In the small apartments those months, I watched the half-sisters near-always, impatient to be part of their togetherness and clashes both. Soon after moving into the apartment, I acquired the habit of breathing them in, of trying to draw goodness from one sister, then the other. Among family, satiating cuddles, from what I understood, could arise at breakneck speed: I waited.
Stacey Levine's Mice 1961 is about two half-sisters, living in south Florida after the death of their mother. One is Jody, the elder, and the other is Mice, whose improbable name comes from her pale white skin, cotton-colored hair, and thick glasses. The sisters are alike in some ways, so much so that they often seem like the same person, but in others, they are quite different, Jody the anxious caretaker and Mice in her own world, making crystal radios and hiding in wells. The girls, and Mice especially, are the subject of much gossip in their small suburban outpost of Miami, and though opinions differ, many seem to believe that there's something not quite right about Mice, that her strange appearance is connected somehow to her diffident nature and her unwillingness to work. Mice is tormented regularly by a series of teenagers who are simply known as "the teenagers," although, in a stroke that shows just how weird the novel is, one of them turns out to be a 28-year-old who's just kind of hanging out at the high school.
By far the most interesting thing about Mice 1961, for me, is the position of the narrator, Girtle, who occupies a strange kind of position in the girls' household as a maid or factotum, doing odd jobs and cleaning. The truth is that Girtle (what a name!) seems to have inveigled her way into the house by simply asking to be there; her origins are obscure, though she tells us that she once hopped a fence to escape an orphanage. Girtle longs to be part of the sisterly bond between Jody and Mice, and she even tries to peel Mice away from Jody by way of promising to take her to a remote cabin. As a narrator, Girtle manages to disappear, often very literally, hiding and skulking around and trying not to be noticed. Much of what Girtle is able to report is because she is literally unseen, not noticed by the townspeople, and often not by Jody and Mice, either. More interesting still, Girtle has a recurrent premonition that someone she calls "the helper" is soon to arrive, a figure who will come to further Mice's narrative as the protagonist of the story, perhaps by taking her away from Girtle. When a smooth-talking James Dean type with a secret connection to (what we know will be) the Bay of Pigs invasion, we're not even shocked that Girtle turns out to have been correct.
Mice 1961 has so many fascinating parts, and it's written in a slightly alien prose that keeps the narrative vigorous and captivating. But why is the middle of it so tedious? A huge section of the book takes place during a town party at a local bakery, where the villagers come in bearing cakes and pies (and in one case, "blue water"), gossiping about Mice and Jody but all sorts of other people as well. Some of these townspeople are memorable and some are not, but together they seem as if Levine is trying to give us a sense of the somewhat cloistered town in which the sisters live, one of those mid-century commuter towns that end up as a kind of panopticon of good manners. Girtle records it all fastidiously, but I felt again and again that I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be getting out of it. Like Jody, I kept wondering: Where's Mice?
