Kat's post

Kat Reeve

8/31/14

Blog Post: Week 1

Child Innocence and Gravity in Casey Clabough’s “Show & Tell”

I felt that Casey Clabough’s piece “Show & Tell” created a unique narrative voice that was had retrospective awareness while retaining a child’s perspective of identity.  Clabough gave the reader glimpses of both himself and his mother as an adult, but the sections of childhood focus on certain details while omitting others, giving the reader the acute sensitivity and limited perspective of a child.

The first section combines the child’s visceral and the imaginative sense of the mother leaving. “Then I would hear the sudden burst of sound that came when Mama stomped the floor. She didn’t know it, but that was her real daily goodbye to me.” (Clabough, 60). Whether or not the narrator could literally hear the car a half mile away or the sound of revving the gas pedal, or if the narrator was able to lean in to a memory of the sound each morning is ambiguous. The car is a container for the relationship between the mother and child--it is a space that they alone share. The associative descriptions of the car (“V8 engine, like the drink I liked”, “...plenty of power. More than three hundred horses worth.”) make it more than just a physical object, but also something imbued with the qualities and tastes of the narrator and mother. The narrator keeps a toy car when he misses his mother at nap time. However, the car rides are necessarily fleeting and signal the child’s daily loss of the mother. The child’s love of his mother and an intense sadness are both seen through the description of the car.

The sound of the car ‘like faraway thunder’ stands in contrast to the silence that permeates the rest of the story. There is little dialogue and few other sounds in the story.  The old, rattling car is boldly out of place--just as the mother obviously does not fit with the status quo. First she is a “housewife”-- a role that is obviously not respected-- then we learn that she was a woman scientist at a time when that was an anomaly. The old car also points to the socio-economic status of the family that they cannot afford a new car. To me, the loudness of the car echoes the smashing of the jar when the mother is being sexually harassed while teaching. The mother character says few words throughout the story, but the violent crash of the jar that displaces ridicule seems to reverberate in the loud car that drowns out judgement.

The author was also able to capture a child-like sense of  understanding the world by creating a sense of negative space. There are a lot of things we don’t see (what color is the mother’s hair? what does she look like? what about the father?) and the absence of description gives a weight to the narrator’s world. The lack of knowing the complete story, of being told, coupled with deep emotional sensitivity of the narrator capture the child’s acute ability to sense the world through a few clues.

The story also takes a child-like perspective in the skeleton in the closet. Instead of becoming only the cliched symbol of family secrets or shame, it takes on multiple meaings.  The skeleton is covered in everyday objects. It represents both a foreboding sense of death as well as a kind of normalcy of taboo subjects--death and insides. The mother talks to the skeleton as if it is a real person, a long lost friend. The skeleton represents her success in medical school, her gender-barrier breaking career that has also ‘died’. The skeleton also represents the ‘hidden’ truth the child and the mother share; the delicate and fascinating structure of the world beneath the everyday. The skeleton serves to empower the mother when she shows it to the class. She is no longer disparaged as a ‘homemaker’, but rather of someone who can show reality as it is rarely seen. The mother is able to ‘show them what they are.’

            In the descriptions of the car, the skeleton and the mother Clabough gave us a sense of innocence that belies the weight that each of these things in his formation of identity.