Reviewed by Michael Signorelli
6.15.07

A lot can be said for the firm, even-handed discipline of a good parent. I can’t help but imagine what a little grounding could have done for the characters in Mary Otis’s debut story collection, Yes, Yes, Cherries, a Tin House New Voice book. In eight loosely related stories, we meet a parade of hapless girls and women. Dizzy with heartache, they engage in everything from adultery to statutory rape to adoptive incest. Their exploits even tend toward more obscure criminal activities such as back-alley dentistry, toddler pegging, and drunken psychiatry. On second thought, to hell with good parenting! If sound judgment were a consideration, these stories would lose the lunatic engine driving their plots. (And by that I mean lunar.)

At the heart of several of the stories is Allison. She wanders the landscapes of her life, searching for the saving, bejeweled chalice of…of what exactly? This void inspires all of Otis’s characters to adventure in love, in self, and in family, though they often come to similarly confounding non-answers.

In Allison’s first incarnation as a love-struck adolescent in “Pilgrim Girl,” she longs for and, for a time, possesses Rick, the bearded husband of her neighbor Janie. Despite herself, her age, and the embarrassment she suffers at the hands of her mother and aunt, Allison interests Rick and one day absconds with him to Cappy’s Clam Shack during her lunch period. A few fried clams and some chowder later, the two are hidden “where there’s nothing but a Dumpster and a jumble of wooden crates on the ground…It seems like he’s about to calculate her height…Then he kisses her and her insides unfurl, suddenly beautiful, like a lush bolt of fabric thrown out upon a table.” The moment is sweet and singular, a rare overlap between desire and reality, but is also complicated, or tainted, by the lingering, unexamined fact that Rick is twenty-something and Allison is twelve. This soured satisfaction is akin to finishing a meal of fried clams: you’re full, but with what?

The same kind of conflict occurs throughout the collection. Otis’s characters meander into situations almost without thought, clouded by desires not of practical use to the world around them. They drift like ambiguous pink mist into whatever container is at hand. This may be why the character I came to admire most was Delia, a thirteen-year-old anorexic girl in “The Straight and Narrow”—not because she was anorexic but because she believed in rigidity and in action. Admittedly, her decisions were destructive, but her conscious pro-action was a welcome break from the perpetual self-doubt of the other characters.

Of course, any issue I may have with the lives depicted in Yes, Yes, Cherries is only a compliment to the author. Her characters are drawn distinctly enough that I want to find them…and shake them until their heads fly off. Kidding. They are human. They are at fault and are sometimes redeemed. Otis does a fine job recreating the contradictory impulses of reason and feeling. Her sharp, lively prose affectionately pinches the sallow cheeks of her many Allisons and maintains a tautness of rhythm that speaks to her ability as a sentence-crafter. I give it 1 1/3 out of 2 cherries.