First published in Short Stories by Women, Graywolf, 1986, and collected in Escapes, Vintage, 1990 and The Visiting Privilege: New and Selected Stories, Knopf, 2015
‘Health’ by Joy Williams
It would be inconceivable to me to begin any selection of my favorite stories without including ‘Health’, which is my favorite short story by my favorite practitioner of the form — my favorite writer, period — Joy Williams. I first read this story when I was eighteen, after picking up a collection put out by Graywolf in the mid-80s called Short Stories by Women. I remember that I bought it for a few bucks in the basement of the Harvard Book Store. That anthology introduced me to writers like Elizabeth Tallent and Ann Beattie — more on both of them in a moment — but it was Joy’s story, ‘Health’, that most thrilled me. It’s a fairly simple story in which a young girl, Pammy, goes to a spa to get a tan. Something serious and sundering may or may not happen while she’s in the tanning booth. (The ambiguity of the encounter — real? imagined? somehow both? — is one of the most haunting elements of the story’s construction.) She exits the tanning spa a different person; the surface area of her innocence has shrunk, irremediably, irredeemably. This story contains an entire world in it, and it’s only about eight pages. It also has the best cough in all of literature.
A Personal Anthology 