Work Opportunities: Stories by Teresa Milbrodt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Work Opportunities: Stories by Teresa Milbrodt Kate Harlin (bio) Teresa Milbrodt. Work Opportunities: Stories. Portage Press. Work Opportunities, Teresa Milbrodt's new fiction collection asks what it means when our bodies, with all of their specific quirks, frailties, and imperfections, become the focal point of our livelihoods, our relationships, our lives, and finds answers alternately joyful and devastating. While it may be difficult, arguably, for someone to read "Fat Lady to Marry Skeleton Man: Tickets $0.25" and not envy the quiet self-assurance of four-hundred-pound retired sideshow act Cece, or to fail to admire the effortless cool of teen wheelchair user Zee in "Shoes," it is when the characters' senses of themselves and their bodies come into conflict that the stories eke out the most uncomfortable truths. When two small-mammal zoo-keepers begin an affair after the death of a beloved hedgehog, Milbrodt compares the intimacy of sex in a workplace to the less embodied—but perhaps equally vulnerable—intimacy of shared grief. In "Drug Dealers," a child observes his parents' futile search for a Fountain of Youth, a quest not to stave off death but to repulse the humiliating ways their bodies betray them as they age. Indeed, we are reminded throughout the collection that although it is possible to find times of relative peace and acceptance of our bodies as they are, the next bodily betrayal looms just around the corner. Milbrodt's collection is also quintessentially American. Not only does she pepper her stories with intentional geographical specificity, she also makes many of the jobs and their accompanying hazards manifest only as they are in an American context. Take, for instance, "See Aaron Burr's Foot," in which a father and son depend on a severed foot to divert tourists to their struggling North Carolina gas station. The foot, purchased at an estate sale for ten dollars and stored haphazardly in a messy back office, becomes a monument of sorts to the protagonist. The fact that it is not at all, of course, really Aaron Burr's foot reinforces the monument's meaning: that to imbue an individual man, body, or foot with too much narrative significance is a recipe for foolishness. This collection is the writer's first book-length foray into realism—sort of. While Bigfoot doesn't make an appearance, we do return to the sideshows. However, unlike Milbrodt's 2011 Bearded Women: Stories, 2018's Work Opportunities never leaves the realm of the possible. Yet from the trainers of film-set squirrels [End Page 189] and Siberian sled cats to the fire swallowers and great-aunts-for-hire, the characters that populate the worlds of this book are sideways, surreal, and startling without being wholly unbelievable. In each story, Milbrodt crafts, in just a few short pages, a world almost indistinguishable from our own, but where the characters, who would often live at the margins of the world we recognize, comfortably occupy the center. The narrators and protagonists of the stories fiercely enforce their control over their own narratives, and the reader must buy in to each of their peculiar skewed vantage points for the stories to pay off. "Box," one of the most provocative entries in the collection, serves as a kind of origin story for Taffy, a charismatic woman who, upon being evicted by her practical and resentful sister, finds success in homelessness. She offers the community a landmark and a common cause, and in return they offer her enough material comforts to survive. The narrator's frustrated bemusement, rooted in the utter logic of mainstream discourse about rewarding work rather than indulging laziness, threatens to drive her completely mad. And this, I think, is the great achievement of Work Opportunities: it throws into sharp relief the sickness at the center of efforts to standardize our work, our bodies, and our lives. Kate Harlin Kate Harlin is a PhD student at the University of Missouri studying contemporary American fiction. Copyright © 2018 University of Nebraska Press