Stories by Shannon Sanders, reviewed by Kayla McCall
COMPANY (Graywolf Press)
My family’s matriarch has a ritual when company comes to visit. She chases carefully-swept corners with lemon-scented cleaners. The vacuum hums over the rug, then the hardwood, then the pink hexagonal tiles in the hall bathroom and the blue ones in the en suite. She dusts the coffee table and the wire shelf, pays special attention to the thick buildup on the ceiling fan blades. She wipes down the counter and the range hood, the kitchen table and the windows. She sweeps the pine needles from the deck, the dirt from the porch, and adjusts the welcome wreath on the door. Then she straightens her back, puts on a brown sweater, and pretends the work took five minutes instead of five hours.
My least favorite part is when the front door opens, and the sun pierces the screen door almost to the point of blinding. I straighten up like the matriarch, plaster a fake smile on my face, and stick out a hand. I search my head to find something to say. Something about graduation or work. Something impressive: an award or a promotion, a kind word from a manager. It’s an obstacle course in posturing copied from the matriarch herself because company could be anyone. A neighbor, an old friend, a colleague, a family member I haven’t seen in a decade. All of us too concerned with how we come across to the other. Shannon Sanders’s debut story collection, Company, explores the different ways we choose to present ourselves when company knocks.
Company is a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2023. Each story in this interconnected collection follows perspectives of and complications between members of the Collins family, mainly the four sisters: Cassandra, Suzette, Lela, and Felice. The perspectives range from the sisters to their children and their mother, and the collection spans several decades, but not linearly. A hand-scribbled family tree sits in the opening pages, providing names and connections before the reader needs them. I flipped back to it often as new characters were introduced, connecting Cyrus as the son of Cassandra and Aubrey as cousin to Caprice.
Each character in Sanders’s thirteen stories is faced with choice, of opening their home or their mind to another. They have to make the choice between posturing or presenting themselves authentically. When Cassandra asks Lela to wear a nice dress instead of her normal clothes to a party celebrating her promotion to university provost, Lela calls her a “stuck-up motherfucker.” However, the same request to Cassandra’s niece Bellamy is met with, “Okay, Auntie…Thanks so much.”
The collection volleys between the consequences of each choice. Some characters choose posturing. Janet pretends to like vegan food to get along with her son’s partner but ends up drinking at the neighbors’ by the end of the night in “The Gatekeepers.” Cecilia meets her boyfriend’s family on Thanksgiving, meticulously sorting information on uncles and cousins to make a good impression, only for his aunt to clock the pregnancy she’s trying desperately to hide in “Rioja.” Loulou hides her artificial insemination at her grandmother’s wake to make her mother happy in “Dragonflies,” but the truth comes out anyway.
After Lela knocks on Suzette’s door in the middle of the night with man drama in “Three Guests,” Suzette reveals her ritual for posturing:
Rules for company: Mop the foyer beforehand. It’s all right if your guests dirty it up with their outside shoes, but the floor should sparkle right up until that happens. Serve yourself last in your own house. Keep the powder room clean at all times, just in case someone drops by. Always have a bed made up with good linens on it for guests.
When Suzette’s daughter, Bellamy, asks her what she should do if someone stops by when she doesn’t have the beds made, Suzette replies with, “Well, that’s what I’m telling you…You just make sure you do.” The ritual is intrinsic to Suzette’s character arc. It shares equal importance to her role as a mother and musician. She clings to these rules because her own mother taught a different version of them when Suzette was a child, “When there’s an overnight guest in this house, you never open the bedroom doors. You lock up and wait till I come get you in the morning.” This line is stressed, and that stress plagues Suzette as an adult because company at her parents’ row house came in the form of men too intoxicated to go home after a night at their family-owned jazz club. She carried that rigidity as she got older.
