According to an interview she gave with The Paris Review, this is Deborah Eisenberg’s first short story. This is maddening, incomprehensible. How is it that she arrived at this voice, which feels so accomplished, so idiosyncratic, so deft? She has obviously gone on to write a great number of short stories — her Collected Stories is a veritable doorstopper — and there are so many I love, but it’s ‘Days’ to which I most regularly return. The plot is about as straightforward as it gets: A woman who has given up smoking takes up running at the local Y. Surely this can’t be enough to generate nearly forty pages, you’d think, and you’d be wrong. There are so many lines I want to quote — including a hilarious misunderstanding in which the narrator mistakes Adidas for an airline — but I think maybe I’ll just share the opening two sentences here and encourage you to seek out the rest:
“I had never known what I was like until I stopped smoking, by which time there was hell to pay for it. When the haze cleared over the charred landscape, the person I had always assumed to be behind the smoke was revealed to be a tinny weights-and-balances apparatus, rapidly disassembling on contact with oxygen.”
First published in Eisenberg’s collection Transactions in a Foreign Currency,Knopf, 1986, and collected in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, Picador, 2008
A Personal Anthology 