Haunting but pure. Clear but painful. Climactic but calm. Lynn’s voice is at odds with itself from the beginning. The title points to secrets we will learn, but all we hear are rather ordinary stories of females in the locker room. Pages 39 to 44, I heard Lynn’s voice telling me the odds and ends of locker conversations. But from pages 44 and until the end, that is when I began feeling her voice. Throwing in the secret that the narrative is based on at such unexpected time, is exactly what gave life to the voice in this piece. Only then did we hear Lynn speak, and not the voices of every other female aforementioned.
The beginning of the piece did not hook me in, but rather forced me to start skimming through the chatter of the women. I was irritated by the sentence structure, as if it were trying hard for me to go back and reread because I may have missed a pivotal point. And then, I arrived at Stockholm. I slowed down at “the doorway revealed an abyss of midnight black, dead silent, not even a faucet dripping” and sped up again when Lynn found the light switch (pg 44). Her voice told me the scene was alright, especially after throwing in a Edward Hopper reference. Of course, the voice whipped me in the face when it began describing the man in an electric blue track suit. I finally understood the voice of pages 39-44. The voice that echoed the voice of every woman in that locker room, for safety. Lynn’s voice poses as one of humor and wit, with a dark seed embedded with it. Restraining her voice offered the reader a new methodology of exposing a secret in a way that allows the complexity of a piece to be cushioned by realities exposing the secret without giving it away–only hitting you in one go when it is time.
A sentence that I found beautiful would be the last one, “The water, too, embraces all as we plunge in, move through, at our own speed, closing over each other as we leave, surfacing—ever hospitable, ever open” as it perfectly encapsulates Lynn’s idea, and action, of surfacing (pg 46).
