strip Tease on Fast Forward, Davis’s “Good Women” Excites

Good Women
Lisa Selin Davis

I am not now nor will I ever be a good woman. I am not instantly charmed by children, nor polite when asking if anyone is using this chair. I do not smile regularly, or without deciding on it first.

I hate blondes, and happy women, and husbands parading their miniature versions like expensive toys with remote controls.

But an old man with a cat on a leash, a sharp-tongued, balding, angry old man with his drooling, furious feline refusing to follow, that will make me shine,. An old man, formerly a sailor, in faded patriotic stripes, soaked to the collarbone in mid-August humidity, unyielding in his commands to the cat, and the dogged cat, unamused by puns, hissing, his parched tongue loose and waving like a flag: this pair, they will make me happy.

The man hates children, too. He loves it when the youngsters are fascinated by his little calico Mickey, when they crawl up to him, chubby paws reaching out to pet and the thing slaps its fangs on punk flesh. The man shrugs his shoulders deliciously as the contented cat collapses on macadam for his afternoon nap.

What is wrong with her, the other women wonder, that she is amused by the misfortunes of others and not touched by tiny successes? Surely it is jealousy that twists her matronly callings into curses?

Girls, I can't broil a thing. I'll never be a good wife.

I am not a good woman, not generous save for the one big decision I've yet to make: to make, not to make, another me. 

"Good Women" appears here courtesy of the author.

Fifty-one stories appear in the collection Women Behaving Badly: Feisty Flash Fiction. I read them all in a row, without pause, over the course of an afternoon. Some whipped past me in a smear of slick leather and bare legs and perfume, like a strip tease on fast-forward. More than several were fearless and hungry in the best way, and some were steeped in a faint almost-sadness. A few were hilarious. I waited to see which would linger the longest.

Four of those fifty-one flashes were written by Lisa Selin Davis. Of the four, of the fifty-one, of the myriad fragments of sound-bites and stories and songs I'd absorbed over the course of my sixteen waking hours, I found one line stuck to the roof of my mouth the next morning: "I am not now nor will I ever be a good woman."

The absence of a weighty, cryptic title allows the story's first line to jolt even the most heavy-lidded reader to attention. The narrative voice is too candid to ignore; it's as "sharp-tongued" and devilishly triumphant as the old sailor himself.

The key here is balance and discretion; like any successful flash, "Good Women" tells us everything we need to know, and nothing more. A less capable writer could have turned a similar premise into a tired, post-feminist dismissal of gender archetypes and the [non]miracle of childbirth--which, in all fairness, would be very nearly as irritating as hearing some squeaky-clean (blonde, if you like) Suzy prattle on about baby bumps. But how Selin Davis chose to construct the story makes it infinitely more engaging.

Instead of unleashing a long litany of "I am not/I hate"-type statements (we get just enough of those), the narrator's blithely contemptuous temperament is mostly filtered through her impressions of the old sailor and his surly cat. Her generous descriptions of this scrappy pair are the meat of the piece, and serve as our guide to what she values: obstinate individualism, spitfire, tenacity. Mickey and the sailor are bound together in their dismissal of the outside world's expectations and needless intrusions. When she states that the pair "will make me happy," the reasons for her admiration are set precisely against the sort of "happy women" she hates--the cloyingly proper ones who move through this world cooing and dead-eyed, too-wide smiles affixed.

Selin Davis' no-good woman is too cheeky to be offensive, and too self-aware to be easily dismissed as subversive for the sake of it. Catch the delight in her voice as she plainly declares, "Girls, I can't boil a thing. I'll never be a good wife." Self-assured, she sashays across the page without even a hint of desire for the reader's approval.

The cat, too, is "contented," and the old man "shrugs deliciously." Bitter is better when it's steeped in such unadulterated pleasure.

About the Author

Alina Ladyzhensky lives in South Philadelphia, by way of Moscow. Her preoccupations include reading, writing, and drinking middle shelf whiskey--sometimes, all at the same time. She'll earn an MA in Publishing from Rosemont College in 2011, if she can manage to sit still long enough.

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