Greg Hollingshead’s “Rat With Tangerine”, from his collection The Roaring Girl, affectingly portrays a family suffering from a profound disconnection and loneliness. Bill and Diane, and their son, Adrian, live together, yet painfully apart.
Hollingshead first shines light on how isolated the family members are from each other. Bill, the protagonist, fills his days with sleep or television---all the while keeping “the morning’s last dream rolling like a tangerine around the periphery” (85). Adrian spends most of his time studying rats in the basement, discovering that the rats that eat whatever they want are the “worst diseased” (87). When Bill and his son do interact, discussing Adrian’s research results, Bill muses “wouldn’t it be nice to just crawl back under the covers and hello dreamland” (87). In the meantime, Diane attends a “primal therapy” (87) meeting, as Adrian informs Bill. Bill prefers dreams to his family and loses track of his wife; Adrian, in the psychological underworld of the basement, searches for connections between appetite and illness, and Diane attends mysterious meetings (86). The only time the family is together in the kitchen, debating whether or not mammals should eat everything they want, even if doing so leads to disease, a conversation encouraged by Bill, Adrian and Diane argue fiercely, and Adrian leaves.
Hollingshead then points to the quiet catastrophe at the centre of the family, Bill and Diane’s open marriage. In fact, the marriage is so open that the man Diane pursues walks her to her back door. Still, Diane, at the same time that she pursues the man, seems hardly interested in him. Bill observes that “as she talks, she seems to become more and more confused, as if the guy has sounded more and more ordinary in the telling” (90). Also, the marriage is open only for Diane. Bill sees no one, though his depression could be seen as a counter-attack, a different sort of betrayal. Bill and Diane’s marital problems touch Adrian, too. If Adrian is not experimenting with rats in the basement, he finds himself in the middle of his parents’ problems. Bill, seeking advice from his son, asks Adrian, after midnight, in the basement, what he thinks of open marriage.
Although each family member leads a separate life, Hollingshead cannot complete the story without exposing the depth of their need for each other. Ultimately, Bill gives his television to his son, so Adrian can, as they discussed at dinner, observe the effect of television’s blue light on rats. Also, as Bill mentions at dinner, he is “almost drowned” in television’s “blue world” (89), indicating, possibly, a brave step toward the real world of his family, his wish to connect with them. Adrian continues to study the behavior of caged mammals, as if in search of clues to his parents problems, since not only appetite but “drowning” is at the heart of them. Diane comes home to Bill, showing that whatever or whoever else she wants, she depends on Bill, or at least the life they have built together . In the final moment, Bill sleeps close to Diane, spoons her, so that we cannot mistake any of his previous behavior as lack of longing for her.
At the close of the story, Bill dreams of “a white rat walking on hind legs down the hall to the bedroom, tangerine held high in thin ecstatic paws” (91). A white rat on hind legs conjures, for me, a starving human, and the tangerine, the possible answer to that starvation. The final image might capture, all at once, the family’s “disease”, their hunger. Naturally, the hunger is not for food, in the family’s case, but for someone or anyone else, somewhere or anywhere else, and answers for the consequent hurt and confusion. The story, in the end, makes me think about family; we depend on family to fulfill us, but as it fulfills us it encloses us, and that very enclosure can lead to a desire to escape.
There is much to admire in the story: the taut yet evocative language, the sharply written scenes, the unity of imagery. “Rat With Tangerine” is also impressively complex, not because of a convoluted plot or an extraordinary subject, but because Hollingshead, in depicting how a family can long to be together and apart simultaneously, produces a story that points one way and then another, refusing to settle on facile or pleasing half-truths.
Hollingshead, Greg. “Rat With Tangerine”. The Roaring Girl. Toronto: Somerville House Publishing, 1995. 85-91.
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