An orange by any other name would taste as sweet, Sheri Reynolds' fourth novel hits the sweet spot, #fictionreview

An orange by any other name would taste as sweet

I hate my body. I am so sick of living in my body, Kenny Lugo says in Sheri Reynolds’ fourth novel, The Sweet In-Between. Kendra is Ken and Ken is Kendra and the difference between the two is Kenny, a third name and identity her adopted family bestows upon her.

Kendra is Ken and Ken is Kenny, and the difference between the three is the binding of the breasts, the ball cap, the shorn hair of a young country boy who monitors his intake of fluids so he won’t have to use the bathroom at school and be called out as a freak and punished with a short burst of hair spray to the eyes. Kendra is Ken. Ken is Kenny.

And if making an uneasy truce with her body isn’t hard enough, Kenny’s creepy wolfish whisky-faced neighbor, Jarvis Stanley, kills a college girl who broke into Kenny’s duplex mistaking it for a rental. The shock and heat of the murder are enough to singe Kenny’s psychic hairs and send her into an anxious spin, the fear of being kicked out of Aunt Glo’s house when she turns 18 like hot copper on her lips. And when she isn’t worrying about having to live in the shack behind Glo’s house, which she renovates and redeems as she fights for identity, she worries about sex, which is front and center as her younger “adopted” brother simulates the female sex with oranges, while older brother Tim-Tim and his girlfriend, Sneaky, parade like cocky birds in front of Kenny, who’s just trying to deal with being a “nobody with a lifestyle,” a lifestyle she isn’t even conscious of, a lifestyle that’s just the truth.  

But making an uneasy truce with her body leaves her isolated in the run-down school whose rigid rural restrictions on gender and sexual orientation are as tight as the Ace bandages that bind her breasts down, and she haunts the classrooms and clubs, sometimes called Ken, sometimes Kenny, never fully engaged in work or with others, her social world governed by blueprints laid out by her drug addled father’s absence, Aunt Glo’s pill-popping, and repeated sexual creepiness from dad, neighbor, weird-school-bus-kid, and “adopted” brother. And what could play out as Jerry Springer rings lyric and true under Reynolds power, for Kenny, despite her psychic suffering, tries to do right in the world, sacrificing her own emotional and mental stability.  When she was a young child she allowed Daphne, abandoned by her drug addicted mother, to nurse from her immature bosom, and the guilt Kenny suffers plays out in the endless hours she spends helping Aunt Glo raise the girl.

To me, everything feels like work, Kenny states. Because she doesn’t belong to anyone she must work harder because her experience with family is as tenuous as tidal foam that washes up on the beach in town, as fragile as the decaying horseshoe crab tail she carries as a talisman, as a tribute to the dead and forgotten. And through the engendering eye of Kenny’s narration a simple visit up state to see Dad in prison becomes a psychic hassle, and humiliation, the prison guards thinking she was a boy trying to pass as a girl. And Daddy is no louder than the whisper of the dead girl whom Kenny anchors herself to; life’s happened to Kenny while he’s been away.

Like the oranges the characters sexualize Reynolds’ plot and character are layered: below the skin, there’s pith, and below that the meat of the fruit. For the action is really all reaction, the shotgun’s report an echo, echo, echo, as the family struggles to hold on in a run-down coastal town. The images mirror and reflect, and like a musician, Reynolds allows images to return loop and resonate. The males look like they should be females, Kenny says of the Buffleheads, one afternoon on the water. At school her favorite teacher is rumored to have changed her name to Saraswati, a lifestyle change which is as tolerated and understood as much as Kenny’s gender-bending. Identity slips and slides between the fingers like Kenny’s squid bait. The whole family is looking for their reflection, they all have fixes, and they all have identity issues. Identity washes in and out of the tide; after all names can change, and clothing isn’t natural, or necessary and of these identities Reynolds leaves us with no easy ending, this family’s life isn’t going to be easy, it’s a country-blues song without an end, but there is hope, even for Kenny who is Ken who is Kendra, a sweet in-between.