A presentation on Marian Crotty’s short story “Halloween”
Summary
Julie is a seventeen year old High School student who finds herself often talking and spending evenings with her grandmother, Jan. Julie’s parents are divorced, and her Dad, Jan’s son, has long since moved out of the family entirely, but Julie’s Mom has a close relationship with her former mother-in-law. Jan is not a little eccentric; she has what others regard as attention-seeking tendencies, and is a strident believer in the overwhelming importance of love at seemingly any cost and risk, which Julie regards as not a little fucked up. The most revealing episode in her history with love was when one of her ex-boyfriends, a man named David, broke into her apartment and tried to set it on fire. Julie has been spending significant time at her Grandmother’s new apartment complex (where they go for walks and swim in the pool) to avoid her Mom’s new boyfriend, a polite bespectacled man named Paul. She overwhelmingly dislikes Paul with a passion that she recognizes as irrational, but still spends significant time attacking him to Jan, who usually takes up the role of mildly defending him, like she does for most men. However, what Julie most discusses with Jan is her crush on her ex-girlfriend, Erika, her twenty-year old co-worker at the yogurt place she’s employed at. Erika and Julie were together for the last summer, when Erika kept things deliberately slow and stopped them from ever having sex or becoming too committed. After Erika broke up with Julie, the latter begged her to take her back and created an atmosphere of tension and awkwardness between the two, which culminated in Erika blocking Julie’s number and switching shifts at their workplace. Julie is embarrassed by her actions, which remind her of her ex-boyfriend A.J.’s pleading after her previous breakup (which was caused by Julie realizing she was gay). Jan begins advising Julie on how to win back Erika; firstly that she should attempt to act casual and unbothered around Erika the next chance she gets. When a busy work day places them on the same shift, Julie begins to talk with Erika casually and manages to break through the pre-existing tension between them. At the same time she remains preoccupied with a mad crush on the older girl. Erika stops changing shifts as frequently, and the two girls resume an unhurried friendship against the backdrop of Julie’s senior year, which is providing great stress for her. After a month or so, Jan advises Julie to draw Erika’s interest by acting like she’s the object of another girl’s affections and by finding a reason to spark physical contact with Erika. Like Jan’s other pieces of advice, these strategies had been successively deployed by her in her past love life. Julie successively pulls off the first facade and than finds an excuse to touch her on the back in the supply closet when they’re cleaning up. Erika, who initially seems to feel encroached on by the touch, responds by making out with Julie until their boss arrives at the store. After they finish cleaning up, Julie wistfully follows Erika to her car, and after a moment of Erika’s hesitation the two go back to the latter’s place. The two end the night by having sex. The next day, Erika texts Julie that she’s quitting the yogurt place after getting an internship, and that while she had a good time, she doesn’t think that they should do that again. Julie is content with that until witnessing Erika come pick up her stuff from work with her supposedly ex-girlfriend Kat, realizing that they were never broken up and Erika simply messed around with her while Kat was away from the summer. Erika tries to meet Julie’s eyes but the latter acts like it doesn’t bother her. After talking with her best friend about it, Julie tells her Mom what happened. Her Mom reacts with compassion but tells Paul, who says something to Julie, leading the girl to tell her Mom that there are no longer any secrets between them. On Halloween, Julie is with her grandmother when she receives a text from another yogurt store employee inviting her to a party at Erika’s house. Julie knows that she’s not really invited and that it’s a horrible idea to go, but still wants to. Her grandmother tells her that it’s her decision, and admits that when Dave tried to burn down her house she stayed with him for over a year after the event. Jan tells Julie that to be with the person you love is “heaven,” and Julie realizes that no matter what happened in the past or might happen she wants to be around Erika and enjoy that frenetic, all-encompassing feeling. Jan volunteers to drive.
Acute Tension: Spurred on by her Grandmother, Julie’s attempts to woo back Erika and restart a relationship that she desires greatly.
Chronic Tension: Julie’s struggle to find affection and satisfaction from her love, framed by her hesitant dialogue with Jan’s views and experiences on the matter.
