Prison Reviews: Ethel Rohan’s Hard to Say

Hard to Say, stories
Ethel Rohan
PANK Publishing

An epigraph occurs at the beginning of a literary work. It suggests the work’s theme. I taught myself recently how to remember that this word is the one I want to use, mostly, as opposed to “epigram” or “epithet,” by remembering that the “f” sound of the word’s ending “ph” could stand for first, or front, as in, “the front of the book” or “the first thing in a book.” Hopefully, because of this mnemonic, I’ll never doubt my use of this word again.

I love epigraphs. I like quotes to begin chapters too, though I don’t know if those are considered epigraphs. Here is an epigraph once used by Peter Ustinov, who I think was an actor, but cannot confidently say. (If I had access to the Internet I could quickly find this, and more than I ever wanted to know about Ustinov, but I have come to like this not-knowing. The state of Not-Knowing is probably what we, as a society, miss the most, though we don’t know it. )

Anyway—Peter Ustinov said, “Love is an act of endless forgiveness.” 

The mother in these fifteen stories is impossible to love, yet the narrator makes three trips halfway across the world to be at her deathbed. I wished the narrator would let the mother die without her company as punishment for all her bad behavior. But I wouldn’t have, either. As much as we try to hate a parent, we really can’t, because we have learned by their bad example how to love better than they do. In a sense, even horrible parents sometimes raise their children right.

Here’s an epigraph by me, that I give to anyone who wants to use it: “The world owes a lot to deranged moms.” There will be a dash, then my name. “Who is Curtis Dawkins?” someone reading my epigraph will say. “Maybe he was an actor.”

The mother in Hard to Say has tiny feet and can only find shoes that fit in the children’s section, though she sometimes wears women’s heels stuffed with newspaper and laddered nylons—a creepy detail, like the cans in the killer’s boots in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

The mother says things like, “We should set fire to this place. We’d all be better off dead.”

My mother was often packing her bags, leaving all of us to live with her friend Gloria in California. Especially around Christmas. Did she ever actually pack a suitcase? I don’t know. When my older sister began dating, my mom would regularly lock herself in the bathroom and sob, smoking Salem Lights.

These stories, for the most part, are set in Ireland. The mother, though she is losing her sight, wanders off regularly to the pub to drink the day away. One day she doesn’t come home, ending up institutionalized. The kids may have hated their mother on one level, but they missed her when she was gone.

After school one day, I hit a car as it sat behind a school bus stopped at a defunct railroad track. When I told my mother she slapped me because my dad had just bought a sleek, used BMW that wasn’t running right. She was in the basement by the ironing board.

Parents of the seventies and eighties really were, as a group, dangerously inept keepers of kids. In retrospect, they seem narcissistic and childish, as if we were pain-in-the-ass surprises they hadn’t asked for. My wife and I often laugh at our dismal childhoods. We would have been better off had we been raised by packs of poodles.

May God have mercy on all the horrible parents.

The title of this thin book is perfect because 1) the love/hate with the crazy mother is impossible to adequately talk about, and 2) like anyone in a dysfunctional family, illnesses and ailments are part and parcel of attention-getting. The narrator’s ailments manifest themselves in unpronounceable jaw disorders. “I told people I suffered from things hard to say.” I love that. Also, in the first few stories the voices are “thin,” they “wobble,” or are “too big.” Voices follow people down halls, are darkened by decades of nicotine, or silent “with all I knew not to say.”

The choppy, fragmented, stop-and-start shape of the stories is perfect for a girl trying to find the things she needs to say. The chapbook form is ideal, too, because a reader couldn’t bear to spend an entire novel with the mother. This may be a perfect chapbook. There has to be awards for short books, doesn’t there? This book should really get one.

In one year’s time I was stung about twenty times. The first eighteen stings happened when I was weed-wacking the roadside embankment of a Frank Lloyd Wright mansion, between grad school semesters. I disturbed a ground nest of hornets and ran across the road trying to escape the stings. If a car would have been coming, well, that would have been that.

Next, I was opening a window above a bed where a wasp lay sunning himself. I thought a shard of glass had opened up my finger. 

Lastly, after my son’s soccer game, I put a celebratory powdered sugar donut in my mouth. I tasted the bitterness of the bee’s body just before the wallop of the sting on my tongue.

In “Stung” the mother feels along the windowsill looking for change for an ice cream cone for the daughter—a rare treat. A wasp stings her. “Look what you did,” she says.

The stories aren’t only tragic, though. I don’t care how bad your life is, it’s never all tragedy. In “Departures,” the narrator throws herself a farewell party, which is sadly funny. She angles for goodbye sex from her derelict ex-boyfriend.

I don’t know how I got this book. It came in a white envelope with a hand-written return address that didn’t say anything about a publisher. [Note: books should at least look as if they came officially, directly from the publisher. Or they need to come from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.com] I think the mailroom confused the chapbook for a literary journal. It’s one of those things. Sometimes things just work out.

Anyone can use that, too, as an epigraph. Or as an epitaph, which is on a tombstone. I see “epitaph” also ends in an “f” sound. 

Regardless, “Sometimes things just work out.” – Curtis Dawkins

Who’s that? I have no idea.

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