Zorrie & Cocktails for When the World Feels Like it’s Slipping Straight Out of Your Fingers
Image from Bloomsbury.
Novel: Zorrie
Laird Hunt’s Zorrie, published by Bloomsbury Publishing, is a soft-spoken narrative that works hard to explore loss and joy, and the challenge of making connections in an emotionally stunted era. Through its eponymous main character, Zorrie, the novel also models coping mechanisms and the importance of beginnings, for both narratives and lives.
It took her a long time to come fully into consciousness, and as she lay there, vaguely urging her eyelids to open, aware that she was not quite awake, it seemed to her she had never felt so comfortable, so careless, so at ease.
— Zorrie, pg. 3
Zorrie’s life begins in loss and the way that loss is shaped around her informs the trajectory the story takes as well as her response to the life ahead of her. Her parents both pass to diphtheria when she’s a child and her aunt, who had “drunk too deeply from the cup of bitterness” after her divorce, becomes her caretaker but she doesn’t allow Zorrie a moment to grieve. “If she woke up screaming,” we’re told, “she received a slap. Sometimes she received a slap anyway.” Affection, in her aunt’s home and throughout the novel as a whole, is another rare currency, and it’s only when Zorrie is working hard at chores that she receives complements and attention from her aunt creating a deep and abiding connection between her self worth and work. It’s only in these moments of deep, focused work when her aunt reveals any vulnerability and talks about her deferred dream to open a flower shop, reinforcing work’s value for Zorrie. This forms the beginning of a coping mechanism through which Zorrie will forever deal with emotion: unable to articulate her traumas she must demonstrate an “unbrokenness” to herself throughout, even when those close to her try to help her express herself more directly.
This work-as-outlet mentality create a subtle and anxious conflict that results in confused, emotional outbursts later, frustrated moments that come on suddenly and without intention. Like when Zorrie visits Marie, one of the girls she worked with at the Radium Dial Company, who is suffering from cancer caused by the radium they used to paint clock faces with luminescent paint. On the ride home, Zorrie becomes overcome with emotion as she confronts the traumas of her life regarding the paint, concerned that it caused so much of that loss in her life—from her miscarriage to the death of her fellow Ghost Girls, to her husband’s death in WW II, and beyond—and she has to pull over to the side of the road. There, she feels the need to get out and walk around, to escape her feelings, and when she does a teal car comes by playing music she recognizes, and “whether…it was joy or some of that old hope her aunt had so hated, it made her want to move her feet,” so she does, dancing and humming there on the side of the road, giving in to an inexpressible need.
This gentle, but obvious, surfacing of anxiety is present throughout Zorrie, an understated thread that’s pulled more and more taut as loss and small regrets begin to heap. The novel, though, as a whole, is understated. From the narration to the dialogue, it feels like the right tone for the emotionally stunted era of hardworking America for whom it’s difficult to express what’s happening when feelings are involved.
The narrative provides us with exceptions to the walled-off emotional characters who populate the pages, like Opal, who is hospitalized because she’s mentally unstable (though we’re uncertain whether that’s because she’s actually unstable or just seen that way through the midcentury’s lens of mental health vis-à-vis the emotions of women), and Opal’s husband, Noah, who has been separated from his wife for decades after her hospitalization; he burns down his barn hoping to be hospitalized with his wife, but only receives a few slaps to pull him from himself.
Zorrie herself has no outlet for her emotions. And worse, she doesn’t seem to think much about that. It’s only when she’s too old to work, and she must take more time resting, that she’s forced to deal with her feelings, her old thoughts, though there’s little reflection on the situations that cause the moments she recalls. There’s no anger and the Radium Dial Company for poisoning her and her friends, no rage at her aunt or questions about how women wind up where men never do. Zorrie lives an unexamined life.
There she cried amid the pretty trees for a time about where the deaths first of her parents and then of her awful old aunt had brought her. Soon, though, she became furious with herself for carrying on and for thinking of her poor dead aunt as awful, even if on balance she so clearly had been, so she set her chin and marched into town, telling herself as she went that she had to live up to the Attica woman’s observation.
