Offense and Satisfaction
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Excerpt
The girls decide to settle their grievances with a sword fight. It will be the first known duel at the Claire Guthrie Preparatory School for Young Women, and they meet before dawn, in the fescue behind Squash Court D, fencing sabers in hand. Under the iPhone lights of two dozen sophomore witnesses, the girls are greenly radiant. They’re wearing sports bras and running shorts. Creamy March air spills from their nostrils.
Lark Spencer doesn’t notice the cold. She feels as neutral as the stone hippogriff gazing down from the fleur-de-lis crest on the clocktower. She does not need—has never needed—the breathing techniques Dr. Theriot tries to teach her during their weekly stare-downs. (Q: What are your hobbies? A: Not being in therapy.) She doesn’t need her steel-mesh face mask, or her high-collared metal lamé, or her thick cotton under-jacket, or her canvas shoulder plastron, or her hard plastic breast shield, not for this, not when harm is the entire point.
She’s unfavored in this fight. Even blessed, like she is, with a seventy-inch sword-arm reach, she lacks her opponent’s years of training. Sophia Nowak is a lefty with spring-loaded thighs and a blade speed of over forty miles per hour. Sophia is graceful, even in this moment, when she adheres to etiquette, raises her saber, and salutes her adversary. She brings the pommel to her heart, leaves Lark to follow her lead like a bumpkin.
Courtney Marcelo Norton
Courtney Marcelo Norton is a writer and attorney who lives in Atlanta. Her short fiction has appeared in Narrative, Ivy Hall Review, Jelly Bucket, Document, and Arts & Letters. She has just finished her first novel, Snake Oil, about a one-man traveling medicine show that arrives in Natchez, Mississippi, on the eve of a yellow fever outbreak.
Will Allison on “Offense and Satisfaction”
Twenty-one years ago, when I moved with my family from the Midwest to South Orange, New Jersey, I was interested to learn fencing is a popular sport at our local high school. At the schools I had attended (in South Carolina and Ohio), fencing wasn’t a thing, and I’d always been curious about it.
So when I first began reading Courtney Marcelo Norton’s elegantly written “Offense and Satisfaction”—which introduces a boarding-school sword fight in the first sentence—I perked up. Sure enough, the story went on to teach me a great deal about fencing.
What I wasn’t expecting, though, was to also learn a fair amount about pediatric cancer treatment through the indignities it inflicts upon Lark Spencer, the story’s memorable misfit hero. Marcelo Norton’s synthesis of these two bodies of knowledge—the way she brings them together to propel the narrative—is one of the many pleasures of reading this story.
I also relished the story’s good old-fashioned suspense. The narrative begins and ends with a saber duel between Lark and her boarding-school tormentor, fencing champion Sophia Nowak. And though the story moves back and forth in time, recounting all that led up to the duel, the tension of that sword fight never lets up. If it’s not playing out on the page, it’s there in the background with its thrusting sabers and threat of bodily harm, as epic a clash as anything Hollywood might serve up, minus the CGI and overwrought soundtrack. By the time the girls ended their battle, I felt almost as wrung out (and relieved) as Lark and Sophia did.
So when you sit down with this month’s issue, take a deep breath, brace yourself for a gripping ride, and then, as Lark and Sophia’s classmate and designated officiant, Adelaide Tsao-Watkins, says to commence the duel: “En garde, prêtes, allez.”
Q&A by Will Allison
- WA: What inspired you to write “Offense and Satisfaction”?
- CMN: I started writing the story about a week after my older son rang the bell to conclude his leukemia treatment. He was thirteen when he was diagnosed and seventeen when he finished, and so for about four years, we were operating purely in survival mode. There were many 2 a.m. sprints to the emergency department, many frightening hospitalizations, very little time to pause and reflect upon our circumstances. And then, suddenly, it was over, and all of the feelings I hadn’t had the space for came powerfully at once. They would have been quite overwhelming if I hadn’t been able to pour some of them into a work of fiction. I imagined how a teenage girl might handle her trauma, especially her anger and grief. The story’s duel came from the idea that some kinds of trauma cannot be reckoned with simply by talking about them. They exist physically, within the very tissues of the body, and therefore it takes some physical action (in this case, a violent action, a sword fight) to start to heal them.
- WA: What was the most challenging part of writing this story?
- CMN: The scenes describing Lark’s medical treatment were the most difficult to write. To get through them, I made a couple of decisions at the outset. First, I wouldn’t use the word cancer anywhere in the story. The word carries so much weight for me. I knew that the moment I typed it, I would stop writing the story and probably not pick it back up again. I wanted to talk about the disease without using its labels. Second, I decided I would include only the most benign, commonplace aspects of pediatric leukemia treatment in the story. What it actually looks like when a child is going through modern-day treatment is really too appalling to be credible. I would not have believed it myself, and I felt that if I included the worst aspects of treatment in the story, they simply would not come across as believable to a reader.
