Editor’s Corner
April 4, 2008
Glengarry Glen Ross in Glendale?
By
Constance Hale
Call us fans of long-form narrative. We are. But let us confess something less obvious: we are thrilled with stories that run deep without running on.
“Climbing a Ladder Made of Lipstick,” by Molly Hennessy-Fiske, is one such story. In a compact 2,000 words, this Los Angeles Times writer gives us a window on the U.S. economy, immigration, hard-luck Latinos, and the stubborn persistence of the American Dream.
How does she do it? Hennessy-Fiske starts with a good idea, which she boils down right at the top: “In a land of opportunity, cosmetic direct sales looks like a shortcut to the middle class, a corporate ladder whose first rung doesn’t require a high school diploma or even English skills. As Latina saleswomen rise through the ranks, they are changing the face of Mary Kay, long associated with blond Texas founder Mary Kay Ash.”
But Hennessy-Fiske’s real knack is her use of character. Too often, characters merely adorn news narratives. They provide the occasional face in a sea of talking heads — or perhaps an opening hook and a closing quote. But Hennessy-Fiske clearly searched for an altogether different kind of character, one who could enliven the entire story. After an editor at the Los Angeles Times steered her toward women who hadn’t yet made it, Hennessy-Fiske spent many hours with several potential subjects before settling on the perfect one.
But, of course, it takes more than such dedicated reporting to craft a compelling narrative. In a deft sketch combining the physical and the psychological, Hennessy-Fiske lodges Altagracia Valdez in our imagination:
Valdez’s skin is caramel-colored, lined with age and hard times that Mary Kay creams and lotions can’t smooth away. But she has learned to use her grandmotherly looks to entice customers. Immigrant women welcome her into their homes like a relative, often during the day, to buy cosmetics while their husbands are away. They call her Alta, “tall” in Spanish, an ironic nickname for a diminutive woman who stands 5 feet 2, always looking up to somebody, always listening.
|
Valdez works so well as a character because she manifests larger themes: She is an immigrant. She has been hemmed in by a husband who beat her and by seven children who call on her for babysitting. She has a “burning desire to improve” her looks and her finances. She needs health insurance and a new car. But more than anything else, she is determined to grab hold of the lowest rung and never stop climbing.
|
Importantly, Hennessy-Fiske gets at this last aspect of her character through action. (To use the editing cliché, she shows us, rather than tells us.) Check out the description of Valdez navigating her way through apartment courtyards smelling of Mexico (“cheap laundry detergent mingling with the sweet scent of simmering corn tortillas”) and past “garden Nativity scenes and apartments with pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe taped to the windows.” She ascends a rickety stone staircase in her JCPenney pumps, then slips, falls, picks herself up, smiles, and knocks on the door of a pregnant woman who had promised to recruit customers.
Would it be grandiose to say that the estrellas of Mary Kay shine as brightly as American literary archetypes Willy Loman and Shelley Levene? Perhaps. But when characters are both this desperate and this dogged, the spirits of Arthur Miller and David Mamet hover.