Review: Belly Up by Rita Bullwinkel

Reviewed by Joanna R. Demkiewicz

Belly Up
Stories by Rita Bullwinkel
A Strange Object, May 2018
$14.59, 192 pp.
ISBN-13:978-0998518435

Rita Bullwinkel’s debut collection of stories Belly Up is uncanny, prickly, romantic, and ultimately anchored by the fluidity of bodies. Bodies in Belly Up are vibrating harps, a piece of furniture, and foldable ghosts throwing punches that make contact “like two waves going through each other, two tides briefly meeting and then receding and meeting again.” This elasticity traverses a spectrum that runs from playful to grotesque. The visceral flavor of this collection is an eight out of ten. Think of it like spice level. Bring milk.

“In the South, the Sand Winds Are Our Greatest Enemy” features two brothers—one a surgeon, the other a sculptor—who are banished to work a prison infirmary, where they re-attach prisoners’ limbs, lost either by accident or malice. After a man’s thumb is lobbed off during a brick-laying accident, the brothers conduct a successful albeit sketchy surgery, and the prisoners begin to think of them as magicians, or godly. This story treats body parts like velcro in order to illuminate the parallelism of magic and manipulation. Like one of Bullwinkel’s former obsessions, “The Thunder, Perfect Mind,” this story is a riddle; it tangles the miracles of medicine and art together, leaving the reader wondering what makes them a true believer.

More compelling than the absurdly grotesque is the way Bullwinkel explores violence and women’s agency. In “Arms Overhead,” two bookish friends banter about cannibalism the way other girls their age may gossip about crushes and glitter. They read aloud to each other from books about parthenogenesis—a reproductive strategy in which a female fertilizes herself without male intervention—and the ouroboros, an ancient symbol that is both “man and woman, begetting and conceiving, devouring and giving birth.” When Mary reads this aloud to Ainsley, Ainsley confidently responds: “That makes perfect sense to me.” These are astute observers, imaginative enough to understand the world is not simply binary, underscored by their interest in a symbol that represents the dualities of existence.

Their imagination is earned in the way many young girls’ imaginations develop from the need to escape. In this story, men continually fail Mary and Ainsley—or try, through violence, to destroy their concepts of self. Mary’s father commandeers the dinner table by talking “into the air like a spore-releasing perennial,” his lecture “a kind of indiscriminate spray that struck Mary as very foul.” While walking to school, a car pauses next to them and a passenger spews a rape threat. Because her shirt is too short, Mary is sent to the principal’s office, where Principal Flavin reveals that he is a proponent for slut shaming: “Your outfit is encouraging men, your male classmates, to want to have sex with you…when they should be thinking about school.”

The girls are able to repel these experiences by simply being in the company of one another, a reminder of how important it is for communities exposed to trauma to band together. Their conversations are often incredibly perceptive. After the rape threat, Mary and Ainsley discuss the implications of a gaze:

“The car-boy way of looking at someone is violent, or at least implies violence,” said Ainsley. “They could have just looked at us that way, without even saying anything, and their intent would have been the same.”

“How do I look at you?” said Mary. “What does my gaze contain?”

“Questions,” said Ainsley. “Which is the essential thing. When the car-boys looked at us, they didn’t have any questions for us because they assumed we had nothing to offer them except our bodies, which required no questions because our bodies could already be seen.”

Still, a few stories in the collection—like “Passing” and “Harp”—reveal the romantic. In the collection’s longest story, “What I Would Be If I Wasn’t What I Am,” Franny laments her qualms with her late husband Ray: he was a bad listener, he annoyingly gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. But, they spent so many years together as companions, and a lot of it was very good: the sex, the cozy ranch house they built together, the encouragement Ray gave Franny to paint, to be a painter. Even though it is difficult for Franny to determine which parts of her identity are solely hers and which parts developed because she was with Ray, ultimately, she cannot untether herself from him, this spectator to her life, proof of warmth and generosity.

Perhaps calling these stories romantic is too prescriptive—but here, Bullwinkel reveals her interest in vulnerability and the mundanity of how prevalent unions are to our existence. In “Harp,” Helen is split into two selves after becoming mesmerized by the twinkling of tuning harps. Her harp self develops an emotional intelligence that she hides from her husband, a transparent man who loves to cook for his wife. Harp Helen drives aimlessly, buys tickets to a concert, and develops a flirty friendship with another man. This new self elicits a matter-of-fact pleasure, but in the end, Helen returns to her home and dinner with her husband. In this way, romance is elusive but inevitable, something that we keep, even as we search for ways to escape it. For Helen, her harp self is proof that she has agency beyond the choreography of coupledom. “Listening to the harps, I didn’t feel angry or sad or anxious or incited. I just felt other than myself.”

The younger voices in Belly Up—like Mary and Ainsley of “Arms Overhead” and a young girl who licks exposed wires in “Black Tongue”—are what bring this collection its playful but compelling depth. Their narratives are the most radical and experimental. Bullwinkel’s deft hand and gift for the uncanny, perfect line had me underlining and starring and dog-earring an embarrassing amount. These stories are thorny and tender, a reminder that even as we are grounded, we bump into each other and through that contact, we transform into something new.