"Showered With Gifts" by Leslie Pietrzyk

3/20/2022

Photo by Susan Hale Thomas

Leslie Pietrzyk’s collection of DC stories, ADMIT THIS TO NO ONE (Unnamed Press, November 2021) was called “insidery, insightful, and deftly executed” by Washingtonian magazine. She’s the author of three novels, including Silver Girl, published by Unnamed Press in 2018. Her first collection of short stories, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by University of Pittsburgh Press. Short fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Story Magazine, Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Washingtonian, The Sun, The Washington Post Magazine, and others. Awards include a Pushcart Prize in 2020 and the 2020 Creative Arts Prize from the Polish American Historical Association. Organizations awarding fellowships include the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Virginia Center for the Arts, the Hambidge Center, and Hawthornden International Retreat at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. She recently moved to North Carolina. www.lesliepietrzyk.com @lesliepwriter

Annie Przypyszny is a student at American University, majoring in Creative Writing. She is the Associate Poetry Editor for The Adirondack Review and has poems published in Pacifica Literary Review, The Northern Virginia Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Ponder Review, and others.

Introduction to "Showered With Gifts"
by Annie Przypyszny

Reading Leslie Pietryzk’s story “Showered with Gifts,’ I am struck with a sense of familiarity—and a strange, confrontational intimacy. I grew up in McLean, Virginia, about a twenty-minute drive away from “the Little River Turnpike exit” where this story is situated. These kinds of ‘showers’—baby showers, bridal showers—took place all around me, full of gifts, dainty appetizers, and light laughter. And these women—I know them. They are my neighbors, my mother’s friends. Reading this story, I had to address many of my own assumptions about who they are and whether their lives are as neat and simple as I brush them off as being.

Having lived in Alexandria, Virginia for thirty years before recently moving to North Carolina, many of Pietrzyk’s stories take place in the Washington Metropolitan Area, including her newest collection of short stories, Admit This to No One, where different narratives are tied together by their relation to a fictional Speaker of the House. Several stories in the collection, such as “This Isn’t Who We Are,” boldly confront the culture of privilege and superficiality that the area’s white, upper-middle-class residents are steeped in. They also tackle the professional snobbery so prevalent to the area, poking fun at how one’s job reflects one’s status. Pietrzyk knows first-hand how ridiculous this job-judging can be, telling me in an interview that she “loved the slightly subversive sensation of being an ‘artist’ in a political town.” Indeed, Pietrzyk dedicated Admit This to No One to “everyone in DC who scanned the room during the party while asking me, ‘So what do you do?’” Her answer: this.
Although “Showered with Gifts” was published twenty years before Admit This to No One came out, Pietrzyk acknowledges that in some ways, it could fit within the collection, as it has a similar sense of discomfort. Pietrzyk stated that, as her writing career has progressed, she’s been pushed “toward the core of whatever is hardest to face.” This is exactly what “Showered with Gifts” achieves, as we are forced to see past social veneers and question what we know about what constitutes a fulfilling life.

“Showered with Gifts” is written from a plural first-person point of view, which allows us to feel as if we are also guests at the wedding shower. The hostess is “our” hostess, and it is “we” who “are being asked to offer advice to a bride” via anonymous slips of paper. When I asked her about this unique choice of perspective, Pietrzyk noted that it allows her to “dig into a topic from an unexpected angle” —this unexpected angle being that, instead of watching the party from afar as we might from a more conventional third person perspective, we as readers are situated as part of this social group. We are pulled in as intimates of these women, participants in the superficial rituals of the shower, whether we think we belong there or not. No matter what we think of them, we are framed as, for the span of the story, their equals.

There is an additional layer to the point of view, along with its close and personal placement of the reader. The story’s perspective has a unique omniscient quality to it—Pietrzyk describes “Showered with Gifts” as her way “to write about omniscience without writing true omniscience.” Throughout the narrative, as our focus is shifted onto different guests, it is clear we possess an unsettling amount of knowledge, aware not only of these women’s deepest insecurities, but of their unfortunate futures. Our presence, then, feels ominous; yet our dark knowledge is necessary for the possibility of empathy to arise. As they gather to celebrate their friend’s approaching marriage, in a space that should be full of warmth and comradery, these women are hiding. They are hiding behind materialism (such as our hostess, who “owns all the right implements”); behind the advice they write on slips of paper for the bride, which means so much more to them than the other women could ever guess; and behind the social performance they put on for each other. Underneath these facades, however, is loneliness, fragility, and even tragedy. In our interview, Leslie mentioned that, in the story, “each woman brings their unique and individual baggage and experiences to the event.” They keep this baggage, however, to themselves. Even among other women who could perhaps sympathize with them the most, they are unable to cast off their polite shells and find solace in commiseration.

“Showered with Gifts” is, along with its point of view, shaped by its tone, which is a mix of wry humor and blunt reality. This tone is present in many of Pietrzyk’s stories, including those in Admit This to No One as well as stories like “Shadow Daughter” and “What I Could Buy.” This tone is able to highlight the absurdity of certain situations (such as, in “What I Could Buy,” human life being reducible to insurance money) while also conveying their depth. This is certainly true for “Showered with Gifts.” There is no doubt that the story criticizes the inanity of these women and their niceties. As the narrative focuses on Kim, we are given amusing anecdotes about the men she’s been involved with, such as the most recent one who referred to the shower as “an old-fashioned hen party.” However, such moments of wit are interspersed with descriptions of deep sadness in Kim’s life, such as her insecurity about “having grown up motherless” and the harsh truth that “no man will ever propose to Kim, though she’ll live to be ninety-three.” We can enjoy a snarky laugh at Kim while also feeling immense pity for her. This adds to the story’s complexity, as we see that the humor on the surface is only that: the surface.

By the end of the story, after we’ve learned the fears and destinies of the guests, we are left with our hostess, who, once all the other women have left, will pour herself a glass of bourbon and “sit and stare at nothing, listening to nothing as she slowly drains that first glass dry and then a second one, a third.” This is described as her routine, “what she looks forward to every night,” finishing the story with a sense of endless emptiness. Our hostess has it all: plenty of material objects, plenty of friends to throw showers for, the right house in the right area. One is left, then, wondering if her prim, polished life is all that it seems, questioning whether her sadness is a hole that affluence cannot fill or a result of such affluence to begin with.

Such questions are uncomfortable to ask, and perhaps they don’t have neat answers, but Pietrzyk’s work demands that we ask them, nonetheless. “Showered with Gifts” has forced me to ask myself whether my easy criticism of the women I grew up around is not a form of hypocrisy. I have tried to put distance between them and myself—I have tried to avoid the fact that I have lived in the same community as them and have reaped the same privileges. Pietrzyk’s story has broken that distance, and instead placed me even closer, sitting me on the couch right beside them. What this has taught me is that empathy and criticism are not mutually exclusive. I can be skeptical of the ways in which, in the wealthy suburbs of the DC area, privilege is often taken for granted; and I can also acknowledge that nobody, no matter their affluence, is immune to the stark realities of “silence and aloneness.”