The Brooklyn Rail

Disappearing Debutantes offers a lot to admire. Its verbal acrobatics and ingenious abbreviations suggest a pair of kittens got their claws into a list of rules for the short story, and afterwards the shreds were repurposed into freaky papier-mâché miniatures of alternative love—dollhouse furniture that suggests fresh shape for fulfillment itself. “We all need a little Doomsday,” claims one of the text’s debutantes, struggling to adapt, “just to give us a chance to move on from the plague of life.” Altogether, these are stories that challenge storytelling, making splendid mischief with the notion that narrative gives our lives meaning. For all its sudden, subversive thrills, however, the book never answers the first question that it brings to mind.

At first glance, anyone can see that the collection has two authors, Meg Pokrass and Aimee Parkison. Both are featured in the promotional materials as well, yet nowhere does Pokrass or Parkison or anyone else get specific about composition. Did each story have its own sole author? Did these two combine their talents, working together, and if so, how?

All good questions, though to be fair, they don’t demand an answer. Dual-author fictions aren’t hard to find, especially in genre work; back in 1991, The Difference Engine, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, introduced steampunk. Novels like that, after all, aren’t weighed down by explanations. Still, this is another sort of book, and I’m a book reviewer⎯ so I did some research.

Both these women have impressive resumes, with a handful of books and awards apiece, and soon enough, between websites and bookshelves, I found a few of their Debutantes. Conjunctions online had “What Happened With Gilbert That Night,” under Parkison’s name alone; there as in the book, the story shrink-wrapped decades of longing while also, within the cellophane, somehow setting off fireworks. “Jeopardy,” with Pokrass as sole author, turned up in The Museum of Americana, and it too matched what’s in the final, right down to stinging last image, which tucks a marriage into a runner’s “shoelace clip.” The most intriguing earlier pub, however, appeared at New World Writing Quarterly: “New Frontier,” credited to both authors. Once again, I spotted no revisions worth mentioning; it remains one of the gloomier pieces, indeed chilling, a four-pager in which a girl getting away from it all winds up in an inferno. But the pub date on the original, the fall of 2020—that’s news. That tells us these two have been at their project a while, perhaps intermittently but also without losing touch, keeping an eye on each other while exploring their compatible sensibilities, encountering different apparitions in the same haunts.

The reports they share prove appealing, as I say, given the smart-aleck tone and the head-tipping digressions: “I’ve attempted to console myself with HeavenlyWitch.com, a randy new witch-sex chat app.” Supernatural elements never feel twee, particularly in “The Romligulet,” a standout at mid-book that features shedding skin. Still, even then the mood is uneasy, touched with desperation, as once more young women find themselves with little to show for their coming-out. Most find themselves strapped for the wherewithal, and the hustle after a break provides what passes for plot. Poverty haunts Beanstalk Jack and his mother, for instance, in the collection's fractured fairy tale. The piece is one of the best—and at five pages, long for this collection—and spiced up with sexting and flatulence, but unlike in the original, the hero never profits from his magic. He blows his opportunities; his debutante disappears.

Not that Pokrass and Parkison ever tumble into dreariness. The pervading hardscrabble strikes me as distinctly American, but the micro-dramas unfold in a kind of Wonderland. Flora and fauna pack all sorts of surprises: “…our rental house developed wall-cracks in which ants live with criminal intent. Some ants were ruder and more deviant than others.” So too, most of the changes in story direction spring fine surprises. Often the shift is into the surreal, but even when not, the effect feels more nutty than bluesy:“When our car finally expired at Castle Rock State Park, the month after our AAA membership elapsed, I decided to lose my virginity. This felt like a tangible solution.”

A “solution” out of left field, it lends a playful quality to the girl’s hard choices—and to the hard and lonely life that might result. That’s the gamble for these authors, a long shot on aesthetic bliss by way of inevitable disappointment, and it doesn’t always pay out. The collection’s last third consists mostly of two- and three-page narratives, and these can feel underdone and repetitive. On the other hand, there are winners like “Macaroni,” and the final story, “Sand Trap,” closes with a line that speaks marvelously to the whole: “falling in love in some terrible way.”