The Lightning Room with Tara Mae Mulroy

Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Today, Simon talks with  Tara Mae Mulroy, whose story,“The Last Hurrah,”  from our February issue is loss itself:

 

1. The atmosphere in “The Last Hurrah” is just perfect – the unease of being abroad; exotic history and locales coupled with familiar things taking on unfamiliar dimensions (the McDonald’s, the dogs; the Greek alphabet); it heightens the sense of a couple in limbo. What brought you to Greece to write this story?

As a wedding gift, my father, who travels for a living, offered to comp our plane tickets for our honeymoon. My husband is also a manager for a hotel, so since we were footing the rest of the bill for our honeymoon, we sought out locations that would a.) be able to be flown to and b.) provide us with a hotel discount. Athens, Greece ended up being that place. Athens was far from what we expected though. As we were flying over, the economic riots started, and our first foray into the city center ended up with us in the middle of the riots, our eyes watering from tear gas.

On top of that, we couldn’t find hummus, falafels, or gyros because that’s Turkish, not really Greek, food. The city was covered with graffiti, and most of the public transportation was shut down due to the riots. We sent expensive text messages home to our families to let them know we were okay. It was a strange two weeks. When I started writing this story, I wanted to re-create that time of discomfort and exoticism. I imagined a failing marriage and the husband running out to join the rioters. It ended up as a love story.

2. Can you walk us through your favorite ruin?

As in the story, the trek up to the Acropolis is a long set of winding trails then a steep incline up to the actual site.The Erechtheion is a smallish (relatively) temple on the north side of the Acropolis, on the other side of the Parthenon. The “Porch of Maidens” on the southside features six Ionic columns carved in the shape of women (called caryatids).

The real caryatids have been moved, and plaster/cement copies hold up the temple today. Lord Elgin took one to furnish his Scottish mansion in the early 1800s and later sold it to the British Museum (Legend has it that when he removed it, the other 5 could be heard wailing at night for their lost sister). He attempted to remove another caryatid, but it was damaged badly in the process and the fragments re-cemented back together.

The remaining 5 caryatids were moved to the Old Acropolis Museum in 2005 and then the New Acropolis Museum (which is down off the hillside) in 2007. In 2010, when I visited, the caryatids were in a special room that could be seen from all sides, the focal piece of the entire museum. To restore the patina, each statue was lined up and meticulously cleaned by laser. They had also reattached one of the caryatid’s sandaled foot, as it had been found in the rubble.

The women are 7 feet tall, and beautiful, even with their eroded noses and lips. I’m embarrassed to write this now and I imagine some might feel outrage at this confession, but when a guard wasn’t looking, I reached out and touched one of the caryatid’s knees. It was quick. I wanted to touch something that people must have touched in wonder thousands of years before. I wanted to feel something beautiful as if I could take it in me. My husband didn’t understand my level of fascination, and I was crying as we were leaving the museum, keeping my palm lifted as if I would drop whatever I had gained.

3. You manage to thematically mix bits of Greek mythology – from the statues, the ruins – in with the pain of the narrative, which I think gets at the overwhelming sense of the tragedy at the story’s core – it’s at the point where it is inescapable, where everything, no matter how minor, recalls it. Is it all-consuming loss at the core?

It’s all loss, the fragments of us we’ve left behind, the parts we return to again and again because there is as much beauty in the pain as there is hope, always hope. We can rebuild. We can learn something new. We can choose not to repeat the same mistakes. We can surrender.

4. This is not the only story from PANK’s February issue with a population of strays and structures left from thousands of years ago. Why do you think we’re drawn to these lonely animals? Is it purely substitution, or something more?

Animals can be blank canvases. We can dress them up. Imagine we see our reincarnated grandfather in their eyes. Teach them to shake and roll over. Maybe it’s a sense of Biblical entitlement: God brought the animals before Adam for him to name. Now we have these animals we may take or leave; we may name and love. Anna loves them because they are cups she can fill with her grief. Henry lashes out at a dog when he can’t lash out at God.

5. If you could take one horrible thing in your life and channel it into a technical skill, what would it be?

When I was first learning to speak, my parents discovered I had a speech issue which was later diagnosed as auditory dyslexia. As children, we learn to speak by mimicking the sounds we hear our parents make, we shape our mouths the way we see them shape their mouths. I was hearing the words through a corrupt filter, so my speech was garbled. I was trying to shape sounds that didn’t match the sounds I was trying to say, so I’d say t sounds as f sounds, among other things.

The cure for this was to read aloud and record it and then play it back, and I learned how to think before I shaped a word to make sure I was shaping the right one. I learned once I started writing that writing was easier. I could write in a way people could understand. Writing, thus, was easier, safer. I still sometimes even say a word and watch a look of confusion pass over someone else’s face. The horror of miscommunication, of not feeling heard. I’ve had years of practice, and still have to think before I say words like “nirvana” because my mind wants to pronounce like nir-van-uh, instead of nir-vah-nah. My mind does funny things like that: the accents all wrong, a sound wrong, saying a word when I really mean another one. The mind an enemy when I’m tired or stressed. Funny issue for a Latin teacher teaching a whole new language, but it’s one I deal with on a daily basis.

I would love to have fine-tongued voice. It’s a skill. It must be. It’s too special to be born with, the palate for those perfectly enunciated syllables, the way the tongue knows how to roll here and drive up there. Let me make what was broken into something better than whole.

6. As you write in the first sentence, this is the story of a vacation meant to “the last hurrah before parenthood,” but one whose timing is thrown disastrously off by the death of the child. Still, do you think that this story serves as the preparation for something? For new beginnings? For carving new shapes?

I tend to have a pretty fatalistic viewpoint: everything that happens was meant to happen and it always happens for a reason. This is what I believe in my life when I look back at my path and things seem connected, as if each thing was built upon the thing before it, and it is as if I’m always building up, and the setbacks just serve to remove a shaky beam or rotted joist before I keep going.

Chad Robinson, who recorded this story for me, asked me if I thought Anna and Henry’s marriage was over by the end of the story and what did I think would happen to the both of them. My answer was that I really don’t know. The end of this story is where I set them down.

I did imagine their marriage would be over, and that it would be Anna’s decision. But Anna also loves so deeply and feels so guilty by the end of the story that maybe she will try to work things out. Maybe it will be Henry that flees. Maybe he will want a little peace, a little less pain. Maybe they both deserve some peace and less pain.

Either way, I imagine it will be something that continues to build and shape them, as we are all built and shaped and loved.

 

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Simon Jacobs curates the Safety Pin Review, a wearable medium for work of fewer than 30 words. He may be found at simonajacobs.blogspot.com.