—Zorrie, pg. 11
Unexplored emotion is just one of the mid-themes of the novel. That is, a theme that sits between the other two central themes as a bridge between them. On one side, hard work and its consequences, and on the other what makes a life happy, what makes it good.
The consequences of hard work are shown but unarbitrated by the narrative, or even by Zorrie. Only Marie, one of the remaining Ghost Girls from the Radium Dial Company, shows any anger at what they were made to suffer, but even that is cleverly disguised through its description as a dance, how the cancer had “made its mark on her dance card too, and that she would be starting treatment soon” and that her “prognosis was generally positive…and [Marie] was feeling motivated to get things done.” The Ghost Girls suffer the most from the prioritization of work over life, over individual lives, and they justify the dangerous labor as necessary to acquire their dreams, though they never really do.
They’re not the only example in the book. Zorrie, having worked hard for her aunt until her passing, is left with nothing when the state claims her aunt’s home for back taxes, and Opal, no matter how well behaved she is at the hospital, never returns to Noah. Even Noah, upon us meeting him on the page, is missing fingers from one hand from working the farm. It’s all the price of work, of doing business.
There’s no moment of emotional growth for Zorrie, no exploration of feeling or situation. Questions are posed but her being content with being content is always the answer. A good mindset seems to move her through. “What do you aspire to?” she’s asked by Gus and Bessie, her eventual in-laws, “which took her a moment to understand,” though she never provides an answer. It’s unsettling, too, that everything that brings Zorrie happiness in the novel is given to her by someone else, and what she pursues on her own leads to confusion and failure. Harold, her husband, is presented to her by Gus and Bessie, and he turns out to be the love of her life. Oats, Zorrie’s dog, is given to her by Ruby when Zorrie becomes withdrawn after her husband’s death. When Zorrie tries to take a small trip away from her town she gets lost; when she tries to kiss Noah, he rejects her. And in these ways the narrative presents an idyllic midcentury situation, rife with problems and issues, but stops just short of exploring their consequences, resists causing any direct conflict that Zorrie would have to face, and instead seems to insist that happiness is an action. Maybe two actions: working hard and ignoring the bad.
“And grief at long hard last breaks a way for the voice.” Noah said that in truth he had always been partial to the next citation, by Petrarch: “He who can say how he burns, burns little.”
“I like that very much,” said Zorrie. “Do you suppose it’s true?”
“Maybe it depends on how you’re burning,” Noah said.
“Let’s not talk too much about burning,” Ruby said with a shiver.
—Zorrie, pgs. 66-67
It’s frustrating to have such a wonderfully written narrative ignore the correlations between cause and effect when Zorrie goes to great lengths to carefully, and beautifully, render such moments. There is an insistence that everything is good, and that the only way is through to the other side where, by hard work and optimism, happiness waits. But there’s so much missing from the history of the world, so much that’s ignored, that it feels intentionally myopic in its scope. Is it even possible to tell a happy story anymore? Does Zorrie condemn the happy as willfully ignoring the issues and problems of the world outside their backyards? Zorrie feels like a novel full of rich and interesting material that’s handed to the reader but somehow, it all falls away. In the readers’ hands, the Ghost Girls’ sickness and Opal’s “madness” and Zorrie’s miscarriage and Harold’s death and the quickly changing world at large slips through the fingers and all that’s left is Zorrie.
It’s impossible to discern intent, though it feels that Hunt’s are good, and lofty, the entirety of the story articulated and wrought with such skillful attention that for the reader—for me—to ignore it is just as myopic. There might be something hidden in the pages of Zorrie that speak surreptitiously about what it takes to be truly happy in those fleeting moments we’re able: focus, dedication, a long lead-up from hard work, and the willingness to forget everything problematic in the world, if only for a small time.
