Can You Feel This? by Julie Orringer

Published digitally by Amazon on December 19, 2019

Amazon commissioned five stories for a series it calls Inheritance. The stories are unconnected to each other except by the broad theme of family secrets. In a departure from its usual format, Tzer Island will review one story in the Inheritance series each day this week.

“Can You Feel This” is a mundane story about the anxieties of a new mother who, in childbirth, recalls a traumatic experience that she has hidden from her husband. Julie Orringer hints at the traumatic incident before it is revealed near the story’s end. Until then, the story’s focus is on childbirth, territory that has been explored in countless stories about the anxieties experienced by new mothers. Orringer does nothing new or special in this story’s examination of the fear of motherhood.

Emily is understandably freaked out about the bleeding that won’t stop. Recalling her doctor’s warnings, she fears losing her baby. As her husband Ky drives her across a bridge to Manhattan, she’s also freaked out because she sees a different bridge where her mother died 28 years earlier. Apparently, Emily has never become acclimated to traveling from Brooklyn to Manhattan via a bridge.

Against her wishes, Ky takes her to the hospital where she saw her mother’s dead body. Emily feels very alone because she has no living parents, notwithstanding the presence of a patient husband who drove her to the hospital and stayed in her room during her C-section, as well as three friends who visit during her brief hospital stay. Emily is a bit fragile.

Doctors stick Emily with needles and repeatedly ask “Can you feel this?” Hence the title, which presumably also refers to all the other things the protagonist does or doesn’t feel. How very literary.

Since it happens quite early, it isn’t a spoiler to report that the baby is delivered alive and that he smells like wildflowers. Alyssum, in particular. Orringer goes on about new-baby scent for just a few sentences, but that’s a few sentences too long for my taste.

The bulk of the story explores Emily’s endless stream of anxieties: her reluctance to enter a state of motherhood because of her unhappy experience with her unstable mother; her attempts to figure out how to operate her newborn. Neither her husband (who stays dutifully in the background) nor her supportive visitors lessen her self-absorbed anguish. Why Emily insists on feeling sorry for herself in the midst of all this love and attention is a bit of a mystery. Emily seems to think she needs her long-dead mother to tell her how to raise a baby, a task that women have been doing forever, despite getting advice and instruction, not to mention helpful pamphlets, from hospital staff. If she needs coaching, she can also turn to another visitor, a “powerful” West Coast neuroscientist who is the mother of three children and one of Emily’s long-time friends. So why all the fuss?

The story works its way to a denouement after Emily leaves the hospital and must again confront a scary bridge, (presumably) symbolic of a bridge between pre-mommy life and her new-mommy status. In second-person prose that is (presumably) meant to connect the reader more closely to Emily, we learn the source of her life-shaping trauma. I rejected the traumatic moment as ridiculously manipulative and, in any event, I had little sympathy for Emily’s three-decade long refusal to confront her past. Nor was I moved by the suggestion that childbirth will finally give Emily reason to change.

Orringer’s prose is fluid. Emily is the only character who is given even the slightest substance (all that can be said of her husband is that he seems like a nice guy), although it isn’t unusual to shortchange secondary characters in short fiction. I found no offsetting virtues to overcome my dislike of a contrived motherhood story about an annoyingly fragile character. Readers who enjoy obvious emotional manipulation or, for that matter, stories about anxious new mommies will likely have a very different reaction.

NOT RECOMMENDED