A 42 year old woman – Faith, Paley’s alter ego – leaves Manhattan and takes the subway out to her childhood neighbourhood in Brooklyn. It is the early 1970s and entirely African American now; Faith is the only white person on the street. The neighbourhood is run down, neglected, and rife with heroin addiction. Then, a preposterous exchange causes Faith to seek sanctuary in what is – literally – her childhood home, moving in with the family who now live there. Their interaction is both hilarious and touching – Faith tries to explain the place she knew and the family tries to explain the world they know. When Faith leaves after several weeks, she realises she both can and cannot return to the place she came from. Paley’s stories repeatedly confront the most serious of subjects (love, death, war) without ever taking themselves too seriously, and therein lies their power. The titles of her collections (this story is from Enormous Changes at the Last Minute) are playful, comforting, knowing, like she’s sitting in an all night diner and wants you to know that, in the end, That’s life, darling.
From Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), first published in Esquire, March 1974 and available online here
A Personal Anthology 