Author Lorrie Moore once said, “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage.” With Sunday Shorts, OprahMag.com invites you to join our own love affair with short fiction by reading original stories from some of our favorite writers.
Over five novels and a short story collection, Curtis Sittenfeld has, with a mix of compassion and irony, mined the casual cruelties of the elite for comic gold. Her female characters often have hilariously warped senses of themselves and the world. Jill, the protagonist of “White Women LOL,” is no different; when she’s caught on camera in a confrontation construed as racist, her notion of her own “wokeness” is called into question. What ensues is a narrative that very much speaks to our current cultural moment and how racial tensions play out over social media.
"WHITE WOMEN LOL"
Kiwi the Shih Tzu gets loose on the Thursday before the schools in the district let out for winter break. This means everyone knows, in a way they might not if he got loose after break had started. Regardless, everyone knows Kiwi. He weighs maybe twelve pounds, and the plentiful white fur around his face accentuates his dark eyes and dark little nose. (Do dogs have faces? Jill isn’t sure.) But Kiwi is both yippy and cute, and, though Jill—who is not particularly a dog lover—has never sought to pet him, he’s the only dog at the elementary school dropoff whose name she knows.
Aside from his cuteness, there are probably two other reasons Kiwi is a school celebrity: The first is that he belongs to the Johnson family, and Vanessa Johnson herself is something of a celebrity. She’s an anchor on Channel 8 evening news, is widely agreed to be the most beautiful mother at Hardale East Elementary School, is black, and lives in the tree-lined, large-house-filled neighborhood adjacent to the school, which allows her to bring Kiwi on a leash when she walks with her children to school in the morning; meanwhile, almost all of the school’s other black families, whose children account for under ten percent of the student body, live miles to the north, and ride the bus to campus. The second reason for Kiwi’s celebrity is that, for kids, including Jill’s own son and daughter, Shih Tzu is fun to say.
The way Kiwi escapes is that the Johnsons’ housecleaner, who has been working for them on a weekly basis for years, carries a bag of garbage outside to the trash bin, leaves the back door open, and doesn’t securely close the storm door. Apparently, while the housecleaner is despondent, Vanessa Johnson doesn’t blame her; Kiwi is wily, and such a thing could have happened on anyone’s watch. But, as Jill hears from her best friend Amy, whose other best friend is Vanessa, it isn’t the first time the housecleaner has let this happen. However, in the other instances, Kiwi didn’t make it out of the backyard.
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It’s from Amy that Jill learns about Kiwi. At 9 p.m. Thursday, Amy texts her Kiwi has been missing since noon!
This is the first text Amy has sent Jill in weeks, and Jill immediately replies, Oh no what happened?
Amy explains the situation, and Jill expresses concern, which she does feel, though perhaps not as much as an actual dog lover would and not a concern totally separate from her own concerns about her strained friendship with Amy and her—Jill’s—recently tarnished standing in the community. Jill initially thinks she’s learning about a dog’s imminent death rather than its escape; she thinks she’s feeling a conclusive sorrow rather than the agitated hope of the unresolved. Their neighborhood is a grid of quiet, stately residential avenues bound by significantly busier streets. Additionally, in their part of the Midwest, a cold front is expected for the weekend and the temperature will likely fall to the single digits.
Jill and Amy engage in a thirteen-text volley, and the last text between them, from Jill, is Wow I feel so bad, keep me posted
She refrains from adding:
Does everyone at school hate me?
Is it too soon for me to come back to dropoff?
Are we still friends?
Almost three weeks prior, Amy’s husband Rick hosted her fortieth birthday party in the elegantly appointed back room of a trendy downtown restaurant. There was a fireplace, a bar, and many high round tables where guests could congregate first for drinks and then for the buffet dinner. Instead of flowers, there were willow branches and white lights.