“You Know I Want It Ice Cold,” by Rachel Heng, appeared in the May/June 2019 issue of KROnline.
In prose, whether fiction or nonfiction, the second person point of view—where the story is told as if to another character using the word you—is notoriously hard to pull off. The declarative nature of this point of view can feel confrontational where the “you” in the narrative inadvertently imposes its narrative life onto the readers, bringing them somewhat into the story. Done badly, the second person point of view can also come across as gimmicky or tedious to read, especially if the writer’s hand lands heavy on producing a shocking experience for the reader as opposed to creating an emotional connection.
Not everyone who reads the fiction of Lorrie Moore—maestra of the second person point of view—will have been brutally rejected or commit adultery, as is the case with so many of her characters. But they will be familiar with the over-salted taste of rejection or what it feels like to be tempted, to contemplate straying from their relationships, and the waves of burning shame and guilt that accompany those feelings, thus creating an emotional connection between themselves and the gorgeously crafted “you” in Moore’s stories. When the narrator of a story struggles with shame or guilt or significant pain, or a combination of these emotions if not all of them, and needs distance from such feelings, the “you”—throwing blame back at the reader—works best then.
So it is, in Rachel Heng’s “You Know I Want It Ice Cold,” that understandable human selfishness, failure, guilt, and longing come spectacularly alive through the second person point of view of the narrator Terry: a fifty-year-old man stuck looking after his dying mother, perpetually at her beck and call. He has failed at life—”no job, no wife, no kids, no house in the prosperous New Jersey suburbs like your older brothers do, not even a girlfriend to uproot”—and his interactions with his mother turn him into the disappointing child she still thinks him to be. He is jealous and resentful of his “tall, fit, married, wealthy, successful brothers,” who use their good-natured voices and money to bully Terry into doing whatever they want while “making it seem like they are doing you the favor.”
The only thing Terry finds solace, and even misguided courage, in is a reality show where entrepreneurs present their business ideas to a panel of judges in the hope of winning an investment. His admiration for the meanest judge, whose parents were refugees from the Lebanese war, reflects Terry’s own longing for more, to be more:
You dream of going on the show yourself one day. Most contestants want an investment from the square-jawed man, because he owns a basketball team and has an exclusive distribution deal with Amazon Prime and looks like a movie star. No one likes the Lebanese man, but he is your favorite. The other judges speak in kind, rational voices. They let contestants down gently, with encouraging words like “You’ll get there one day!’” and “Everyone has to start somewhere.” When they do offer investments, the terms are fair, in dollar amounts close to what the contestants ask for. The Lebanese man, on the other hand, calls people bozos and tells them his five-year-old kid could do a better job of making that presentation. He offers bad deals involving structured equity and royalty checks that only a real sucker would take. He once made a steely-eyed engineer, who had invented a bike with detachable electric wheels, faint. It is because of the Lebanese man that the TV show ensures that every contestant sees a counselor after they present.
On the night this story takes place, Terry, feeling exhausted and frustrated and angry—“perhaps, you have been doomed since birth. You are, after all, the third child, eight years younger than your second brother—incidental, unplanned, unwanted”—decides to charge his mother money for bringing her yet another glass of ice-cold water. He is inspired by the reality show. This is the sixth time that night she has called for chilled water when a perfectly full jug of cold water is sitting next to her bedside. His mother sees through Terry in this moment of need, and at her capitulation he feels petty triumph.
But then, in the penultimate paragraph—and this is the coup de grâce in Heng’s portrayal of Terry as a fully realized and flawed human being—through a flash forward reminiscent of Tobias Woolf’s “Bullet in the Brain,” Terry is given a poignant humanizing moment:
Your brothers will let you keep Ma’s apartment when she dies, even though she writes you out of her will for reasons no one else understands. You understand, of course. Twenty years from now, lying in that very bed, you will bolt awake, remembering the searing chunks of ice you swallowed in the kitchen that night, the night you charged your dying mother money for a drink of water. Twenty years from tonight, for the first time since your mother’s death, you will miss her with a desperation that you have not felt since you were a boy. The shame will eat you hollow, and lying awake there in the cold quiet night, you will cry.
And although the narrative ends in the present moment, with Terry sauntering off to the kitchen to get water and ice, his mother taking sips from the glass, and Terry taking his payment from her purse, a lump continues to form in my throat because it is in the penultimate paragraph, along with the many small moments of humanity we see throughout the story, in a deeply flawed Terry, that stays with the reader long afterwards, leaving us with a sense of the complicated nature of human life.