Sunday Afternoon

An old poem - one of my favorites in high school.

Sunday Afternoon
By Denise Levertov

After the First Communion
and the banquet of mangoes and
bridal cake, the young daughters
of the coffee merchant lay down
for a long siesta, and their white dresses
lay beside them in quietness
and the white veils floated
in their dreams as the flies buzzed.
But as the afternoon
burned to a close they rose
and ran about the neighborhood
among the halfbuilt villas
alive, alive, kicking a basketball, wearing
other new dresses, of bloodred velvet.

18: She's So Money

Just read Cherry Cheva’s first novel, She’s So Money. Like her second novel, Duplikate, I have mixed feelings about it.

She’s So Money concerns Maya’s desperate attempt to raise ten thousand dollars to pay off a fine that she accidentally incurred when her parents left her in charge of their Thai restaurant for a weekend. Maya starts a cheating ring to raise the cash, deputizing her smart friends to do the rich kids' homework at a hundred bucks a pop - while Maya secretly skims a twenty-five percent commission off the top.

It’s the secret skimming that bothers me. First, screwing over her friends makes Maya unsympathetic in a way that merely cheating does not; but second, and far more importantly, I have no idea why she doesn’t just tell her friends about the fine. I bet if they knew, they’d be willing to give her an even bigger commission, even split the money fifty/fifty; they'd still get fifty bucks for fifteen minutes of work.

It’s a classic idiot plot. Cheva doesn’t even attempt to explain Maya’s refusal to tell. It just sits there, a black hole in the center of the story, sucking Maya’s more sympathetic qualities in with its gravitational force - the more so because Maya's friends are reasonably well-developed and a lot of fun, making her look like even more of a cad for lying to them.

On the other hand, if you put that aside, the book’s got a lot going for it. I didn’t like her boyfriend very much, but I have a low, low tolerance for fictional assholes, no matter how reformed; I suspect other people would think he just hit the spot. I read the book in a night, and the pacing is cracking good (though, as in Duplikate, Cheva chickens out on the consequences in the end) and Maya’s fast, frazzled voice is a lot of fun.