This weekend’s selection is a relatively obscure short story from Marilynne Robinson, “Connie Bronson,” published in the 1986 Summer-Fall issue of The Paris Review. How it begins:
I had one friend named Connie Bronson who lived two houses up the street from me and was one year younger than I and two grades behind because she had had brain fever. She had blood-red hair and a freckle-spattered face, and was called Bones by the boys at school, who regarded her with intense loathing and in bad weather often spent whole recesses devising other, more terrible epithets for her.
All of this was a source of great sorrow to her mother, who took a job in a drugstore so that Connie could have piano and tap-dancing lessons, and gave parties for her on every pretext, ordering huge cakes from the bakery encrusted with coarse, dusty frosting and blowsy sugar-roses, calling the mothers of each of the children in Connie’s class to be sure that the parties were well-attended.
She had once even bought the girl a pony which, since her means were limited, was very old and sickly and ill-tempered, and was put up for sale again a few weeks later because it bit Connie’s hand, breaking her little finger, which, though it was set and re-set, healed veering outward at the first knuckle. This, of course, cast a shadow over those of her mother’s hopes that rested with the piano lessons, and provided another theme for the inventions of the little boys at school.
Keep reading here. For more of Robinson’s fiction, check out one of her most loved novels, Gilead. Previous SSFSs here.
The Dish 