And Then You Apply Ice by Pamela Gwyn Kripke • Book Reviews

Stories by Pamela Gwyn Kripke, reviewed by Ashlee A. Paxton-Turner
AND THEN YOU APPLY ICE, (Open Books)

One of the most basic aspects of humanity is pondering the future—questioning who we are and what we will become. In the mid-1950s, Doris Day answered the question quite simply: “Que sera, sera / whatever will be, will be / the future’s not ours to see.” Decades later, Pamela Gwyn Kripke, in And Then You Apply Ice, provides a glimpse into the future that isn’t ours to see in twenty-one well-crafted stories about women and who they do indeed become. In this thoughtful collection, Kripke not only confirms that whatever will be, will be; she also offers compelling and accessible insights about the human interactions and relationships that tend to comprise various stages of life.

Throughout this richly developed collection, women repeatedly come to terms with what their futures hold as they confront the tension between loss and connection that is unavoidable in human relationships. Women face the mental illness of their partners (and would-be partners), the death of their partners, the loss of their parents, the inevitable age-related changes in familial relationships, and the potential loss of their children. Part of what makes the collection such a powerful read is Kripke’s ability not only to cover the experiences of women from girlhood to motherhood to widowhood in one volume but also her ability to highlight the particular questions about human connection and how those connections do or don’t define us as they surface throughout the various life stages.

Kripke judiciously uses recurring characters to encourage the reader to anticipate connections that aren’t certain and won’t always exist. Most of these stories leave open at least the possibility that a character is one that the reader has previously encountered in the collection. But because it isn’t always explicit, the reader must engage in a little guesswork. This guesswork allows Kripke to emphasize that connection can be fleeting and uncertain in a way that is itself interesting and unexpected. In doing so, she not only showcases her own talent for describing and building anticipation but also showcases how the structure of a short story collection can deliver its own narrative. Kripke’s structure is, in many ways, an invitation to the reader to reflect on the arc of the stories–something not all short story collections so graciously offer their readers.

Where the recurring characters are obvious, Kripke gives the reader the chance to catch a glimpse into how the future can change. For example, the bride in “Dress for Success” is also the daughter in the opening story, “The Suitor.” In “The Suitor,” Kripke has carefully and expertly contained loss and connection in one human interaction. Specifically, the story is largely told inside one fleeting moment—the moment before the daughter shakes the hand of her widowed mother’s recent suitor. In fact, this story is an emblem of Kripke’s talent for making small moments and details shine with narrative force. In the story, the daughter notices dirt under the suitor’s fingernails and considers how very different he is from her now-deceased father. In the face of her mother’s new potential connection, she faces the dissolution of her own marriage and the reality that she has lost her father. “Dress for Success,” precedes “The Suitor” in time but not in the collection. There, as her father gives her away to her husband, a young woman faces the promise of her own connection to her husband. Although the reader already knows her future by the time “Dress for Success” appears in the collection, on her wedding day, the bride does not. In this clever ordering, Kripke reminds the reader that for the individual in the moment, the future is not hers to see. And indeed, it is clever ordering like this that makes the collection engaging and a testament to Kripke’s ability to keep the reader in a state of anticipation rather than well-settled familiarity.

Throughout the collection, Kripke highlights that we often discover who we are and what we want in the most ordinary situations. And what could be more ordinary than what we eat for lunch or a late-night snack? Kripke repeatedly uses food to set the stage or move the story forward. In “Of All Things,” eating a turkey sandwich and with “coleslaw spill[ing] from his lip,” a husband tells his wife that he was suicidal when she said she didn’t love him. His wife’s initial reaction is to ask him how he would have done it—as she takes a bite of chicken salad, appreciating the addition of tarragon that she can never replicate when she makes it herself. In covering the various life experiences of women across different life stages, Kripke is a master of transforming the fundamental, day-to-day aspects of life into stories with sharp observations about human interactions and relationships. What makes the stories powerful is Kripke’s ability to transform details about numerous prosaic moments into mechanisms that reveal the sometimes-overwhelming feelings about those interactions and relationships.

When Doris Day poses these same impossible questions about the future to a sweetheart, she asks if the future will hold “rainbows day after day.” Kripke’s stories would tend to suggest that the future is anything but rainbows. Instead, Kripke offers raw honesty through women who confront the future with on-again-off-again partners and men who see them as objects or projects. In the title story, Kripke describes the relationship of Jane, an abstract painter, and Stan, a doctor, who specializes in removing fat. As the story opens, we learn that “Jane was thin, 105-pound thin, but [Stan] found the places where the flab collected.” When Jane wonders if Stan jiggles her flab the same way that he does that of his patients, she appears to be questioning if her future is really with this doctor or if she is simply another body for him to improve. Later, when Jane observes one of Stan’s procedures, her suspicion is confirmed, despite Stan’s earlier denials. As Jane watches Stan determine “where to correct the imperfection” and “where to eradicate the flaw,” she feels dizzy and runs to the bathroom—stripping down and splashing cold water on herself. After all, learning who you are to someone else and what, in fact, will be is understandably overwhelming.

Similar to how Doris Day concludes her song with the transition to motherhood, Kripke ends her well-crafted collection with a mother confronting the uncertainty of the future. In “The Holiday,” a divorced mother faces the possibility of losing her children, as her ex-husband has alleged that she is an unfit mother. The future is also not hers to see, but she can hold her children in that moment a little “closer and tighter.” The uncertainty of the future need not limit who we are and want to be in the present moment.

Doris Day’s famous song poses questions that are hard, if not impossible, to answer. In this collection, Kripke adds further gloss to the refrain of “whatever will be, will be” by demonstrating that, at the very least, the coming together and breaking down of human relationships will be a near certainty. Although this sentiment isn’t new, Kripke beautifully conveys it in a unique way that reflects the reality that the ebbs and flows of human relationships are not always expected in the moment and often contained inside the most ordinary of moments. It is hard to capture something so human in words in a way that is both believable and accessible, and Kripke has done it.

Ashlee A. Paxton-Turner is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University School of Law. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Duke University School of Law, where she researches and writes about corporations and American democracy. Her legal scholarship has appeared in a range of law reviews, and she has written several book reviews for Cleaver over the past decade. Before entering academia, Ashlee was a lawyer at a major law firm in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.