Empress
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Excerpt
Recently her father had started referring to her childhood home as his and her mother’s Lover’s Nest. Marie-Claude didn’t know if this was ironic or not. If it was simply a way to keep her from moving back home. MC had moved out and then in and then out again five separate times since she was eighteen. All out of necessity. She was born in a bad year, 1987. The timing for success was all wrong. None of the economic conditions were in her favor. This wasn’t just her opinion. The Atlantic had said the same thing.
The Lover’s Nest, MC asked her mother. Is that for real?
Sort of, her mother said, and shrugged, smiling to herself.
Her mother was wearing a tight white tennis dress and fiddling with her sunglasses, which hung on a gold chain around her neck. Her mother was voluptuous and earnest, but MC couldn’t remember if this had always been true or if it was new. A new self, brought about, perhaps, by the empty nest now filled with Love, her somehow graceful aging, her husband’s retirement.
The French are very particular, her mother said. They hold the knife and the fork at the same time, all through their dinner, in separate hands. You’ve never eaten that way. You’re bad with your left hand.
Nini Berndt
Nini Berndt is a graduate of the MFA program in Fiction at the University of Florida. Her work has appeared in The Southampton Review, Subtropics, Split Lip, Passages North, and elsewhere. She teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where she lives with her wife and son. Her first novel, There Are Reasons for This, is forthcoming from Tin House in June 2025.
Patrick Ryan on “Empress”
One of the wonderful things about fiction is that it allows us to “experience” things we wouldn’t actually want to experience in our real lives. Things such as washing up on a deserted island or being abducted by a psychotic nurse. My personal list includes destination weddings: a phenomenon I’m not at all keen on experiencing but love reading about in fiction. (If you’re someone dear to me and you’re reading this just as you were about to send out your invitations—sorry, and let the healing begin.)
Our new issue turns up the dial on the destination wedding scenario by setting it at sea…and then thwarting it.
To say much more would be to infringe on your reading experience. But I’ll go this far: “Empress,” by Nini Berndt, is a wry and emotionally moving story by a writer who understands the complexities of identity and how those complexities affect even the most basic quests for love. Because, ultimately, that’s what “Empress” is: a love story, set at sea. Welcome aboard!
Q&A by Patrick Ryan
- PR: Where did you get the idea for this story?
- NB: I started writing this story while I was in the south of France on vacation, but anytime I looked at my phone I saw updates of the horror in Palestine, and there was this sense of guilt, shame almost, how could I possibly be on vacation while other people are living through this atrocity? But we just go on with our lives, we go to work, go to weddings, go on vacation. We have to. So that was the backdrop of the story. The specifics of the wedding just materialized. I had the first line, and I knew this man, and I knew MC; I was that girl in large parts of my life, this woman who sort of goes along as a set piece in other people’s stories, looking for this unobtainable love. It’s a love of imagination. A love of “what ifs.” That hypothetical love, the love that could have been and never was, has so much hold over us.
- PR: How long did it take you to finish a draft you were happy with?
- NB: Once I knew the general shape, I had most of the story pretty quickly, a few weeks maybe, but the end needed to percolate. I let it sit with a different ending for a few months and then came back to it. And then it just clicked into place. The image was right, the sentiment was right.
- PR: Were there any surprises in the writing of it? Another way I sometimes ask this is, how different is the finished story from the one you set out to write?
- NB: I think I usually have quite a few surprises, but I’m not sure I did here. I always start with the voice; without the voice there isn’t a story, and the voice felt right here pretty immediately. There was an assurance in the language and tone and setting and characters that felt set, maybe in part because MC feels so much like me, at least me in certain points of my life. I knew what she wanted so clearly.
- PR: “Empress” has the best backhanded compliment I’ve ever read in a short story. MC’s then-boyfriend says to her that the woman he’s been seeing on the side is a salad, whereas MC is a cheeseburger. “You can’t eat a cheeseburger every day,” he tells her. “You have to have some greens. But you always look forward to the cheeseburger.” I don’t usually ask this sort of question, but is that a work of pure invention on your part, or something you pulled from your observations? And when you wrote it, was it the humor of the declaration or the awfulness of it that struck you the most? (Or both?)
- NB: This is, I’m afraid to say, something that was said to me, almost verbatim. And when I was told this, I did have this terrible immediate reaction of pride. It was a joke, we laughed about it, but it also seemed strangely precious to me. It was what I wanted to be. The more desirable thing, the unhealthy but delicious thing. But in retrospect (many years later), I realize how ridiculous and absurd a thing that is to say. How damaging it actually is. But I don’t know that MC is able to move into that place. I don’t know that she thinks she can be more than that to him. To anyone, really.
- PR: Can you say a little about the function of identity in the story? And roleplay?
- NB: I think much of the time we’re roleplaying to some extent. We put on and take off all these different selves, identities. We do this throughout the course of our life, but also sometimes just in the course of a day. I think a lot about the way we’re able to romanticize certain parts of ourselves, our lives, and the embarrassment that comes from confronting those things with more objectivity later on. And so those questions of “who am I? how do other people see me? who am I to them?” never have satisfactory answers. There is always some amount of distance there, and that distance creates loneliness, a loneliness often for some part of ourselves. MC doesn’t really know how to escape that loneliness.
- PR: Do you think MC and Eugene will see each other again, after this cruise?
- NB: I don’t think so. I think Eugene will try to call, and MC won’t pick up. I wish she would, though. But I don’t think she knows how to move beyond fantasy.
- PR: What are you currently working on?
- NB: I’ve started working on a new novel but I’m also working on stories. Stories are and always will be my first love. I want to get back to a place where my brain works in the mode of the story, which is a very different mode than that of the novel. I would very much like to have a story collection together before the end of the year.
- PR: What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
- NB: “Calmly write a not-calm story.” Padgett Powell said that in a workshop once and it seemed essential to me. I have that written on a notecard on my desk. It is the thing I repeat to myself most often when I’m working.
