![[PANK]](https://pankmagazine.com/wp-content/themes/pank/assets/images/pank-logo-large.png){kind=logo}
175 pgs/$12
Laura Maylene Walter’s Living Arrangements is a collection of finely honed stories, all deeply concerned with place and memory. Her stories are quietly resonant–beneath the everyday veneer of each of her characters, Walter clarifies their internal tempests; their struggles with identity and belonging, desire and grief. I’m proud to say Walter is also a heartland lady, living an afternoon car ride away from me in Lakewood, Ohio.
Her book opens with “you,” years ago, when “you” were “a newborn, a wrinkled girl confined to your crib, the high chair, the stroller,” in the book’s opener, the titular Living Arrangements. I was immediately taken in by this second person narration, this plain focused care. The story Living Arrangements takes us through the life of a woman, to each of the places and times that hold magic for her, that are still sharp, years later, the living arrangements almost characters themselves, the way places that have held us can become in our minds. I simply cannot narrow down my choices for a quote, so you will just have to trust me. It’s badass.
The vast majority of Walter’s protagonists are women and girls, but her male protagonist in The Ballad Solemn of Lady Molena is a true marvel. It is always hard for me to pick favorites (see above), but The Ballad Solemn of Lady Molena may be the crowning jewel of this debut.
The Ballad Solemn of Lady Molena concerns a predator and his measured pursuit of an underage ice skating champion, Annabelle. He is calm, calculating, charming. The tension between this young woman and her hunter, the thrill he feels, in the rosy thrall of ephebophilia, and the web of yearnings inside Annabelle, almost a kept girl, under scrutiny, in near-isolation, were both familiar and unexpected.
 She nodded. Glorious God in the heavens, she nodded. He reached for the notepad one last time and tore off the bottom third of a page. He wrote “Brian McPherson†and below that, “Room 406.†In one smooth motion he stood and sat next to her on the other loveseat, handing her the scrap of paper. Keep it light, he told himself. Never mind that her body was right there, that he could reach out and put a palm on her thigh or slide his hands up over that soft sweater to feel the  rise in her chest.
It’s easy for me to understand how Annabelle knows enough to know he wants. Almost every girl I’ve ever known first felt eyes on her body before she was fourteen. We knew what we were expected to be, right then and there, and from then on. It was an overwhelming feeling that is difficult to describe, even now, in a concise manner, so I’ll just say that Annabelle is a realistic mess of a girl with eyes on her; a personification of the observer effect. Honestly, I could go on and on about this story.
The final story of Walter’s collection, Return to Stillbrook Farm, turned my heart into butter in a pan. I’m not a big fan of the title, but it serves its function and I’m sure I wouldn’t have come up with anything better. Walter drops us into Caroline’s life at its most raw, back home after a decade away, days after her mother, Joyce, died from an apparent riding accident. Her mother’s partner, Denise, found her dead.
It was all the same, right down to the maroon paint on the stable’s Dutch doors, but it was the smell inside that took Caroline back: dirt and hay and manure, the musk of          a horse freshly dappled with rain. She walked deeper into the barn with Denise trailing behind her. Caroline had changed into jeans and boots, but Denise was still in the outfit she’d worn to the airport: tapered wool pants, a blazer, and flat brown loafers that were completely inappropriate for a barn. Denise was a smoker; Caroline had learned that of   her mother’s partner within the first ten minutes of their meeting, and now Caroline worried something in the woman’s clothes would spark and set the whole place up. The corner of dry hay, the wooden stalls, the horse hair just waiting to singe.
Our minds dance, mimicking the dirt and hay, musk and rain. Our hearts seize for a second, almost unnoticed, at the phantom scent of singed hair. Walter wants us there, and there we are, with Caroline in the guts of her reeling world.
Another standout, Live Model, explores objectification, as The Ballad Solemn of Lady Molena did. This story introduces us to a young, conventionally unattractive woman who is a lingerie shop window model with a rich inner life. It is a bitterly comic story with a refreshingly complex character at its center.
Tumultuous mother-daughter relationships are mined for The Clarinet, which contains one of the best child narrators I’ve had the pleasure of reading, and A System Based on Counting, which broke my heart more than once. The Last Halloween was far more haunting than I expected when I began it. The ending was perfect, and Genevieve was another excellent child narrator. I think Sylvia Plath would have enjoyed it.
Living Arrangements, for me, is about the search for a place in society, particularly as a young woman, and the way that we all carry and feed off of our pasts like second beating hearts. I look forward to reading Laura Maylene Walter’s future work. Based on the merits of this collection, she has a fruitful career ahead.
*
Dawn West (b. 1987) reads, writes, and eats falafel in Ohio