Call Up the Waters by Amber Caron
Milkweed Editions, 2023
Review by Elaine Edwards
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From drought to drowning, across memory and mirage, moving through distances both beyond and within us, the stories of Amber Caron’s striking debut collection Call Up the Waters are composed in forces that at once repel and depend on each other. We are shaped, these stories suggest, both by and against what we love: in “The Stonemason’s Wife,” stone is both stability and barrier; in “Didi,” characters run toward and away from home; in “Fixed Blade,” adulthood is both burden and gift. But these dichotomies are never as obvious as they seem, and Caron’s characters rarely carry them with ease. Often they become what they resist; often what they become has been inside them all along. Lines blur.
Relationships are a frequent site for this blurring, and it’s worth noting just how many different permutations these ten stories explore: children, spouses, coworkers, schoolmates, exes, neighbors, strangers. Sometimes, the troubling begins in these identities themselves. In “What the Birds Knew,” a man is both father and not-father; in “Sea Women,” a haunting voice is both daughter and not-daughter.
Each story is a map drawn by those it connects, however knotted or tenuous, where all lives are conduits to other lives. As one character in “Barn Burning” says of another, “I understood he was my doorway into this world.” Often as I read, the sense I had of each story was of a house, entered through a window: many times we begin with characters who are not those that guide us to the end, and what they’re seeking is never something seen head-on.
In the title story, a mother is consumed by the search for underground water, her children by turns are fascinated and embarrassed by this compulsion – by her. The story pulls at the tension between their desire for her and their shame: “We tried to save herself from herself and the embarrassment she was causing,” the daughter tells us, and they do try, stealing her equipment, lying, making a mess to prevent her from leaving. But as she reprimands them for this last incident, they think “Keep going. […] Let us have it.” The mother declares she isn’t going anywhere until the mess is gone, and in response her children take their time.
How often do we lash out, hoping someone might see us? What the children crave is connection: to no longer suffer the alienation of their peers, certainly, but also to bridge the gap between themselves and their mother. With this comes a jealousy and distrust of the mother’s connection to the water, one that is painted as almost supernatural. It’s a skilled magic – one that can be taught, but one that must also be felt. Nature, here and in many of these stories, is a site of the divine, but also a sight of delusion. If what the mother has is a kind of faith – a sincere and uncomplicated belief – then what the children are left with is doubt.
As I read, perhaps in part evoked by the arid, segmented design of the book’s cover, I kept returning to the image of a slot canyon. Water and time carving what was once one thing into two. The narrowest of separations – and yet the whole sky rushes to fill it. There is no completeness in Caron’s world, but the fractures are themselves an illusion of againstness. After all: canyon, sky, the eyes of the witness holding both at once. These are made of the same elements, the same essentials.
The spare, unornamented sentences that make up this collection help take us back to these essentials. The pleasure of reading here is in the details, in which details Caron chooses to hold up to our attention.
“Bending the Map” begins with the surreal image of the central character’s cabin sliding from a canyon wall in a storm. When she fails to find her belongings in the river, she heads to her neighbor’s house, where her things have been arranged exactly as she had organized them in her own. The narrator understands – has known for a while – that he has made a habit of sneaking into her home, that many of these recovered items had been taken long before the storm.
He is infatuated with her, obsessed, though she is in love with someone else – a married man who will not leave his wife. And of the wife, she tells us:
She didn’t say her name on her voicemail recording but instead repeated her phone number. She
drove a small silver hatchback with a dent on the back bumper. A collection of beaded necklaces
dangled from the rearview mirror. I knew she went grocery shopping at the same time every
Saturday morning and that she always ordered a cappuccino at the coffee shop on her way home.
She pronounced cappuccino with an Italian accent. She didn’t use sugar.
These details are a mirror placed between the narrator and the neighbor. We understand intimately, without having to be told, each step that must have been taken in the acquiring of this knowledge. In their specificity, we see that her obsession is a reflection of his, with all the same complications of envy, tenderness, concern. These details, too, are stolen, and so too do they reach us in a flood: arriving all at once, the narrator once again displaced.
