Nanci Kincaid: Pretending The Bed Is A Raft

James Cook

published: December 10, 1997

Nanci Kincaid
Pretending The Bed Is A Raft
Algonquin Books

NANCI KINCAID IS the practitioner of a kind of narrative voyeurism. Through the eight stories of Pretending the Bed is a Raft, the reader has the opportunity to observe other people--our next-door neighbors or friends of friends--who are consumed with predicaments created by forbidden yearnings. And in each of these stories, there is just enough critical information about the darker side of these people's relationships--what happens behind drawn curtains and closed doors--to keep the pages turning.

In "Just Because They Got Papers Doesn't Mean They Still Aren't Dogs," a woman tries to grieve her husband's untimely death without ever having owned up to the guilt of an undisclosed affair. "Why Richard Can't" follows a literature professor whose life seems "well-organized and under control" until he comes to realize the differences between his lover (the woman he wants to be with) and his wife (the woman he's stuck with). And in the title story, "Pretending The Bed Is A Raft," a woman attempts to accept her imminent death to cancer while executing a 10-item wish list before she goes. Three of those tasks include tape recording birthday messages for her children up through their 21st years, finding a new wife for her husband, and making love to three other men.

Though these scenarios may seem of the earnest and poignant variety, the strength of Pretending the Bed is in the dialogue--a blunt and memorable brand of profundity. In "Won't Nobody Love You Like Your Daddy Does," Tammy confronts her mother upon discovering that she is having an affair with the next-door neighbor. This is, unfortunately, the same man that Tammy likes to pretend is her husband and whom she slow dances with at the end of her baby-sitting jobs. Tammy's mother responds to her daughter's threat of exposure by performing the older-and-wiser song and dance: "'When I was fourteen,'" she says "'I had good and bad memorized too, but things change places...that's what they don't tell you.'"

Kincaid's writing forces her characters to switch those places, while exposing the reader to the things they don't tell you. In the end, Pretending The Bed is A Raft is about the all-encompassing mysteries of love: possessing the power to dismantle with love, reassemble with love, and to know when to leave love in fragments.