In understanding Carmen Maria Machado’s flash story, “Mary When You Follow Her,” I found it helpful to simplify the numerous clauses with a short summary of the narrative: in the autumn, after a series of terrible things occurred to and around Maria, and before another series of terrible things occurred, she caught a bus to Chicago and escaped. By roughly sectioning the story into thirds, it appears that each portion is respectively defined by three time-relaying prepositions: “in,” “after,” and “before,” through which the author orders and outlines the traumatic events of Maria’s life. Yet, while this content of the story focuses on the physical events surrounding Maria’s escape, the structure appears to compliment it by reflecting Maria’s mind—her thoughts and emotions, her responses to trauma, and the coping mechanisms she employs to control them. Machado creates this intricate narrative by piecing together distinct yet coherent clauses into one long, complex sentence, mirroring the restless anxiety associated with Maria’s need for continuous vigilance and concern regarding her surroundings. There is no closure for any of the separate parts but each one, building upon the others, culminates into her final act of escape, demonstrated both physically and emotionally.
The only friends explicitly named in Maria’s story are Dolores and Perdita (pain and loss), suggesting a deep and internal intimacy with these presences as sentiments in Maria’s mind. The loss and alleged death of Dolores reveals the coping mechanism of hiding and numbing painful emotion rather than allowing it space to breathe and heal. Maria demonstrates this traumatic response when she “snapped at her mother that she was fine and collapsed in her bedroom wheezing and crying,” revealing contrarily that she was not “fine,” but was attempting to numb her pain by trapping and losing it within herself (Machado).
After physically escaping the trauma of her city, Maria emotionally escapes as well by imagining “that the missing girls were all living in the city in brick row houses […] with gardens and parks and cafés […] where they all laughed and […] told stories […] about the last […] time they’d truly been afraid” (Machado). It is only through this expression of denial, this escape to a fairy-tale reality that the story—the long, complex sentence—is able to conclude. Maria’s imagination, while yet another coping mechanism for her trauma, is the first sense of closure that the story provides for her and also for the audience. It is only when she has removed herself from the dangerous space of her old city, and removed her thoughts from the pain and loss of her experiences that the restless anxiety in her mind, reflected in the numerous, complex clauses of the narrative, subsides and quiets. Thus, the end of the story at last indicates a calm within Maria’s mind.
11 February 2020
Works Cited:
Machado, Carmen Maria. “Mary When You Follow Her.” VQR: A National Journal of Literature and Discussion, Iss. 2, Vol. 94, June 2018.