Out of the Girls’ Room and Into the Night
by Thisbe NissenUniversity of Iowa Press, 250 pp., $19.95 (paper)
The expression of love is the center of Out of the Girls’ Room and Into the Night, an awe-inspiring collection of short stories by Thisbe Nissen, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Nissen’s characters are young and yearning, and they come together in lovely and unexpected ways.
A young video clerk in “The Mushroom Girl” pours his heart out into his beloved’s intercom: “I think you think I’m crazy, and I’m not. I’m not crazy. It’s just that I see a chance for something I think could make me happy in a world that is a generally not very happy place, and I can’t just give up and walk away from that without doing everything I know how to do to make it happen.” This flustered suitor is probably the most eloquent in the book; Roz Rozenzweig in “The Unlikely Courtship of Edwin Anderson and Roz Rosenzweig” proposes marriage by calling to her lover, “C’mon, Gimp, waddaya say?”
Words are not the only means of admitting love in Nissen’s stories. In “Accidental Love,” Lilith, a high school senior, listens to an older woman who tells her, “Love is an entity unto itself. There are patches of it all over the place. It’s not really tangible, but it’s there, pools of it.” Lilith takes the woman’s words to heart when she finds Steff, the boy she loves, fixing lights underneath a Christmas tree: “The TV is perched on a rolling cart, and I wheel it over to where we can watch before I crawl underneath the tree myself. I curl around Steff and bury my hands into the wool belly of his sweater, and we just lie like that for a while: spoons under the tree in this pocket of candle-blue.”
Although Nissen’s characters are generally young and blessed — traveling Deadheads, college housemates, wealthy New York teens — Nissen bestows them with earnesty and explores their desires carefully and with gravity. This is a marked change from the cynical city gals currently in fashion in contemporary literature, and I found myself astonishingly moved by her character’s simplest movements, like those of the lovers in “Fundamentals of Communication.” In a college classroom, the lovers “sit, shifting occasionally, glancing at the glowing wall clock, waiting for 9:15. I can’t see them as well now, in the shadows, but I catch the occasional movement in one of their hands, the caress of a finger, press of palm.” They seem to have realized another character’s observation that safety is “a point of contact.” And perhaps, Nissen suggests, that’s what love is as well.
This article appears in November 26 • 1999.