Both Ways is the Only Way I Want it by Maile Meloy
This wonderful title is a quote from a poem by A.R.Ammons, and is an apt description of the quandary encapsulated in each of these stories. Often enough the wanting it both ways is the classic case of the husband hoping to keep both wife and lover, or hoping for the chance to juggle the two – funny how it’s rarely a woman trying to keep all the plates spinning. But this is not the only kind of wishful thinking, there is also the child who regrets the departure of her mother’s glamorous lover and his appealing son, or the very funny rivalry between two brothers who would dearly love to do without the other as ego booster and audience to and judge of their success. My favourite was the first in the collection, a broken, isolated young man of mixed Cheyenne Indian background, fizzing with loneliness drives to the nearest town and just follows people into a building, as if he were a stray dog. He finds himself in an adult education class taught by a young and attractive lawyer. Mesmerised by her, he returns each week, and attempts a restrained courtship of this unapproachable creature who lives six hundred miles away, a telling indication of how much separates them, even though her mother works in a school cafeteria and her sister works in a hospital laundry and “selling shoes is the nicest job a girl from my family is supposed to get.” And that restraint is a key to Meloy’s narrative style; there are no verbal fireworks, but a calm and unexcited expression of emotion, a style that is more rather than less effective at conveying that surge of empathy.
A class act 