What Unmet Expectations Offer Us
The 2022 midterms, Kansas politics, and The Office of Historical Corrections
IN AUGUST 1991, I was 10 and glued to the nightly news. Thousands of people had come to town to protest a women’s health clinic that performed abortions. They were calling it the Summer of Mercy. I was mesmerized; this sort of thing did not often happen in Wichita. I suppose I knew what abortion was. We’d had a round of sex ed in the fourth grade, during which our mothers had filed into the back of the classroom to hear firsthand what exactly the nurse was telling us. I doubt very much that abortion was explicitly discussed, but the protestors used pretty graphic rhetoric. I connected the dots.
If I were writing a fictional scene to show this moment in Kansas history, I would place my narrator among the throngs of protesters chaining themselves to security fences. But in real life I only saw them on T.V. An old one at that, with a knob that moved around four or five channels and bunny ears covered in tinfoil.
One night during the protests’ apex, my mother walked over and switched off the news. Without the familiar cadence of the anchors’ voices, the house went quiet. My mother turned back to making dinner and said – to me, to herself, to no one – why can’t they leave that man alone.
That man was Dr. George Tiller, who headed the clinic. I knew he went to the other Lutheran church, the one just like ours but across town, and I was surprised by my mother’s remark. Not because I thought she supported the protestors; I was just a 10-year-old who didn’t think her mother had a point of view. My parents never talked about politics. No one did, really – it wasn’t polite.
And maybe that’s why I’ve remembered this moment for years. I heard and understood my mother’s opinion, however obliquely given. My younger self filed away this scene from my life, recognizing it as a shift in my perception of the world. A question had been answered, one I hadn’t even known to ask.
***
In advance of this week’s midterm elections, forecasters issued dire predictions for the fate of Democratic candidates. Yes, it appeared some voters were upset about the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. But inflation, gas prices, ginned-up crime concerns – all of it was supposed to add up to a windfall for Republicans. When the so-called red wave didn’t manifest, a flurry of thought pieces attempted to answer the question of the hour: Why not?
At Literary Citizen we have very little time for hot takes, and we nearly failed statistics class. But we are interested in the subjunctive, the space between, the enigmas – what’s just outside our grasp. As the writer Maud Casey says in The Art of Mystery, “…If stories are one of the ways we make sense of the world, they are also how we experience what doesn’t make sense, whatever cannot be fully understood.”
***
Danielle Evans’ collection The Office of Historical Corrections is a masterpiece of short fiction. “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain” begins as a bit of a rom-com, and I say this reverently. Rena, a photojournalist, is attending the wedding of a man she befriended when they were quarantined together for weeks abroad. The bride is skeptical of Rena, but when the groom absconds on their wedding day, the two of them embark on an ill-fated road trip to find him. This is all sort of light and juicy. But on the way to Ohio, Rena reveals details about her sister’s wedding and the family tragedy that followed. Up until this point, we felt as though we understood her, but we also suspected she was holding something back. After we learn all the facts, we can truly unravel Rena’s aloneness, her aloofness. We weren’t expecting this angle, but it’s what cracks the story open and makes it echo into the world.
Danielle Evans calls this the subterranean, the emotional plot. Here, what happened to Rena’s sister colors how Rena sees everything, even though she doesn’t like to think about it, much less confide it to anyone.
***
This August, 31 years after the Summer of Mercy, Kansans voted on a ballot referendum that would have removed the right to abortion from the state Constitution. Many abortion-related battles have been fought in Kansas since the 1990s, but this was the big one, the first state-wide vote on the topic after the Supreme Court officially reversed Roe v. Wade.
The headline in the New York Times the next day: “Abortion Rights Supporters Win Surprising Victory in Conservative Kansas.”
We didn’t all see this as a plot twist – I for one wasn’t that surprised, except by the 18 percentage point margin – but I understand why a lot of people’s expectations were subverted. To a lot of America – and certainly on Steve Kornacki’s election night maps – Kansas is just a big red rectangle.
And yet. In fiction, when something surprising happens, something we as readers didn’t anticipate, it serves to deepen our understanding of the situation, the characters, the consequences.
***
Maud Casey asks: “What about the sort of character whose mystery grows out of contradiction, incongruity, irrationality? Who makes us wonder, even as we recognize some part of ourselves in the mess, why did that character do that?”
In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” another of Evans’ stories in The Office of Historical Corrections, we meet Claire, a young white woman who starts a firestorm at her Vermont college when a photo of her in a Confederate flag bikini is posted online. We come to know the origin story of the bikini as well as of Claire herself – what’s happened to her mother, her best friend, her best friend’s brother. Each of these reveals makes us say: oh. The story never lets any of this excuse Claire’s present actions. We see her go into defense mode, double (and triple) down, maintain an unchecked disregard for other people. She is illuminated both by her present and her past. We are shown all the context – individual, structural – and asked to decide for ourselves what matters. But above all, Claire is devastatingly human, a character who could never be read as a caricature.
***
When I first left Kansas, often people I met would reference the Wizard of Oz. This still happens, but over the years different bits have seeped into conversations – Bob Dole and Sam Brownback, Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School. No one ever brings up Dr. Tiller or the Summer of Mercy. He loomed so large in the abortion debate for so long, but now I find I often have to explain who he was.
In 2009 Dr. Tiller lost his life in a tragic and utterly predictable way: an anti-abortion extremist shot him on a Sunday morning in his own church. The clinic closed. But a few years later, another reopened in the same location, and it exists today.
When we, as readers and writers, as pundits and citizens and voters, find the right questions and attune ourselves to subtext, we may be surprised by what we uncover.
A Brief Note of Congratulations
Many years ago I was a Johns Hopkins college freshman with a work-study job in the Career Center. One day a former student employee, an upperclassman, stopped by to chat with my boss. People were always coming in; that was the nature of the place. And yet I remember this one so clearly. He radiated. He made the room warm. When he left, my boss turned to me and said, “He’s going to be president someday.”
Congratulations, Maryland Governor-elect Wes Moore, and Godspeed.