Hold Me Looser, Tiny Dancer
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Excerpt
Most academics know that summer can be a financially challenging time. When this past summer yawned out before me, I considered the usual solutions: teaching several simultaneous online courses, applying for research funding, engaging in private tutoring, grading standardized test exams, or even donating blood, plasma, or my non-vital organs. Or I could pick up a shift or two at the bookstore or a local restaurant, or even drive for Uber, now that my daughter was a teenager and no longer littered the base of my car with Goldfish and graham cracker residue. I considered these reasonable solutions, as I did at the start of every summer, but this year, the most glaringly obvious answer appeared just after classes ended. Why didn’t I see it before? Instead of engaging in these money-grubbing humiliations, I could monetize the time machine in my basement.
Maria Kuznetsova
Maria Kuznetsova was born in Kyiv, Ukraine and came to the United States as a child. She is the author of the novels Oksana, Behave! and Something Unbelievable. She is an associate professor at Auburn University, where she is also the fiction editor of the Southern Humanities Review. Her short fiction, which includes other stories in the “Yulia” series featured here, appears in dozens of literary journals including Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, The Missouri Review, Guernica, and more.
Manuel Gonzales on “Hold Me Looser, Tiny Dancer”
The other day while waiting in line to buy my daughter a bagel, she cruelly reminded me that in but a couple of months she would be turning twenty, and for the first time—through her teenage years, through leaving home for college, through all of it—I felt the urge to weep at the heartless passage of time, at the inexorable drift that must, by rights, occur between my daughter and myself.
So it was with joy and dread that I read Maria Kuznetsova’s story, “Hold Me Looser, Tiny Dancer,” in which Yulia, an academic and mother of a now-independent teen looking to score some easy money during the summer months, stumbles upon an idea both manipulatively brilliant and utterly wrenching: monetize the time machine in her basement and charge the other mothers in her community for the opportunity to revisit their children, back when their children were young and sweet and loving, back when the mothers felt adored and needed.
As do all plans in the best fictions, Yulia’s takes an eventual dark turn. But even before that turn, Kuznetsova demonstrates through Yulia and all the other mothers such a deep, indelible yearning for a time that can never be recovered that the heart would break in the face of their hunger, if the story weren’t also so absurdly funny. Maria Kuznetsova brings us along for a wild and ridiculous ride that is never sentimental but will cut to the core.
Kuznetsova walks the fine line between absurdity and reality to capture the extreme lengths we might go to in order to bring our past back to the present. We hope you enjoy “Hold Me Looser, Tiny Dancer,” and the gelatinous hub of Yulia’s basement time machine, as we did.
Q&A by Manuel Gonzales
- MG: One of the things I found most beguiling about this story is your ability to glide over the fantastical and sometimes absurd pieces of the world you’ve created without offering much by way of explanation—for instance: “Instead of engaging in these money-grubbing humiliations, I could monetize the time machine in my basement”; and “I entered the chamber, took a seat on a metal bench across from a series of illuminated knobs and buttons, and placed my fingertips inside the gelatinous substance in the enormous fishbowl in front of me,” etc., etc.—and I wondered if you’d speak to the way you think about how these fantastical, not-actually-sci-fi elements operate in fiction for you.
- MK: This story is one of many in a manuscript of a completed novel-in-stories called Every Little Ache I Feel Is Tragic, which all feature Yulia getting into trouble when her dad’s solutions to her existential ailments have unintended and often disastrous consequences. So while I wanted this story, and each story, to stand alone, I also wanted them to accumulate, without having to slow down and explain how things worked, especially when, well, there really was no good reason for why they worked. The dad often has some kind of a dysfunctional time machine, so I hope readers just roll with it from the first scene and buy in without the added details. I actually love H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, where the time traveler doesn’t spend a ton of time explaining how he got it to work, but instead, through his wild story of what he encountered during the time travel (people who seem sweet and dense at first who are…cannibals?!), we are convinced that it must have worked, because of his vivid descriptions. I hope that, through seeing the different iterations of the young children in the machine, and then the gelatinous doppelgänger kids at the end, the reader can just be like, well yeah, that must have worked.
I once had a returning student who worked in animation for Pixar, and she said that they had a rule about how the more ridiculous or different the world was, the more the viewer had to be grounded in the details to believe it was true. But here, I had the opposite approach, where if the reader was grounded enough in Yulia’s emotional state, then they would believe her wild approach to it. That is, if we can really feel her longing for the young and sweet tutu-wearing version of her teenaged daughter, who breaks her heart through her snippiness even if she ultimately still loves her, then hopefully, we are okay with the time machine and the gelatinous substance.
Last thing: the first story in this book I wrote about a decade ago, when I had to give a three-minute reading and really wanted to tell a complete story in that time. There was no time to explain why the “science” there worked—I just had to jump right in, and I found that this approach worked for all these stories, which I think are built to be read aloud more than my longer work. - MG: There is something darkly unsettling, even if somewhat relatable, to the desperate desire of these mothers to find their way back not to their own youth, but to the youth of their now-grown children. Were you thinking of how, historically, in fairy tales and literature, our darkest desires push us to turn to equally dark and consequential magic? In other words, were you placing your story in conversation with these narratives?
