"Off" - Aimee Bender

Music suggestion for the reading: Getter Jaani - Rockefeller Street

Aimee Bender's "Off" is an interesting piece. At first, I wasn't sure that I would like it. The narrative took too many turns, and it took me a page or two to adapt to her "stream of thought" narrative style. However, it really worked by the time the story was finished. The narrator would bring up a seemingly-unrelated subject, drop it, and then refer to it later in the piece. By the time the piece was finished, every part of the stream of consciousness seemed important.

The thing that interested me the most about this piece was the character of the narrator. She reminded me of an adolescent girl. It seemed that the character was experimenting in being a little bit of everything, and not only was she a little bit of everything, she was one of the best at everything. Her paintings were amazing pieces that a clueless art teacher couldn't understand. She's the most attractive girl in the party. How could any man not want her? The character was almost like a yuppie yet old-money hipster that had a taste of misunderstood dark girl while still being the sign of utmost perfection. She wants to believe herself the ultimate Mary-Sue archetype.

That being said, I left with the understanding that the girl hated herself. All of this inflated sense of presence seemed to be an attempt to validate herself to a world where she felt the same as a steak lying in a fruit bowl. She feels so out-of-place, probably due to being a girl that gained a huge inheritance in her early. She always felt that she couldn't relate to most people, and after deciding that she couldn't fit into this perceived mold, she instead tried to push herself further from society and create a wall of perfection around her.

Proof of this can be found in her relationships with the characters throughout the piece. She constantly gets jealous of the other women at the part, with the only exception being the Host. These women represent a threat to her, perhaps a representation of something that she feels would be more-desirable to the average man. She insults every woman that she interacts with. This one is weak and meek; that one has a flat ass, while another is simply plain and boring. As for her interaction with the redhead, we find her being insulted at a character remembering a part of her from before she built this wall of self-importance. She was the little girl with the inheritance, the girl she buried.

She even rewards those that help to validate her wall. Adam's insult, "Lady, you are screwed UP" (Bender 116) pleases her. Suddenly, she feels like there is a character that understands that she is different from the rest of society and will make statements to validate those differences, even if they aren't the differences she wants. Even at the end, when he takes her hand while she laments about how she screwed up the night, he is validating her wall, even if the wall was just heavily bombarded by the incident that preceded it.

The most-complex relationship in the short story is that between the narrator and the Host. They have been friends since high school, and the narrator comments that the Host feels "sorry for her" (Bender 108). At the same time, the glimpses at the interactions between the two characters seems to show the narrator validating the Host as a person as well. The scene where the Host tried on clothing for the girl, in particular, showed the narrator praising her with compliments, and I interpreted this as both 1) a homoerotic scene and 2) mutual validation of each-other's character.