Unpacking “Emmas” & Apposition
Image from BBC News
Story: “Emmas”
In Jessie Roy’s story, “Emmas,” published by The Journal, there’s a lot to unpack and a lot that’s unpacked by the narrator: moments of the near past woven with those of the distant past that evince a quiet, unshaped anger that can only be known through the act of unpacking and storytelling.
Difficult to remember the difference between now and then, my wife and not my wife: the chief one being the unknowability of my own future, the struggle to imagine that my wife would remain my anything.
First person narrators rarely understand what it is their working towards saying when they’re telling their story, and the narrator for “Emmas” is no different: swallowed frustration, un-expressed/-expressible emotions, and an uncertainty about how to move towards what she wants culminates into a story that works to make sense of it all. Speaking from a place where the narrator is more confidant and secure, she begins the story in the near past and occasionally allows scenes from the distant past into the narrative which not only demonstrate the narrator’s search for understanding but help contextualize actions and thoughts in the near present of the story. The tone of the story is patient and curious, but confidant, too. The mature voice of the narrator looking back at herself is in opposition to the action we’re given of the young narrator who is curt and brash, and feckless when it comes to expressing herself. It’s this mature tone that secretly assures us that, eventually, things improve for the narrator in the near past. Just listen to her speak now. The positive end is already spoiled from the start.
Tracing the plot isn’t a good way to go about exploring this story. If you want a plot-driven deep dive, I recommend simply reading it. I’m more interested in how the story’s form and use of punctuation embodies the narrator’s need to unpack things, how she organizes her memories in a way that helps the narrator in the present understand herself better: she does this through those movements into the near and distant past that, through the use of colons, represents her own emotional unpacking of memory.
I used to go in every day at six for shipment shift, which is where you take the boxes off the truck and sort everything, first by department, then color, and finally, size: when I was done the racks looked so neat, tiny pink cargo shorts on one end and big ones on the other.
Colons are crafty bits of punctuation that have well-understood grammatical uses, but they also have the potential to be used for artistic expression like they are in “Emmas.” One of the more interesting ways they’re used here is to create dynamic apposition. The narrator provides a statement and then recontextualizes it through a second statement that’s linked to the first with a colon. Something similar happens with semicolons throughout the story, too, but the semicolons have more awareness to them; the narrator knows what she’s saying and she’s saying it the way she wants, whereas the colons feel more like a subconscious connecting of two things, an honest phrase followed by a mature unpacking of it on the other side of the colon. To the left of the colon, the metaphorical box: to the right, the metaphorical contents.
The apposition created through the use of colons and semicolons is echoed in the shifting between temporal memories, too. “Let me start again,” the narrator says after only two paragraphs before she shifts away from the near present of her job working with Emma unpacking department store boxes and moves into the distant past when she was with her Girl Scout troop at a museum. In this memory, we meet her travel buddy, “Emma, who was not named Emma, but is so clearly an Emma that it seems silly to call her anything else,” and that works to recontextualize the first two paragraphs, where we’ve met a different Emma, into something more meaningful. Through this back and forth in time and memory, a more complex picture is rendered of what the narrator is working to understand.
These appositions, and temporal shifts with reflection, don’t provide an answer to a question; they don’t reveal anything. This is a narrative of acceptance, of learning to love one’s self. The narrative moves towards understanding, an “I made it” moment. “Here I am,” the narrator seems to say at the end, “and this is how I got here.”
Cocktail: Apposition
She shuffled toward the largest statue, right in the center of the room. I thought of it as ‘it,’ unsure whether the figure was meant to be male or female and without any other language for their overlap, or absence. It covered its face with one hand and trailed the other, unnaturally long, arm toward the ground, grazing along its bent knee. Every limb tapered to impossible thinness: its hands were not true hands but flat, lacy mosses, growing outward to cover whatever they touched. Its feet, the same. Every time I looked at it, I felt the room as full of threatening presences.
This week’s cocktail is called Apposition, and like the complex recontextualization “Emmas” creates through its use of colons this cocktail pairs two spirits uncommonly used together to create something bright and flavorful. Apposition is a sour riff built with gin and smoky Islay scotch, melon liqueur, cucumber oleo, and lime juice. Visually inspired by the scene at the museum, the cocktail relies on the varied differences between the main spirits to create a surprisingly pleasing sipper.
Apposition
1.5oz Gin (citrus forward)
0.5oz Islay Scotch
0.5oz Melon Liqueur
0.25oz Cucumber Oleo*
0.75oz Lime Juice
2 dashes Orange Bitters
Add all of the ingredients together to a shaker, add ice, and shake for 10-15 seconds.
Strain into a chilled coupe: garnish with fresh nutmeg and lime.