- WA: And what was the most satisfying part?
- CMN: It was incredibly satisfying to write about Lark’s first glimpse of healing, that moment when she has physically exhausted herself and purged so much anger and sadness. It felt wonderful to imagine what that would feel like for Lark, and I would say that the process was healing for me as well.
- WA: I love the fencing details in “Offense and Satisfaction,” and I learned a lot about the sport, thanks. Are you a fencer?
- CMN: Thank you so much. Yes, I started fencing as an adult, and purely as a hobby, and I have a younger son who fences competitively. I’ve always been fascinated by the rituals of civility in the sport and how they manage to coexist with the fairly savage actions you’re carrying out, how the slashing and lunging takes place within a paradigm of etiquette. It’s a combat sport, but it’s a very mannerly one.
- WA: I also love the story’s girls-school setting, especially the social dynamics. Why did you choose to set the story at a private girls school?
- CMN: Thank you. Yes, it was fun to build the world of the boarding school, especially as someone who grew up attending only public schools. I chose that setting because I liked how isolated the characters were, truly stuck with each other night and day. I felt like that relentless proximity, and the lack of any distraction from families or boys, would maximize the tension between them. As well, the school’s traditions and its unspoken code of conduct seemed to breed the kind of thinking that would inspire the characters to resort to a duel as a means of conflict resolution. They wanted to fight each other, but they were going to do it in a civilized, socially acceptable way.
- WA: Most of the fiction that crosses my desk is told in the first person or in close third person, but the narrator of “Offense and Satisfaction” demonstrates a bit of psychic distance, as signaled at the beginning of the story, where we don’t even enter the mind of Lark, the protagonist, until the second paragraph. Why did you opt for this distance as opposed to a “closer” telling?
- CMN: Yes, that first paragraph is a bird’s eye view of the fencers as they’re poised to begin the duel. I wanted that bit of distance to really admire their steeliness and the violence they’ve agreed to engage in. And the story ends with that same aerial view so that we can see what they’ve achieved through all of their efforts, what they’ve become as the result of the duel.
- WA: You’ve recently completed a novel. Could you tell us a little about it and compare writing a novel to writing a short story?
- CMN: My novel, Snake Oil, is set in the late 1800s in Natchez, Mississippi. It’s about a one-man traveling medicine show that comes to town on the eve of a yellow fever epidemic. Unlike stories, which I tend to write fairly quickly (anywhere from a month to three months), the novel took over ten years to write. It’s a work of historical fiction, so there was a good bit of research involved. To get the dialogue right, I read dozens of personal diaries of people living in that part of the world at that particular time in history. And the protagonist is based on a real historical figure, J.I. Lighthall, who roamed the American West from 1880 to 1886 pitching fifty-cent bottles of his “Spanish Oil” and “King of Pain” tonics. It was fascinating to research his life and the lives of other snake oil salesmen during that era.
Another difference between my novel and my stories is that I don’t tend to outline a story before I write it. I have a vague idea of where I’m heading, and I just start with the first sentence and move forward. The novel, on the other hand, with its subplots and its sheer length, demanded at least a loose outline before I could start. - WA: How long did it take you to finish “Offense and Satisfaction”?
- CMN: The story came together in about five weeks. The fight scenes took the longest to write. Saber fencing happens at a very high speed, and I really wanted to slow those actions down for the reader and highlight their various components. I kept coming back to those scenes and reworking them.
- WA: What are you working on now?
- CMN: I’m really enjoying writing short fiction right now. It’s been about five months since my son finished his treatment, and I’m feeling my creative brain coming back to me. For about four years, I didn’t write a single story, and I’m discovering there’s a stockpile of them that I didn’t know I’d been waiting to tell.
- WA: What is the best bit of writing advice you’ve ever received?
- CMN: “Why don’t you just go ahead and start?” That was something my no-nonsense grandmother would say to me when I was growing up and I’d talk about wanting to write novels or stories. It took me a very long time to actually hear that advice. I didn’t start writing fiction until I was thirty-two, having the very incorrect belief that in order to be a writer, my life needed to be fully in order, with hours of uninterrupted silence at my disposal, which, as a working mom, was never going to happen. One day, for no particular reason, I just went ahead and started. Right in the middle of the work week, at 4 a.m., with a baby upstairs in his crib. It’s really the case that if you wait for your circumstances to be ideal, you’ll be waiting forever. Just go ahead and start.
