Darkly funny and quietly brutal stories about the lives people build around the past
The title of M.C. Schmidt’s short story collection, Tell Me Something Before I Show You, is taken from a conversation between thirteen-year-olds: a bargain. A secret for a secret. It’s an apt title for a book about the ambiguity of memory—the often-conflicting space between what happened and the stories we tell ourselves about what happened.
Across eleven thematically interconnected stories, Schmidt immerses us in the lives of characters surviving in the shadow of their choices. The stories move through grudges, marriages, and families, as characters avoid the versions of themselves they keep failing to outgrow. The collection feels uncanny and leaves us with the sense that everything is just a touch off.
In the opening story, “That Actor Who Drowned,” a man fixates on the disappearance of an actor in Lake Champlain. The actor himself means nothing to the now-elderly narrator. Lake Champlain, however, means a lot. In 1970, he spent a lonely summer in Vermont, where he was befriended by Stevie, the kid brother of one of his grandmother’s farmhands. Stevie promises to take him to a secret swimming spot, but he first needs a secret from the narrator, like a down payment. “Everybody’s got a secret. Fair is fair.”
This familiar adolescent bargain essentially establishes the book’s terms. Schmidt’s characters are forever wrestling with how much they can reveal and what version of history they can live with. The various events at the heart of the characters’ wounds aren’t particularly dramatic on first blush. Instead, they show up in what people won’t say, in what they choose to misremember. Those old wounds fester, though; they leak into marriages, arguments, jokes, habits, and the stories people tell about themselves.
These stories are filled with characters who’ve had decades to revise themselves. Schmidt doesn’t treat his elderly characters as superficial repositories of wisdom or remorse. Everyone in this collection is intensely human: vain, frightened, petty, horny, funny, defensive, often wrong. Time doesn’t clarify Schmidt’s characters. If anything, it just gives them more substance with which to lie to themselves.
Schmidt trusts the readers to find meaning without beating them over the head with it. He lets concrete details accumulate: a drained swimming pool, climbing gear hung on a rental-house wall, wallpaper patterned with deer and lemons. These features don’t announce themselves. They’re just part of somebody’s life; it’s only time that clarifies their significance.
Schmidt does much the same thing with dialogue. Characters tend to avoid saying exactly what they mean. Instead, they tell it slant, leaving plenty of room for dark comic relief, of which there is plenty. It’s the humor here that keeps grief, aging, and estrangement from turning solemn or excessively self-aware. Schmidt keeps puncturing solemnity with embarrassment, irritation, bad jokes, and the petty humiliations of ordinary life.
In these eleven stories, first-person narration is just another form of distortion. Characters tell us who they think they are, and everything around them tells us not to take them entirely at their word. Schmidt explores what happens when somebody slips outside the assigned part. Children discover that their parents existed before them and apart from them. Parents discover their children have become unknowable adults. Long marriages contain earlier versions of people their present-day spouses can barely recognize.
Nostalgia, in particular, is treated with healthy suspicion. In “The Rental,” a retired climber watches his old climbing rope become wall art, with pitons tied into it as decorative accents. Crampons, carabiners, and even his ice axe follow. A life he once lived becomes the theme of somebody else’s weekend rental. The core pieces of his life are so easily turned into décor. In this way, Schmidt is sharp about that insult of aging: the self that formerly felt immediate becomes something that can be framed, displayed, explained.
The stories occasionally push past the point where the image has done enough. In “The Rabbit Died,” a buried fertility figure becomes the subject of a conversation about what it might mean. The conversation is intelligent, but Schmidt’s physical details are powerful enough without the characters’ interpretation. This is a small issue, however, and speaks to the fact that his imagery doesn’t really need any translation.
In “Deer and Lemons,” the closing story, a father preparing for death wants to leave behind something material that’s peculiar enough that the next family living in his house will think of him. “I want the next family to wonder about me,” he tells his son. It’s tongue-in-cheek, but also the heart of what the whole collection is asking. What lingers once the event itself is over, even if, or especially if, the life itself is the event? Not necessarily wisdom. Not closure. Sometimes it’s a story somebody tells badly. Sometimes it’s an object whose meaning has changed. Sometimes it’s a room no one else knows is there.
Tell Me Something Before I Show You cleverly explores what people do with memory once they’ve lived with it long enough. They polish it, misremember it, turn it into family lore, or hang pieces of an old life on a rental wall. The result is a sharp, darkly funny literary collection about people trying to live with what they can’t quite put behind them.
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