We don’t have typewriters anymore, so it is refreshing to read a typewritten piece with its idiosyncrasies and specific markers and tell tale signs of authorship. There is nothing that will hint at the authorship of this review of Stephen Emerson’s fictional short story ‘Red’, however, except that yes my name is also Red. For deciding to reduce my character to the color of my hair, I will reserve my first praise of Mr. Emerson’s narrator. Perhaps it was out of respect for my anonymity? I, unlike the narrator, will be generous with my imagination. Red, my genuine hair color, he points out is also the color of my Persian pussycat, (the cat who only occasionally answered to his name but was apparently also my one true love). How can the narrator be so sure? Well, the cat and I did share a common parasitic family: ringworm. I was cured of the ringworm but my cat was punished with death. Though I did love my cat, Red, and it was a cruel and unnecessary punishment, I had many other loves many: dear friends, my children, colleagues, my passions.
My crowning glory, aside from my pale and delicate demeanor was, according to the narrator, my hair. What lengths he thinks I went through to lay to waste this gift of mine. Through ignorant neglect, lack of style or malicious intent I am believed to have worn my hair short and unbecoming. I think despite of, or maybe because of my ‘buxom’ figure, Mr Emerson’s narrator may have enjoyed, appreciated or was even aroused, when I wore my, “Auburn hair long, and it surrounded [my] head and swam on the tops of [my] shoulders.” Could that be why he felt I squandered its beauty?
What would he know of how uncomfortable long hair can be during our southern summers? My arousal, narrator, came from feeling a breeze on my neck. Did you ever get close enough to notice, I wonder, that even after my hair grew short and gray, my nails were always painted red. My lips were often red from biting them when I was bored, or nervous, or excited. I even blushed red well into my old age.
“So only in the beauty itself of her early years did she offer any analogue to what was becoming her character.”
What of that character were you able to discern, narrator? Your tone presumes to be so impartial, yet I do detect an intimacy. How else could you know of my “bedroom practices or lack of them…” and deem them “inappropriate to speak of here”. The responsibility of such lack of bedroom activity clearly doesn’t belong to my husband, “a man whose life would be devoted to errors in her eyes”. But of course you are talking of my character, not his. Mine seems to have been formed by causal inferences to assumed hardships growing up in a family that didn’t appreciate the successes of an intelligent female graduate. I appreciate the way you have created this piece of fiction which, in form, reflects the very situation you describe. You have done so well, narrator, to demonstrate this very constraint of a women’s life. In life and in death, a woman is evaluated for her beauty and reasonableness.