- MK: I love this thought of Yulia as almost an antagonist in her own story, like how in fairy tales wanting eternal youth or beauty or even just to wander off without listening to your parents can lead to disaster. But in terms of influences, I would say they are a bit scattered—Kurt Vonnegut was probably the first writer whose entire body of work I had read in high school, and his absurd take on devastating situations, like Billy Pilgrim dealing with his PTSD in Slaughterhouse-Five through time travel, really made me think of writing about these creative solutions or approaches to emotional problems. Or on a more contemporary level, I adore Alice Sola Kim’s story, “We Love Deena,” where the narrator is so insistent on winning back her ex that she hops around the minds of everyone around her ex to try to impress her, but only ends up being hunted by a death ray. But yeah, this idea of having a desire that may lead to chaos or destruction is foremost on my mind, even if fairy tales weren’t necessarily at the root of it.
- MG: The humor in this story is rooted both in absurdity and in the real reckoning of the narrator’s loss—of sense of self, of importance in her grown daughter’s life—and it’s impressive to me that you are able to wrest so much humor from these otherwise dire feelings of loss. Can you speak to how you bring humor into your work, and how it functions in your stories?
- MK: Again, I think that this story and its others are written to be read aloud more than anything else I’ve worked on. They are short and snappy, and I really wanted every sentence to be a banger and a laugh line, though of course that’s impossible. Shout out to Sergei Dovlatov, the Soviet dissident author who wrote autobiographical fiction but whose every line felt quotable, devastating, and hilarious at once. I felt that, for this story, Yulia would have this really “serious” problem—longing for her daughter to stay young and not hate her—and for it to not come off as corny or sentimental, she had to be able to recognize her maudlin tendencies and to poke fun at herself, while her father and husband also felt she was way off base with her desires and frequently teased and scolded her. The audience, I hope, would both empathize with Yulia while seeing how ridiculous, but ultimately human, she was. Even the almost goofy pun of the title reflects that—she wants her daughter to have less of a hold on her, and that’s so serious, but then it’s a joke on the Elton John song, “Tiny Dancer,” which of course is meant to feel almost—but not fully—silly.
- MG: I would love to know more about where the idea of this story came from in the first place.
- MK: I want to shout out the talented writer Rivka Galchen for this one. A few years ago, I taught her essay in my creative nonfiction undergrad class, “The Case of the Angry Daughter.” It was an essay where Rivka has to reckon with the fact that her daughter, who felt very knowable to her before she went to school, went off to kindergarten and started living this life that felt mysterious and distanced her from the little baby she once thought she knew so well. She quoted Joy Williams in it, who observed in a novel that “children vanish without dying.” I found this to be an astonishing quote, and so chilling and apt—that these children you have grow older, but that their younger selves literally just disappear forever, except in your memories or your camera roll. Initially, I think I called it “Vanish without Dying” as a placeholder. As my own daughter went to kindergarten and beyond, I got what Rivka was saying, but instead of exploring this in an essay, I thought it was perfect for a Yulia story, where I try to ask, hey, what would it look like if the younger versions didn’t have to vanish, and if we could access them in some way that went beyond our memories and home videos? Disaster, of course.
- MG: Before reading this story, I’d only been familiar with your novels, which are funny and beautifully written and great, but seem like such a different animal than the tone and voice and narrative of the story. Do you feel like in general you’re moving in a different direction as a writer, or do you think it’s more a function of the form of a short story and what you can do within it versus the form of a novel and what you can do within that?
- MK: Yes to both! During my twenties, I almost exclusively wrote realism, and felt like it was the most “true” kind of writing for me. But then a bunch of weird things happened to me, or at least things that I felt like I could not describe in a “real” way—first, my grandmother died kind of suddenly, then I had an ectopic pregnancy, and later, after my daughter was born, I had a year of postpartum insomnia, which truly made me feel like I was no longer part of “real” life but was living in a horror story while everyone around me was still on the normal plane of existence. So while I have explored these things in essays and realist fiction through my protagonist, Oksana, they also felt really apt for these weird stories that kept popping up. The stories felt shorter, funnier, and more efficiently faced whatever ailment I had head-on in an almost call-and-response way—Yulia has a problem, dad fails to fix it, and there’s some emotional aftermath. It’s almost like I would tune into a different radio station and try to follow the music, and these stories had their own kind of logic that I would have to follow. Why a gelatinous substance? No idea, but it felt right to me, and felt even more right that the faux children at the end would also be gelatinous. And that’s how this story kind of worked for me—I don’t know why, this makes no sense, but actually, it makes perfect sense.
- MG: What are you working on now, anything new?
- MK: Right now, I’m working on yet another surreal linked collection set in a college town, kind of an All Fours meets Winesburg, Ohio meets Martian Chronicles, if such a thing is possible, where I explore the weirdness of being a woman from adolescence to middle age through a variety of women who encounter cursed oak trees that cause insomnia, horny vampires, diseases that cause you to walk until you die, and more fun obstacles that make them question what it means to be a wife, a mother, and an artist. I’ve found that with my more recent work, I may be veering away from writing about Ukrainian-American immigrants and am more focused on other themes in my life, though I know I will make my way back to them. Right now it feels so heavy to say that a character is from Ukraine, and maybe even also a distraction, if I’m trying to focus on, say, a character being cursed by a tree, because so many other questions and assumptions come with it. So that is all to say, as long as life keeps feeling extremely weird to me, I will keep rolling in the weird story direction, but I am always open to something more realist coming to me.
