The Healthiest Girl in Town by Jean Stafford Enchanting – 10 out of 10

 The Healthiest Girl in Town by Jean Stafford

Enchanting – 10 out of 10

 

The short stories of Jean Stafford are impressive.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for them.

Some have a gloomy atmosphere that probably has to do with the author’s personal experience and troubles with alcohol and more.

However, the spirit of this story is not only positive, but also funny from where I read it.

The debut is not very promising in terms of happy events or people.

We are in town where the sick come in search for a longer life, if not a final cure for their tuberculosis, which they hope would be tamed by the sun and the air.

Whole families move to this town, where the heroine, who is also the story teller lives with her mother.

Mother is a nurse and her tales of hemorrhages, with blood on the ceiling could not be more hideous and terrifying.

The girl asks her mother about the patients and their symptoms, but is really interested in her father, about whom she is afraid to ask.

Or perhaps embarrassed, emotional or both.

Even if the dialogues and the stories we hear are kind of gruesome, there is yet a feeling of a good mood.

This just goes to prove the old sayings:

-          It is not what happens (and what you read) but how you perceive it that matters

-          There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so

A family Butler moves into town, with grandmother, mother and two daughters – Laura and Ada, who study with our heroine in school.

After the initial pity and empathy, the two sisters gain the hate of their new colleagues, appalled at their haughtiness.

The girl is unhappy with Laura and her sister, but Ma warns her that their living is assured by the salary provided by Mrs. Butler.

Laura and Ada come out as mean and arrogant, in spite or because of the education they received, which appears to have provided them with knowledge.

Alas, the exhaustive information that they posses has no impact on their EQ, or social intelligence and lack of people skills.

The sisters make their colleague feel so bad that she makes up a wild story.

In an ironic twist of fate, one may feel ill at ease and handicapped by a lack of a…handicap, when dealing with people who boast about their shortcomings.

So our main character invents a disease that her father had and thinks of nothing else but leprosy that has a huge impact on the Butler sisters.

But if anything, the effect was shattering and the sisters cry out that the girl is unclean and so is her mother.

An elaborate solution is improvised afterwards, wherein they would make the girl eat some chicken entrails.

What happens next is interesting but I will stop here, to let you read this and find out the finale for yourself.