Review by Carla Panciera
Although Take Me With You Next Time is Janis Hubschman’s debut collection, the author is no stranger to the literary world. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals and have garnered prizes from the Bellingham Review and Glimmer Train. These are stories about women, most of whom are established in careers and relationships. In fact, they are firmly in the midst of their complicated lives.
One such complication involves the men they married: Their husbands are recovering from or succumbing to brain tumors, cancer, dementia, addiction. One has been unfaithful. But the women persist. They escape to Italy, find new jobs, pop an occasional Xanax and rely on their sense of humor. When one husband texts from a meditation retreat with a suggestion that he leave his lucrative engineering job so they can open a bed and breakfast, his wife thinks: “Whatever he was going through, [I] hoped it would pass like a fever” (1). In the meantime, these women swim, bike, play golf, and clean up the messes left behind. This is not the stuff of fantasy fiction. These stories are as real as any union gets.
In “Be Here” now, Stella , newly widowed when her alcoholic husband has a fatal fall, is caring for his ailing mother. When a student in her writing workshop insists that because his female protagonist is both a sex worker by choice and a nurse, he’s achieved complexity in characterization, Stella challenges him by asking, “‘What if the man and the woman in your story have a more emotionally complicated relationship? What if, despite caring deeply for each other, they consistently disappoint and betray each other?’” (203) The student wonders why anyone would want to read about his parents. One of the collection’s strengths is that, despite the weighty topics, Hubschman employs a dark wit whose source is the same source of all effective humor: the truth. The wives in these stories are marriage veterans. Their experiences reflect the authentic demands of so many unions that, nevertheless, persist for decades.
Several of the other women also have connections to a literary life. They teach, edit, and tutor. Though the repetition of this familiar territory feels a bit unimaginative, it does allow even Ginger, the engineer in “Please See Me” to supply Muriel Rukeyser’s question: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” What happens is that Huschman’s characters reveal very private parts of themselves, but only to the reader. They also discover the secrets of the women who surround them.
For example, Frankie, in the first of two stories in which she appears, attempts to rekindle an old affair weeks after she places her much older husband in a nursing home. In the second story, she is selling the house she moved into after her husband’s first wife’s death. She’s aided by an energetic realtor who she refers to as “Perfect Mom” only to discover a devastating detail from that woman’s past. Even one of the collection’s two young women, Elle, in “Wilderness of Ghosts,” tells no one that, the night before her roommate’s suicide, she left her a Post-it note that read: I wish you were dead. What would happen if any of these secrets were shared—judgment, voyeurism, pity, healing? No matter because within these pages, as in life itself, some truths mercifully never see the light of day.
What lends strength to these stories is that, beyond creating vivid characters, Hubschman sets them firmly down in the world. They interact with neighbors, good friends, moody teenagers. They cross paths with clowns seeking directions to birthday parties, flashers positioned along bike trails, and students who have their own opinions on the work they’ve been assigned. When Bonnie in “Creature Comforts” assigns Percy’s “The Lost Creature,” to her freshman comp class, she insists that “‘The Grand Canyon is a metaphor . . . It shows how we see things based on whether they measure up to what we’ve heard.” But her students counter with: “Heard from who?” (86). Hubschman is a keen observer of daily life and all the ways in which it forces interactions we can’t prepare ourselves for.
In “Tabor Lake 1993”, Katherine, the second of the book’s two young protagonists, lifeguarding at a local lake, is horrified to see the veins and dark nipples of a nursing mother’s breast. She finds it impossible to believe that this woman was ever young enough to have jumped into the lake from the same tree that Katherine and her ex-boyfriend did a few weeks before. Mr. Hurley the lake president “is older than the tree and one hundred percent duller” (89). This is a transformative summer for Katherine. She suffers her first break-up and loses a friend. When she helps put the raft away for the winter, she notices the pontoons that have kept it afloat: “The gray pontoon floats are covered in algae. She never bothered to wonder what kept the raft afloat. Now that she knows, it’s disappointing somehow, like seeing the strings on a marionette” (110).
Katherine can’t imagine being an adult. But if she needs a glimpse into what lies ahead, she need only meet the other characters in this collection and perhaps take comfort in what they have powered through.
Take Me With You Next Time by Janis Hubschman
Betty Books, October 15, 2024, $17.95 [paperback]
ISBN # 979-8-9877197-3-2
Carla Panciera’s newest book is Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir. Her collection, Bewildered, received AWP’s 2013 Grace Paley Short Fiction Award. She has also published two collections of poetry: One of the Cimalores (Cider Press) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera). The recipient of a Mass Cultural Council Grant in prose, Carla is a retired high school English teacher from Rowley, MA.