What makes the story compelling or interesting to read?
Crotty does a wonderful job of depicting and charting this girl’s crush and desire, accurately portraying some of the best and worst parts of teenage romance. To me, the strength of this story is in its relationships, particularly between Julie and Jan and Julie and Erika. The first is very well developed and does a great amount of legwork in the story; the bond between this girl and her grandmother has arisen only out of the unique conditions of a family situation that has already greatly colored Julie, and the solid dynamic between the two is a source of courage and advice entirely absent from other parts of her life. Crotty perfectly captures the love tinged with unavoidable skepticism that exists at the heart of many connections between teenager and grandparent. Jan’s is a well-rounded, complicated character, whose contradictions (the obviously unhealthy way she loves versus the soundness and success of her advice) captivate Julie and lead the girl down paths she might otherwise have completely ignored.
Julie’s relationship with Erika also rings incredibly true to me; anyone who has ever felt something for an older teenager at sixteen-seventeen can attest that the way Crotty writes Julie’s feelings and perceptions of Erika- the enamoration with someone who seems “perfect” and far more advanced than you, coupled with a massive desire to be more mature and less childish than ever- is very accurate. The general contours of Julie’s crush are well-written. It’s very easy to fall into cliches and tropes when describing feelings that have been portrayed and obsessed upon by every portrayal of teenage youth ever, but Crotty keeps it leveled and just frenzied enough.
What does the story do that is “surprising,” which, per Matthew Salesses, might reveal our “normative” expectations about a particular craft element/technique, and what it does?
I thought that the most surprising part of the story was how seriously it considers and engages with Jan’s views on love and romance. In a different story, the unhealthy ways that Jan fully embracing love at all costs might be the object on a lazy put-down or a wholesale refutation- they are at best illogical and at worst actively dangerous (consider her relationship with David). Julie begins the story with this perspective, not giving it much of a second thought. The opening paragraph is entirely devoted to presenting her doubts and rejection of Jan’s approach.
My grandmother had fucked-up ideas about love. This was something anyone who had spent about five minutes with her understood. She had been married three times—once to my grandfather and twice to a guy named David who I remember as a quiet gray-bearded man with a motorcycle but who had also broken into Jan’s duplex and set fire to the rattan patio set that she’d always kept in her sunroom. When I asked if she’d been afraid of this guy, she shrugged. “Sure. Sometimes.” In her mind, love was an undertaking that required constant vigilance and bravery, and when she spoke about her own relationships, I often thought of a woman I had seen on YouTube trying to explain why she had been raising the tiger cub that eventually mauled her. “We loved each other,” the woman said. “I don’t expect anyone to understand.”
The implications of Julie’s comparison here is clear: in her eyes, Jan’s approach to relationships leaves her in danger, and that her perspective on love is idealistic and misguided. It brings pain and potentially injury while refusing to acknowledge the harsh and messed-up side of its own dynamics.
Yet this perspective is what gives her the unique distinction of being the only person in Julie’s life willing to feed and aid her desire to get back together with Erika. Both her mother and her friend Paloma are hinted to reject the possibility as foolish, pointless, and undesirable, while Jan is able to understand and encourage Julie’s feelings about a girl she is clearly enamoured with. Right away a point-of-view that we might initially regard as useless and odd is given beneficial meaning in the world of the protagonist, even if she is still wholly skeptical of its value. Julie is filled with doubts and frets that logically she has absolutely no chance with Erika. But it is through Jan’s viewpoint and elaborations that she is able to conjure up hope that it is more than just desirable, but also possible.
The logical part of my brain thought the more likely explanation was that Erika had only ever gotten together with me in the first place out of boredom and convenience (we had spent the summer working together at a frozen yogurt shop called Yotopia!) and now that FSU was back for the fall semester, it embarrassed her to be with a high school student. Sometimes, though, in the midst of one of Jan’s musings, I could almost convince myself that there had been a misunderstanding and that if I could just show Erika I was a mature and attractive person, she would, if not see that she had made a mistake, at least consider making out with me in secret.
