Review: Trickle-Down Timeline by Cris Mazza

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration claimed that tax breaks for corporations and the nation’s highest earners would spur economic growth and allow wealth to ‘trickle-down’ to those on the lower end of the economic scale. It was a lie, of course. Money doesn’t trickle down. It pools at the feet of the already wealthy. Reaganomics only led to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer at a faster rate than before. For anyone who graduated from high school, went to university, got married, and generally came of age in the United States in the 1980s, Cris Mazza’s short story collection Trickle-Down Timeline brings that decade into sharp focus again. 

‘For ten or twenty years after leaving home,’ the narrator of ‘What If’ tells us, ‘there’s little nostalgia about where you came from.’ As young adults, loose upon the wider world, the hometowns we moved away from – some of us as soon as we possibly could – held little attraction. The same can be said of the ’80s. We were anxious to break free of that decade, with no intention of looking back. When we finally do, however, we tend to remember what we want to remember: how we were young and beautiful, and life was full of adventure. Cris Mazza, though, reminds us what it was really like.

The title piece opens the collection with a review of the 1980s and, with a satirical edge, highlights some of the decade’s most memorable political moments, including the administration’s attempt to reclassify ketchup so that it qualified as a vegetable in school lunches (1981). And the time Reagan warmed up for a speech to the nation with a little joke – forgetting that his mic was already switched on: ‘My fellow Americans, I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes’ (1984). Ah yes…mired in the trenches of the Cold War, that was a truly hilarious little joke.

In 1986, a spokesman stated that the president knew nothing about the sale of arms to Iran or the funding of anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua on one day, and on the next claimed ‘The President knows what’s going on.’ A month later, the spokesman suggested that Reagan might have approved the arms deal ‘while he was under sedation.’ Reagan later admitted he had authorised the sale of arms to Iran, but within a month he changed his mind – apparently remembering that he had not. Four decades later, we look back at that decade with a warm, nostalgic feeling: remember those shoulder pads and all that big hair? And who doesn’t love E.T. and Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future? We forget the dark times and the anxiety we felt about nuclear Armageddon and ‘spontaneous human combustion’ (look it up, if you’ve never heard of it).

During the 1980s, the national minimum wage was resolutely stuck at $3.35 an hour, while the cost of living rose by forty-eight per cent. And we think we have it tough now… In a Christmas speech in 1983, presidential advisor Ed Meese glossed over the nation’s financial hardship, claiming Scrooge had received ‘bad press’ and blamed the poor, the unemployed and the homeless for being so ‘by choice.’ Some people, it seemed, were choosing not to avail themselves of the wealth that was trickling down from the top… 

With Trickle-Down Timeline divided into years, individual stories in the collection explore pivotal moments in the lives of their emotionally fragile and isolated characters. In ‘What Satisfies People’ (1980), Lee is tormented by memories of an old relationship and so is unable to build a new life with his wife. In ‘Disguised as Suicide’ (1981), Jan stops entering beauty pageants to pursue what she sees as a more meaningful career as a hospital administrator only to find her offers of help continually rejected. In ‘The Three Screwdrivers’ (1982), a woman has a history of falling for the wrong guy, but when her up-until-now platonic friend declares his love she tells him, ‘No one ever said stuff like that to me,’ before adding, ‘I wish you were someone else. Why couldn’t you be anyone else.’ Each story carries a moment of heartbreak within it.

Love, it seems, was complicated in the 1980s. The appearance of a mysterious immune-deficiency disease in 1981 put a damper on sexual liberation, and whether from a lack of opportunity or experimentation, sexual relationships in Trickle-Down are decidedly strained. ‘Each Other’s History’ (1984) details a woman’s life-long passion for her hometown baseball team and her short-lived and sexless marriage. Damaged by the iniquities of Little League baseball and a dearth of high school romance, she has never quite grown up or learned how to go about living. 

Sexlessness, in terms of both doing without and being uninterested, is a common impediment in these stories. So too are extra-marital affairs. But there is little joy to be found there, either. The characters are stifled and stymied, repressed, suppressed, hung-up and damaged, lacking the imagination and courage for adult relationships. 

Two stories, in particular, stand out in this strong collection: ‘What If’ (1985) and ‘Cookie’ (1989). Narrated in the second-person, ‘What If’ highlights the devastating ecological effects that can occur when too many people move into a landscape that can’t sustain them: 

The number of residents had easily quintupled since the grid of streets and sewer lines and water pipes and single-family homes had first been sketched on blue tissue paper. Firemen jumped from trucks and attached hoses to hydrants only to be met with a thin trickle oozing from the nozzle they aimed at the next fully engulfed house.

When your house is among those that burn, the devastation becomes personal, and for an artist who loses everything she has ever created – every poem, every sculpture – the loss is nearly complete. 

The final story of the decade, ‘Cookie’ exposes the endemic emotional isolation of the American suburbs. When an East European family moves into the house next door, Nan wonders about the little girl whose only word seems to be ‘hi’ but makes no attempt to welcome them to the neighbourhood. Later, the girl learns to say ‘cookie’, a word she repeats at volume on a random but frequent basis. Lacking communication skills of her own, Nan is at the centre of misunderstandings and conflicts, and it’s only through the courage of the child’s mother that true neighbourliness begins to emerge. 

Trickle-Down Timeline is a strong collection of short fiction that is anything but nostalgic. But in guiding us through those anxious years with humour and insight, Cris Mazza helps us to understand something that is oddly comforting: if we survived the 1980s, we can probably survive anything.

*

An earlier version of this review was first published on The Short Review, and is reprinted here with permission from the editor. Loree Westron is the author of Missing Words, available from online and physical retailers.