DADDY ISSUES: Stories
by Eric C. Wat
Univ. of Nebraska. 156 pages, $21.95
IN ERIC C. WAT’S short story collection, Daddy Issues, the author reveals hidden responsibilities, roles, and rules that shape the lives of his queer, Asian-American protagonists, who have come of age in L.A. and now must contend with adult life. Wat gives his protagonists a backstory that reveals the hardships, pressures, and compromises that operate on each of them. This history gives the reader space for wobbly first steps out of the closet. We suspend judgment about backward stumbles into problems that have persisted for years. These writers, artists, educators, and social workers lag on the timeline of typical achievements by American adults—if we can posit such a norm.
Walter, the perfectionist narrator of “This Business of Death,” expertly handles the funeral luncheon for his deceased aunt, ordering the same eight dishes for every table. Uncredited by his cousins, he watches as plates of pork chops become bones, and leftovers disappear into takeout boxes. No one in the family acknowledges the loving care that Walter gave his aunt. Walter, we learn, is also expert at handling secrets, especially those that might cause others discomfort. Among three generations of his family, he’s out to only one, his peers. There’s talk that Walter and his cousin Clark had “explored each other” as kids. Clark, now married to Zara, lets the blame fall on Walter, who after all grew up to be gay.
In “Sober (WTF),” the joyless protagonist, who is 39, in recovery from meth use, and working on Narcotics Anonymous’ twelve steps, goes on a “real date” with the engaged man who’s been his monthly hookup. Wandering Little Tokyo with a white man who thinks sushi makes up the totality of Japanese cuisine, the protagonist feels his misery building until the date story erupts into a relapse story. He calls his sponsor, Marie, who “always had a truism waiting.” While Marie views the precarious relationship as a relapse trigger, the protagonist thinks it’s enough that he’s sober, having sex without drugs. His expectations of himself are low. He congratulates himself for hanging onto his apartment through his substance use, while people he’d partied with had lost their homes. When he storms from his date into a Skid Row encampment, instead of triggering relapse, the sight of an orange tent triggers a call to his old camping buddy, whom he’d dropped at step nine, when, we infer, he couldn’t make amends.
James, the disgruntled writer in “Duffel Bag,” can’t afford Chicago, so he heads to New York City (cue rude awakening). His life, including his story collection, which has been accepted by a small press, fills a duffel bag the size of a small person. “[M]y duffel bag is not the easiest thing to maneuver in the New York subway,” he says. Nor is his imposter syndrome, with its fluctuating sense of self-worth. While freeloading off his foster sister, who has emerged from a similarly rough childhood, James berates the publishing industry, cringes at the idea of writerly conversation, and simultaneously feels superior to, inferior to, and jealous of an MFA classmate, a Native American whose debut novel has “glowing” reviews. “The world is not ready for boys who like blowjobs,” James grumbles, somehow oblivious to writers such as Garth Greenwell, Alan Hollinghurst, Brandon Taylor, Ocean Vuong, and Edmund White. When James’ sister gets excited about his career, he responds with preemptive negativity: “The book might not lead to anything.”
In “Natural Law,” we meet Herman and Stella two days after a miscarriage. He says: “We’re in this together.” She says: “Not right now.” He’s a stay-at-home writer who cooks and does laundry. He’s writing a piece about a physicist. “What do you know about physics?” Stella says, sounding mean, though Herman says she didn’t intend to. In the last paragraphs, this story of understandable pain shifts. Herman, in the laundry room, awkwardly chatters to the man from upstairs, who’s in and out retrieving laundry. When the neighbor is gone, Herman kneels before the still-warm dryer, sticks his head and shoulders inside, and breathes, a gesture that seems at once comfort-seeking, fetishistic, and suicidal. Head inside the drum, he continues reciting a list of things he loves about Stella, a litany that we realize is as well-practiced as a prayer. Herman thinks of loneliness and “love bottled up.” His performance is so oddly rote that we stop believing in the previous Herman. The man kneeling half inside the dryer isn’t mourning but enacting his form of conversion therapy.
In “The Lady in the Moon,” Mason fumes silently during a family road trip. He’s agreed to share Grandma’s bed in the same hotel room as his parents, while his straight married brother gets a private room with his wife. On the phone, Mason’s boyfriend asks why he goes along with it. He says he doesn’t know, but thinks: “It takes too much to explain to someone in your world about another world that you also live in. Sometimes it’s just easier to go along.”
In Daddy Issues, Wat creates characters with recalcitrant problems that people struggle with for years. As we read about these individuals, red flags go up. It’s no wonder the characters in these realistic stories don’t find solutions. At the end of “This Business of Death,” Walter contemplates coming out to his young son, who seems ready to understand. We think Walter might come out before the story’s end, but he doesn’t get there, only closer. We register his incremental progress, movement in the right direction, but Wat leaves a breakthrough outside the narrative, in the future, just a hope.
Lori O’Dea, a fiction writer and critic in Chicago, has appeared in LIBER, The Massachusetts Review, Rain Taxi, Bridge, and others.