Throughout the story, as Julie finds Jan’s advice working more and more, she begins to come around more and more to her grandmother’s perspective, while still keeping it at arm’s length in a sense. Practically she applies it heavily to Erika, her head swimming at the mere chance to be around the older girl. She hesitates at steps, but always carries out Jan’s advice. This collection of tips and counsel seems to work when Erika makes out with Julie and than goes to bed with her. Even after Erika tells Julie that they shouldn’t repeat what happened, the latter feels like her feelings have been fully vindicated. In a thought very much like those of her grandmother, Julie reflects:
Stupidly maybe, I felt fine, maybe even good. I had found someone perfect, and she had slept with me. The fact that she had done so against her better judgment just proved that she was attracted to me in the same combustible way I felt for her, and attraction like that seemed rare and true, a tugging magnet that couldn’t easily be ignored.
Yet the following events with Kat seem to be a complete break with those hopes and the perspective they entail. In the immediate aftermath of the reveal, Jan briefly slips out of the story, distracted by her new job. Julie seeks comfort in Paloma and her mother, both of whom reject (in different ways, Paloma more harshly) the illogical full pursuit of love that Jan embodies. Her friend tells her to make a harsh separation with her thoughts of Erika. Both sources of respite, however, prove empty to Julie. She remains hurting and thinking of Erika, unable to shake her strong feelings.
This leads directly into the final passage of the story, where Jan essentially confirms to Julie that her feelings should not be neglected or cut off from. They are not, as Paloma sees them, a “wound” or a sickness to be healed. Jan summarizes the breadth of her perspective on love in one simple note:
“To be with the person you want is heaven. It doesn’t have to be the right circumstances to feel good.”
In direct reaction to this line, Julie has a revelation that marks itself as the key shift in the story. She accepts, even hesitatingly, her grandmother’s feelings of love and pursuit of love.
This was the opposite of what sounded true, the opposite of why my mom had told me she was with Pete. She loved him, yes, but the more important thing was that he was devoted and dependable, that he didn’t jerk her around. I knew that Jan sounded crazy and that it made no sense for me to crash a party where a girl who had not only mistreated me but also made it very clear she didn’t want to see me anymore would be hanging out with her girlfriend, but I also knew that I was going to go. I wanted to be in the same room with her, and I wanted this helpless feeling to go away. To imagine a lifetime of this feeling made me dizzy.
Crotty thus vindicates at least the reasoning of Jan’s practice of love, if not the full extent and implications of it. She does through Julie’s changing relationship with that perspective, a change brought about by her own experiences that provides her with more clarity and understanding towards her grandmother and the reasons behind actions that seemed previously incomprehensible to her.
What can you find to imitate or use in your own writing?
I thought this piece had a wonderful way of portraying a developing and changing relationship between two characters entirely through another. While most of the narrative and plot is about Erika and Julie’s romantic connection, the beats of the story illustrate a progression of the relationship between Jan and Julie, one that is not clearly brought out into the open until the last passage. The first time I read this story that surprised me greatly, and subsequent rereads illustrated how carefully the tracks to that final moment had been laid in moments where it initially seemed like Jan was only an auxiliary character, that her advice and perspective were only context to a young lovers story. I can very much learn from this subtle build-up and subtextual dynamic, especially in the brilliant reveal of its importance as the core of the story at the end of Halloween.
Discussion Questions:
- How does Crotty keep the relationship between Julie and Jan present in the story during the bulk of the narrative that seems primarily concerned with Julie and Erika?
- In what ways does Julie’s relationship to Erika mirror her grandmother’s relationships to her ex-boyfriends and husbands? In what ways do they diverge?
- Paloma is an interesting character, but she isn’t very present in the story, only appearing at a crucial juncture for a short scene. How does Crotty use this character to further the narrative’s themes?
- Do you think the story ends with a complete affirmation of Jan’s perspective and Julie’s desire? Or do the introduced counterpoints and doubts serve to create a balanced viewpoint?
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