Cocktails for When the World Feels Like it’s Slipping Straight Out of Your Fingers
Cocktail: Ghost Girl
…the girls on either side of Zorrie rose as one from their places, took her by her elbows, and led her into the adjoining, windowless lavatory, where with some ceremony they had her stand in front of the mirror over the sink before flipping the lights off. First Zorrie saw that her lips were alive with yellow, and then that her fingertips were covered in glowing splotches. The girls behind her were glowing too. One of them had painted a heart on her cheek. The other had painted an eye on her forehead. Their hair and dresses shimmered. Their lips and teeth too were golden. They waved their arms and shook their shoulders and, as they giggled, sent off little clouds of glowing powder to drift through the dark.
—Zorrie, pg 13
Ghost Girl
2oz Aquavit
1.5oz Corn & Pea Infused Dry Vermouth*
0.5oz Manzanilla Sherry
Add all ingredients to a shaker then add ice. Stir for 20-30 turns.
Pour into a chilled coupe or martini glass.
NOTE: *add 2oz of thawed frozen sweet corn and 2oz of thawed frozen peas to 4oz of Extra Dry Vermouth and let steep in the refrigerator overnight (8 hours), then strain and refrigerate.
Cocktail: Oats
Zorrie had just been reading an article about the benefits of switching over to a strict corn-beans-clover rotation and had been wondering if she should give up the ten acres she still put out in oats, which hadn’t done her much good for some years. She touched the puppy’s stomach again….
“What are you going to call it?”
“Oats,” said Zorrie.
—Zorrie, pg. 63.
Oats
1.5oz Rye Whiskey
0.5oz Sweet Vermouth
0.5oz Lemon Juice
1oz Brown Sugar Syrup (1:1)
2oz Blueberry Toasted Oat Milk*
3 Dashes Black Walnut Bitters
Optional: 1 Egg White
Add all ingredients to a tin and shake without ice for 30 seconds to emulsify the egg; add ice and shake for 15 seconds.
Strain into a rocks glass over one large cube, or up in a coupe or martini glass. Garnish with picked blueberries.
NOTE: *Toast 1/2c rolled oats in a 350 degree oven for 10-20 minutes or until golden brown. Weigh out 100g of toasted oats, 200g of Blueberries, and 300g of water (optional: 1Tbs of Maple Syrup); process the ingredients in a blender until smooth, 30-45 seconds. Strain through a cheese cloth or clean, white t-shirt; refrigerate for up to two weeks.
Cocktail: Full Fathom Five
The final day, the group went to Scheveningen by the sea, and while most of her fellows were content to sit over Dutch waffle cookies and cups of hot coffee and write postcards and watch the rain, Zorrie went out onto the beach and down to the water and did not mind one bit that she had no umbrella or that her good shoes got quickly soaked. This time she did think of Harold, for if some small part of him lay under a sprinkling of worn-out Luna powder, not to mention in the treacherous folds of her heart, the rest of him was somewhere out in the deeps before her.
— Zorrie pgs. 152-153
Full Fathom Five
2oz Ketel One Vodka
1oz Espresso
1oz Stroopwafel Syrup
1 Graham Cracker or Handful of Vanilla Wafers
In a food processor, blitz Graham Cracker until reduced to crumbs; with a spray bottle/atomizer, spritz the outside of a coupe or goblet with simple syrup (2:1 sugar to water); holding glass upside down, sprinkle the crumbs over it until the entire glass is dusted.
Add all cocktail ingredients (minus Graham Cracker) to a tin and shake with ice for 15 seconds.
Strain into glass and garnish with half of a caramel stroopwafel.
NOTE: *In a dry sauce pan, place 4oz of white sugar and melt over medium heat, stirring occasionally; once all the sugar has begun to melt and caramelize, add 6oz of hot water and stir constantly until the mass of caramel sugar is dissolved, being mindful of the steam; chop into small pieces two whole Daelman’s Caramel Stroopwafels and pour still-hot burnt-sugar syrup over it in a microwave safe glass; let sit for 5 minutes and then microwave for 30 seconds, stir, and microwave again, then blend in a food processor and allow to sit for 20 minutes; strain through fine mesh strainer, then strain through a coffee filter. This syrup is delicious over ice cream, pancakes, or in an old fashioned.