Red from green
The short story “Red from green” is written by Maile Meloy and we follow a young girl, Sam, during a couple of days in the summer. The story takes place by a river in Montana in a hot July month, Sam is just turned fifteen and has been offered a scholarship to a boarding school back east, but she doesn’t know if she will go yet. It is her father who suggested her to apply. Sam is a bit quiet, and she doesn’t talk that much with her dad. Sam has never fired a gun, before Layton shows her how to. At first she doesn’t tell her father that she have done it, but then he finds a bullet and then she tell him that she have shot...
Every summer she and her father take a float trip on the river. This time they are companied by her uncle Harry, a private attorney, and the central client Layton, in a class action law suit her uncle is litigating. The trip is meant to smooze the client who is thinking of dropping the suit and moving away; if he leaves, the case dries up. Throughout the day the girl watches as her father (who is a district judge) allows the man to take advantage of his desirability. The client catches fish that are too small but keeps them anyway, something her father usually has no tolerance for. Later the client takes the girl out to practice shooting, using illegal hollow point bullets.
Late in the evening, after the uncle has already retired to his tent, the father also gets up from the fire and goes to his tent. Before entering it he looks back at his daughter whom he has now left alone with this strange client, who has just asked if she could please kneel on his back to help him loosen up some tight muscles. It’s horrifying to read and wonder just what is going to happen. Worse, why? Did the father expect nothing to happen? Why would he leave it to chance? Did he actually expect something to happen?
The reason why she was hesitating to accept the scholarship to begin with is that is because Sam’s mother past away and there is only Sam and her father left in the house , so she did not want to leave her father alone and leave far away from home. Her uncle’s client sexually harasses her. Her father let the two of them alone and went to sleep. Maybe her fathers act has broken her faith so she needed some time away from him to think of what is going on between her and him. Maybe she realized that she needs to be tough to protect herself so she decided to live on her own. She chose to leave her father in order to forget what happened faster.
The story is written as if it was in the past, because in the first sentence it says: “The summer she turned fifteen, Sam Turner took her last float trip down the river with her father” and the story is written in past tense. The narrator uses a 3rd person omniscient narrator, which yet still is rather limited. He only knows of one character thoughts, feelings and actions, the protagonist Sam. He follows Sam like a shadow, and therefore the story is told from Sam’s point of view.
Dialogue plays a provisional role in Meloy’s stories, and the relationships she constructs seem to question the plausibility of honest human communication. Well-founded trust is hard to come by.
I love this story because it moves along like a thriller, but it's entirely plausible. It combines exquisite attention to psychological detail with the sex and body counts that keep audiences engaged. Moment by moment, she makes you believe everything, and yet she keeps you continuously surprised and unnerved.
Everybody goes through this middle pass called the teenage years, where you come in pure and innocent from the childhood into the teenage years where you are insecure and fragile, to evolve into a stable and mature adult. This development is never easy. It inevitably involves facing the realities of adulthood, discovering your sexuality and often seeing your parents in a new light. In the process of these discoveries you somehow learn how to stand on your own two feet.
In the short story the main character finds herself at the beginning of this difficult transition from child to adult. Sam is between two worlds--the world of childhood, predictability, taboos; and the permissive world of adult behavior, a world in which people have trouble telling "red from green." Sam acts the part of the obedient young daughter; she resists mailing off the application that will win her admission to a distant, glamorous boarding school. She hesitates to fire a shotgun, because she knows her father will disapprove. When a stranger speaks to her, she buries her head in her book which her father picked up for her at a convenience store because it was "the best they had." And yet, something tugs Sam toward the danger and moral ambiguity of adulthood.
While on a float trip down a river in Montana with her father, the main character Sam is confronted with her own sexuality for the first time when a grown man shows interest in her..."... The client Sam meets is a victim, and he could help Sam's uncle's case: "It was good...to have a man involved...People were less likely to assume he had invented his symptoms." But the client thinks the law suit is a big nuisance, and he might just drop out.)
When the client begins to harrass Sam, Sam notes that her father is turning a blind eye. Is he deliberately allowing the client to have some "fun" with Sam as a way of ensuring that the client will testify in the chemical-solvents case? Sam acquires some disturbing, mature insights into human behavior. At home, she submits her application to boarding school: "She was red-eyed and nervous, but had decided she didn't know anything, and the idea of going away was to learn." She leaves the safety of childhood and becomes a precocious, semi-jaded young adult:
One question that most of the readers would ask is why Sam’s father leaved her with a stranger. The answer is that he left her behind and left to sleep because he had to trust Layton and so did not think of what he would actually do to his daughter. He ignores the witness's attempts to seduce his 15-year-old daughter; the father's willful blindness leaves his daughter teetering near catastrophe.
Loneliness and abandonment find their echoes in the story. The witness, Layton, takes an interest in Sam and develops the beginning of a friendship. One night alone with Sam, Layton’s attention becomes physical and, to her, frightening. She escapes to her tent and the incident passes without remark. When the trip is over Sam continues to be troubled by her father’s leaving. Meloy captures the uncertainty of adolescence—the notion that somehow, somewhere, something has been gained and something lost. Sam finds herself sliding along a continuum, between the green of innocence and the red of experience. Her newfound experience is perhaps made more disquieting with the consciousness that it was not one she forged for herself, but one she was abandoned to.