As I read the collection, I was reminded again and again of the matriarch of my family, my eighty-year-old grandmother. Her words stick in my head: always wear earrings even when you don’t leave the house, clean the dust off every surface…yes, even if no one is coming to visit. My grandmother is the oldest daughter. She and her siblings were raised by their father, so she became the stand-in mother figure for them, and she never truly let that go. Her voice echoes within me just like Suzette’s within her daughter, Bellamy, in “Rule Number One.” Suzette speaks to Bellamy, reminding her of various rules of conducting herself in front of others. Each new rule she thinks of is the new Rule Number One, simultaneously sharing the spot with the last Rule Number One. Bellamy repeats them in “La Belle Hottentote:”
“Do you literally not know that rule number one is to laugh at your boss’s bad jokes…” “Hey,” says Aubrey, and does a little jig-in-place on the grass. “I thought rule number one was to get our shoes reheeled before this party.”
“That too,” says Bellamy. “And don’t you wish you had?”
All the rules are equally important to Suzette, and she transfers that importance onto Bellamy. “Rule Number One,” is the only story in this collection that does not include a person physically entering another’s space. Instead, Suzette’s voice visits her daughter, echoing in her mind after Suzette has passed on. Sanders’s notion of company is more than just physical. It’s everything we’ve heard and the lessons we’ve learned. Like my matriarch, Suzette is preparing her daughter for the world, but there’s desperation in it because Suzette is sick by the time she starts sharing her rules. It’s upsetting and uncomfortable at times in “Three Guests,” as Suzette spends her last moments entertaining her boss, trying to come off perfect and poised in front of him at a dinner party, and still teaching her daughter how to act in the same way.
Suzette’s and her daughter’s lives hinge on how others perceive them instead of how they perceive themselves. Sanders explores both conflicting and complementary anxieties in the other characters. Suzette’s sisters learned something different from their experiences growing up in the row house under the same rules. Cassandra is similar to Suzette, straightening her shoulders and back to the point of pain to come across well to strangers and colleagues. Lela, the youngest and a direct foil to Cassandra, grew to care more about what she thought of herself then what her guests thought of her. Felice, often absent from the story, decides to shut herself away in the row house forever.
The final story, “The Everest Society,” plainly presents the dichotomy between posturing and authenticity. Lela’s daughter, Liv, wants to adopt a child with her husband. They’re getting ready for the home visit and Liv is tearing herself apart to show the social worker her perfect life and her perfect home. She buys new decorations, makes sure to stock the bathroom cabinet with all natural cleaners, and inspects her apartment building for any and all issues that could be perceived as dangerous. Liv worries the broken elevator will become the one thing that separates her from becoming a mother. However, her apartment community uses the inconvenience to grow together—helping elderly tenants carry groceries upstairs and having stairwell pizza parties. The broken elevator no longer signals a hazard, it’s proof of a strong community. A perfect place for a kid to grow up. Liv sheds her fears and finds a true authenticity that she’s prepared to show the social worker. It’s the perfect conclusion to this complex, and at times intense, story collection. It’s clear that authenticity has won the battle, and I loved the author’s process of constructing this strong message. By the end, it’s clear that authenticity is a central theme built by juxtaposition. When Liv, a character that wants to be perfect is put in a position that requires authenticity, she finally finds the strength to be herself.
I thought about my matriarch again by the end of the book because she’s changed over time too. She’s retired, she’s relaxed. She gives everyone the same version of herself, the real version. I sit back and watch sometimes as she greets company in a t-shirt instead of a sweater. Sometimes there’s still dust on the ceiling fan too. She laughs just as hard and talks just as loud whenever company comes by, and no one even notices the change except for me. The sitting room is warm, and the sun is golden and finally, I let my shoulders relax a bit too.
Kayla McCall is a graduate student at Savannah College of Art and Design where she studies writing. She received her BA in English: Creative Writing from Auburn University. Her fiction and poetry has appeared in Father and I: A Toast to Fatherhood, Perspectives Magazine, and The Auburn Circle. She is also the author of the self-published novel Finding Lights. She has previously served as the assistant editor for Southern Humanities Review and The Writer’s Block.
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