Paige Loucks

The Grand Scheme of Things: A Review

Sarah Cedeño’s debut collection, The Grand Scheme of Things, features twelve short stories connecting the lives of residents in Bridgeport, a fictional college town in Western New York. The characters range from toddlers to older couples, from college students to professors, all confronting grief, love, and the slow march of time. Despite only getting a glimpse into each character’s life, readers can’t help but feel intrinsically connected to every moment. In these stories of everyday life, Cedeño reveals her characters at their most vulnerable, while also framing them within the larger picture of human experience. She reminds us that while the pain is intimate, it is also entirely ordinary. In this way, she makes the entirety of Bridgeport feel real, as if we lived there too. The further the reader gets into the collection, the more genuine the fictional village becomes. Her stories, inspired by archival newspaper articles, span generations. This makes reading the collection feel like the stories are our own recollections of town gossip whispered around our kitchen table.

The collection begins with “The Wash,” which focuses on a mother’s most feared tragedy. Within a few paragraphs, we are blindsided just as Mabel is, as she learns the fate of her son Rusty who was accidentally drowned by Dakota, the neighbor’s dog. Mabel recounts her grief in all of its frustrating, raw, and irrational glory. The use of a retrospective first-person narration allows Cedeño to provide a glimmer of hope even as we see Mabel in her darkest moments. As Mabel puts it, “when the impossible happens, you must accept it. Even if it runs like a spectacle around in your brain, or sits like a coal in your stomach, or severs the legs you once used to stand.” This story sets the tone for the collection, giving readers a very clear depiction of both loss and acceptance. Mabel is not the first, nor will she be the last, to ever feel this way; however, her uniqueness comes from how she internalizes her grief and carries it with her. The story ends with Mabel and Dakota’s owner, former adversaries, sharing a cigarette and watching their smoke dissipate.

Many of the stories collected here feature a looming figure in the back-ground, a kind of threat that will upset the characters’ lives as they know them. The threat might be the inevitable march of time, as in “House, History,” where an older couple waits for the morning when their family home is to be bulldozed by the college. Other stories explore this idea more directly with the use of burglars, murderers, or other shady figures in the area. In “Dear Victor, If I Could Write You a Letter” the nameless narrator writes to Victor, insisting she wasn’t trying to kiss him. She tells him about how she and Clara, his wife, decided that they were going to try and catch the Church Street Prowler, which becomes a way for the women to take hold of their own lives—and the burglar’s escape pushes them further into their feelings of discontentment. At the end, the prowler haunts the narrator by standing and staring at her just long enough for her to imagine that he is Victor, and to think of what she might say to him.

One of my favorite aspects of this collection is how geographically connected the stories are. While characters from one story don’t reappear in the others, many of them find importance in the same places. In “Professor Bird” we follow a college student at SUNY Bridgeport who is having an affair with her professor. At The Cellar, where they go for beers, they see a “Draft Beers Not Boys” sign. These reappear in the final story “Cold Storage,” set during the Vietnam war. The way Cedeño intertwines the setting but not her characters encourages readers to wonder about the importance of the most significant moments of our lives. For example, in “Pooter from Church Street, circa 1990,” Cedeño writes of a toddler who will soon be forgotten. The story begins with vivid descriptions of Pooter and his life: “Pooter was a chubby thumb of a toddler” and “The Purple house was occupied strictly by transients. Children ran in a never-ending supply around the front yard.” It quickly changes pace to proclaim that despite these details, “No one remembered seeing Pooter writing on cracked sidewalks near the train tracks.” Pooter becomes an idea, a vague memory to the residents of Church Street; they may remember that he existed but have forgotten everything that made him Pooter. Although that summer may have been the most remarkable of his life, to everyone else Pooter was just a neglected toddler who lived in the Purple House. In “Primal,” the Purple House where he lived is again present, except this time it’s dismissed as “the purple house, full of women with their young children.” This repetition of place has the effect of revealing our alienation from our neighbors.

The collection ends with “Cold Storage,” which wonderfully captures the complex feelings of anguish, freedom, and the self-absorption that comes with grieving. As the only novella in the collection, it allows us to sit longer with its characters. The reader feels the same aching pain that June and her mother do as they try to navigate their new lives. When June comes home from St. Barnabas Home for Unwed Mothers, having given birth to a daughter, she is confronted with her parent’s divorce and the worsening of her mother’s Multiple Sclerosis. The first-person narrative might have us empathize with June alone, but Cedeño reminds us that June’s mother is also suffering, and that in fact, everyone has their own struggles. Of their separate battles, June says, “occasionally, we took turns crying. Neither of us had anything to offer as a consolation to the other. It was as though we were grieving something similar but in entirely different places.” At the end, June goes home and sleeps, waiting for her mother to wake up so she can help take care of her. Ending this collection with a story of ambiguous loss reminds us of how complex grief can be, and because of this, shows us how crucial it is to find solace and community with the people close to us.