Elephants in Our Bedroom [Paperback]

Elephants in Our Bedroom is Michael Czyzniejewski's first collection of stories, and reading them you wonder why they haven't been gathered together sooner. They are wonderful. Michael, the editor of the Mid-American Review, has the true story-teller's gift. He can take the most mundane topic and put a magical spin on it that makes you realize that you and I -- even in our wildest moments -- aren't thinking half as imaginatively and wildly as Michael is.

Let me give you some examples from Elephants in our Bedroom:

His first story is called "Wind." Yeah, wind. We feel it every time we go out, we watch it moving the tree limbs or picking up a piece of paper and scooting it down the street, but what if suddenly people realized that they couldn't explain it, that all the old explanations didn't make sense?

And then there's the story "Green" where instead of proposing a typical summer vacation, the main character's husband invites her old lovers over for two weeks "just to clear the air."

Or how about the title story "Elephants in our Bedroom"? In it a guy wins an elephant in a card game and decides to keep it in the bedroom. That's wild. But what's wilder is that his wife doesn't say anything about it.

The stories in his collection have the sort of postmodern magic that we used to see in writers like Robert Coover or Donald Barthleme, but Michael makes that magic new again by spinning it in the everyday world, the familiar world, of children and husbands and wives, of city streets and schools and libraries, bedrooms and kitchens and backyards.

Michael's Polish-American background, for me, comes out in these stories. He's got the alien's gift for looking at what most of us take for granted and seeing it in a completely different way.

He's a second-generation Polish-American, and you get the sense reading his stories that he came from an area that was still tied to the old ways, tied to seeing the world outside the neighborhood as strange and foreign, alien even in a sort of comic way. And reading about his life bears this out. He grew up in the predominantly Polish-American Chicago suburb of Calumet City and attended St. Andrew the Apostle School and Church, where the nuns and priests all spoke Polish and Michael often served a Polish-language Sunday mass as an altar boy. In college, Michael studied Polish for two semesters before the language, as he says, "soundly defeated me, though I did expand my Polish vocabulary from 12 words to nearly 30."

But I think I've said enough. Here's an excerpt from one of his stories, "In My Lover's Bedroom":

My lover is hiding old men in the recesses of her bedroom, but if you ask her about it, she'll deny it every time. Despite what she claims, I discover men in her closet, men in her armoire, men skulking behind the vanity or crouched in the trunk at the foot of her bed. The men act pleasant, appear comfortable and content, and all of them seem to know my name, offering salutations and good words in abundance.

To pass the time, the men read newspapers, listen to transistor radios, and some of them, if it's nice outside, fit in nine holes of golf. When I ask about my lover, they change the subject, remind me who won some game, ask if my career's taking off. When I ask what they're doing in my lover's bedroom, reading and resting and recreating in general, they act like they can't hear me, and if I press, they start speaking a foreign language, albeit very poorly. Aside from random pleasantries, the old men go about their business, keep to themselves, and at worst, tell good off-color jokes.

The problem with the old men is, I only find them when I'm alone, when my lover is in the kitchen, in the bathroom, home late from her job at the club. I've asked her many times why she keeps men in her dresser drawers, and her answer is the same, every time: Why are you going through my drawers? When I open said drawer to show her, the man has disappeared. The first time this happened, my lover thought it was funny, some sort of dry humor I'd never before demonstrated. On the second occasion, she was less amused. She assured me she had no other lover, she wasn't married, and as far as she knew, she had no plans for that to change. On the third try, she suggested I leave, forcing me to apologize, to admit I'd taken a joke too far. Since then, I've decided to keep the men to myself, to go to them for answers. When I inquire as to why they won't let my lover in on the joke, I get the What? treatment, the toggle of an imaginary microphone in their ears. It almost makes me think I'm onto something.

Elephants in Our Bedroom is one of those unusual books that opens up with a thought probably few readers have ever thought about - "All of a sudden, nobody can explain wind." That there can be something in this world that suddenly nobody can explain is not a strange thing in itself, since there are so many strange things happening all around us at any one time that we can't possibly understand them all. But, wind? You sit there and you wonder just where wind really comes from, and you go through the whole story and you still don't know even then. It gets you to think about things. It gets you to think about all of the things in the world that affect our decisions ever day, things we take for granted but that we don't really understand. And seriously, that's true for many more things than just wind.

That's the pattern you see in all of the short stories in this collection. Often extremes are used to illustrate interesting points about things in our lives. For example, one of my favorite stories, "Green," is about a woman whose husband invited over her old lover for two weeks to clear the air and change the pace. The lovers spend a relatively uneventful two weeks--until, after they all leave, we discover one of the lovers stayed behind. He is a man that the narrator is not even able to place, and even her husband does not know him. According to the narrator, "The man remained in our house thereafter, not interfering with our day-to-day lives, but in our house just the same." This is a very unusual sentiment, and one that I think says two things at once. Maybe, quite literally, one of the lovers stayed behind (given the often exotic nature of what happens in Michael Czyzniejewski's stories, this is actually not out of question as a possibility). But more realistically, and certainly on some level, the lover probably only stayed in memory. The lover's memory, then, went on living in the narrator's home--and isn't this how real relationships are? Long after you have ended a relationship or drift apart from a friendship, that person stays on in your life. Rarely does that person's memory directly impact what you do every day, but sometimes you will think about him or her and there they will. You will not remember the color of their hair or eyes, but you will remember how they made you feel, and this feeling goes on and on. Just try to get rid of it.

The greatness of this collection is that all of the stories touch on such themes, ones that impact our daily lives and that haunt us in the human experience. The best part is how each story takes these interesting themes and spins them into a dazzling, fantasy experience. There is magic on every page, in every story--things the ordinary imagination would not even fathom but which Michael Czyzniejewski explores in great depth through his stories as if the fantastic could become the ordinary. What I guarantee is that you will not regret picking up this collection. These stories will stay with you for a long time, touching you softly day after day with the message they carry. I have already given many stories a second read in the short time it has been my pleasure to own this book. You will find yourself doing the same.

~Michelle Izmaylov