In “Shovelbums,” choice details are foregrounded by the structure of the piece. Centered on a crew of archeologists tasked with updating the National Register of Historic Places, the story is composed of a series of short, titled vignettes. Like museum placards, these scenes take us through such culturally significant locales as FLAGSTAFF and JOSHUA TREE NATIONAL PARK, but they also detour to LOW COUNTRY RESTAURANT AND SALOON and WHITE STALLION INN, with further unexpected stops along the way – HOME-COOKED MEALS, SHIT LIST, REGRETS. These, Caron’s inclusion insists, must be significant, too. Over the course of a story, such details accumulate.
And the spaces between, the held-breaths, the what-is-left-unsaid – this balance allows room for meaning, and for that meaning to build upon itself over the course of each story. Nothing is obvious, not at first, and “rather than seeing the thing,” as the protagonist of “The Handler” describes an animal’s passage through the forest, you can “only trace the movement of the figure by the changing light through the trees.”
This story, the first of the collection, functions almost as a thesis, providing us with our clearest glimpse at what Caron believes such “essentials” to be: “Food, shit, hay, paws.” When there is nothing else, in moments of deep personal pain or boredom or uncertainty or growth, there is the rhythm of what must be done to stay alive. The job of the handler is to look after a musher’s sled dogs, and her primary duty, the musher notes, is to look after their paws. “No paw,” he says, “no dog.”
The tale, as in others here, is intensely tactile – just look to the title – with characters who use their hands to work, to write, to curse, to care and, in the case of the musher’s deaf teenage daughter, to speak. Much of the story consists of hands engaged in daily work: scrubbing harnesses, inspecting teeth and trimming paws, bootying feet, all in preparation for the Iditarod, the “last great race” from Anchorage to Nome. Like a sled dog needs its paws to run, to survive, our hands are how we do much of our living.
The story is careful to note that this isn’t without risk – in a letter to her ex, a relationship she has taken the handler job both to save and escape, the protagonist details the many injuries on the team: “Stewpot has a fissure; Mars, a swollen ankle. Scooby’s dewclaw is inflamed because I put his bootie on wrong. It started just as an irritation, but I ignored it, and now Scooby might be done for the season.” A small irritation, ignored until it no longer could be: this line a direct parallel to the many fights and failures that led to the demise of her relationship. Likewise, our human characters’ hands aren’t unscathed, either: the daughter’s hands are full of “calluses and cuts, dirt lodged beneath her nails,” and the handler, unused to the labor of caring for these dogs in freezing conditions, suffers from blisters. When a terrible accident happens halfway through the story, though, it’s touch that we see in the aftermath: broken ribs assessed, salves administered, and, repeatedly, characters stroking a deceased dog’s fur. These attempts at connection are imperfect – an offer to help bury the dog rebuked because the ground is frozen, a pillow poorly adjusted, the handler struggling to “touch without hurting.” But despite these injuries, despite difficulty, the work of hands continues. They keep reaching.
Come back to what you can do, what you can touch. Caron doesn’t claim this will save us, but it’s in these touchpoints – in our relationships with one another, in the details of our daily existence, in all the complicated, contradictory connections between ourselves and the world around us – that our lives happen. And in all of that happening, our lives won’t go untouched, either: humans are apart from the natural world, these stories remind us, and part of it all at once. It shapes us as much as we shape it. The same holds true for how we relate to one another: I shape you as much as you shape me. Caron’s stories direct our attention to those moments and places where we touch, resist, overlap. These are perhaps our own doorways into the world, and maybe in them we’ll find whatever it is we’re looking for – though we must be prepared for the world to enter us, to find us there, too.
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Amber Caron is the author of the story collection Call Up the Waters (Milkweed Editions) and the recipient of the O’Henry Prize, the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, Southwest Review’s McGinnis-Ritchie Award for fiction, and grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Best Short Stories 2024: The O’Henry Prize Winners, PEN America Best Debut Short Stories, The Threepenny Review, AGNI, Bennington Review, Southwest Review, Longreads, Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Utah State University and an Assistant Fiction Editor at AGNI.
Elaine Edwards (she/her) lives and writes in Richmond, VA. She was the third place winner of the inaugural SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction. Find her on Twitter @apiologee.
ID: Cover of Call Up the Waters by Amber Caron.
Psaltery & Lyre 