A Run on Hose
By Rona Altrows
Thistledown, 171 pages, $18.95
In the title story of A Run on Hose, Rona Altrows paints death with feather-light strokes. She tickles and gratifies with quirks of the everyday, inserts an intimation of disaster, then gives us sudden loss (a husband's death) straight up while dropping, quite literally, its tiny, sweet antidote. To learn more you'll have to read the tale, concerning a few weeks in the life of a lingerie retailer, Irene, and a skittish customer with a mysterious addiction.
Altrows steers clear of redemptive epiphany. There's no cure for life, but there is balm, sometimes, in the smallest of pleasures.
In Turkey Baster, Baby Caitlin is a "baster child." Our narrator is "Aunt Liz." But really, Liz is Caitlin's mother. By arrangement -- an increasingly fragile one -- Caitlin's real Aunt Margie is her purported mom. But Margie shirks the work, leaving Liz on poo patrol: At six each morning, it hits the fan. The domestic quagmire here is sometimes emetic, sometimes ghastly-hilarious. We leave Liz at the breaking point, up to her elbows.
Four Shirt Rant is about insomnia, prickly relations in a retirement home and election fever at a campaign headquarters, touching wryly on each but falling short on narrative focus. The next story is straight off the evening news: a squalid house full of cats, their misfit guardian and the health inspectors who come to normalize them.
In Upsell, we return to the panty shop. Irene needs to fire an inept trainee, and in the course of girding herself for the moment recalls her own trainee days as a new housewife. Again, the focus is split. The flashback to the young marrieds feels like the real story, yet gets short shrift.
Altrows imparts a lot of inside information on the ups and downs of retail sales and management. By the fourth story on this theme, I felt attention flagging, even when challenged by the ethical dilemmas of shoplifting and employee performance reports. Amanda's Weekend offers a welcome change: a slice of student protest and free-love angst in 1960s Montreal.
Next up, we hear from a mother whose preschool daughter is diagnosed with a rare and disfiguring condition. Robin will almost certainly die in her teens. Altrows reprises her delicate touch with mortality, but this time it seems not quite up to the gravity of the situation. The child's laughter closes the story on an upbeat note, but it feels as if Altrows is avoiding the longer narrative arc and probing character work that this wrenching scenario demands.
The last entry completes the arc, returning us to the bereaved Irene of the first story. This time, Altrows won't let us off the hook. With stealthy humour and bursts of guerrilla pathos, we're led through Irene's stages of grief. The process takes two decades and 70 pages, and feels authentic at every step.
Jim Bartley's first novel, Drina Bridge, has just been published.