REVIEW: Marianna Nash on Leesa Cross-Smith
Grand Central Publishing
Seven years ago, back when literate presidents and bustling city streets were things we all took for granted, my friend and I found ourselves walking away from a coffee shop in the East Village, heading toward the N. We had spent all morning and most of the summer afternoon talking about the zine we planned to start. We were still talking about it when we were accosted by someone who felt the need to say something about my friend’s dress.
“Groovy,” he sneered, flashing a peace sign. We were only 23, and it hadn’t yet occurred to us that we could be mean to strange men. My friend turned to me and asked why I thought her dress, out of all the dresses on the block, had provoked the snide remark. It was a short, light pink cotton dress, trimmed with a little lace and floral embroidery along the hem. It wasn’t particularly Woodstock-inspired, but it was aggressively feminine.
“Too much for him,” I guessed.
Leesa Cross-Smith’s latest collection, “So We Can Glow,” reminds me of that dress. These 42 stories are casually radical in their pinkness, their mission to reconstruct female desire — from the dizzying rush of puppy love to the self-obliterating devotion of a cult. With precision and humanity, Cross-Smith illuminates the inner lives of her characters and shows us the turbulence there.
Throughout the collection, the women we meet are driven by obsessions that complicate their lives. We meet a woman who secretly sleeps with men to pay off her not-quite-boyfriend’s debts; a woman in love with a nature documentarian, who yearns to be watched like a bird; a woman who, after a miscarriage, finds healing in role play; a girl who can’t stop watching movies starring her dead sister’s doppelgänger, Winona Ryder. But the stories also give us a window onto the experiences of women and girls who move through the world with a lustrous, defiant hope.
A book about yearning, “Glow” is all about the olfactory function. The smells, tastes, and sensations of the past pour out of every page, but especially the smells: Pineapple lip gloss, the desert, sweet cocktails, lavender cigarettes. Hair smoked with cedar and cinnamon. The events of the first stories come back to haunt the same characters in the second, the way that catching a whiff of your fifth grade teacher’s perfume can plunge you into rumination on the past. The stories are concentrated infusions that intoxicate and transport. Cross-Smith is skilled at conjuring fleeting moments of rapture.
“Pink” recurs throughout the book as a kind of protective forcefield. Whenever the energy turns bad — usually because of a man — somebody else finds a way to turn things pink. “We’re okay, our hearts, dusted with pink,” intone the nameless narrators of “We, Moons.” “It sounds pink,” says a therapist’s son in “Some are Dark, Some are Light, Summer Melts.” But the best of these is “Pink Bubblegum and Flowers,” which takes its title from a scent. By imperceptible notes, Cross-Smith turns a story about a late-summer thirst trap into one about real intimacy.
The boy our deliciously fragranced narrator winds up texting is lovely, well-intentioned Rafa, her college almost-boyfriend. “We’d been together in our own way from around Christmas until after Valentine’s Day when he gave me some roses and a bottle of champagne and gave the same gift to another girl too.” Rafa hadn’t meant to double-time her or anyone else, but he wasn’t prepared to disappoint them, either. “He didn’t want to be anyone’s boyfriend, but in a way he was everyone’s boyfriend because he never told girls no.”
Our narrator invites him over after taking a long, purposefully fragrant shower. Cross-Smith has fun with this part, noting that the narrator uses her mom’s expensive shampoo and Chanel body wash to make herself smell irresistible — “exactly like pink bubblegum and flowers,” as Rafa later observes, mid-sniff.
In the hands of another writer, these details might have felt corny. Cross-Smith never crosses that line. Her narrator’s ridiculous intensity is part of what endears her to us (“I was a deep, thick, fecund garden”), and it leavens the subject matter when the story takes a more serious turn. The scent, concocted in an attempt at seduction, instead becomes a gentle fog of protection. It turns the bathroom into a safe room where, instead of fooling around, the two just sit and talk, revealing more of themselves than they ever would if they had settled for mere sex.
During this time, Rafa reveals that he’s in town to testify against his father for domestic violence. The tone of the story changes after that. A short while later, they are interrupted by a commotion outside. A man is shouting at a woman, cowing her. Rafa tries to intervene.
“It’s his wife,” somebody says.
Cross-Smith’s diaphanously light touch moves the story forward, credibly, toward a weirdly heartwarming driveway fistfight. The glimpse of toxicity we get at the very end underscores the specialness of the intimacy between Rafa and the narrator. When Rafa has to be physically restrained from jumping on the offending man, our narrator finally calls him her boyfriend. It’s a touching moment, despite the fact that the narrator is slightly embarrassed by the whole ordeal.
“There was no big secret. You just had to let the things in your heart get real dark first,” a woman named Exie confides to the reader in the story from which the collection takes its title, “Knock Out the Heart Lights So We Can Glow.” She’s talking about the act of glowing, of being “special” — of being attuned to the world’s magic, its intermingling atmospheres of hope and sorrow. Much like her character, Cross-Smith understands how to balance the dark with the light, how to make a soul shine brighter by bringing its shadows to the fore.
Marianna Nash is a writer from Queens. Her work has appeared in the Nashville Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Queen Mob's Tea House, Bridge Eight, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and other places in print and online. She is working on a collection of short stories.