Homesick for Another World

The title of the story, “Slumming,” reflects the unnamed narrator’s attitude toward the town of Alna: Although she considers her life in the city to be fundamentally superior to the lives of the people of Alna, the city’s aesthetics, atmosphere, and danger appeal to her. During her summers in Alna, the narrator tries to act like the locals, “slipping pennies in and out of the dish on the counter of the Gas Plus on State Street as though a few cents could make or break me” (109). This perceived difference in social class leads the narrator to feel fundamentally disconnected from the full-time residents of Alna: “I never felt I was anybody’s neighbor. I was only ever just visiting Alna. I was slumming it up there. I knew that” (110). The narrator sees herself as superior to the people of Alna, and her summers in the town as a grungy, exciting escape from reality.

The narrator’s actions betray extreme and largely self-imposed Social Isolation. The narrator goes to Alna to escape the crowded, confusing social life of the city. She sees the rural town as a bucolic retreat, a place to “clean [her] dirty city soul” (119). She would isolate herself from the people of the town as well, preferring to hike alone in the woods and imagine the place as a simple pastoral idyll, but she deals with the same addictions that many of the townspeople deal with, so she buys their drugs while demeaning them in her mind in an attempt to convince herself that she isn’t like them. As in many of the other stories in this collection, disgust and desire are two sides of the same coin—the narrator is vocally disgusted with the townspeople because she wants the same things they want, and she is disgusted with herself for it. Moreover, her actions mirror those of the people she calls “zombies.” Early in the story, she describes watching unhoused people wandering Alna’s downtown while high: “[T]hey slumped on the curb, nodding, or else they rifled through Dumpsters for things to fix or sell” (115). Later, on her way home from buying drugs, the narrator buys a sunlamp for three dollars, noting that “I didn’t care if it worked. If it didn’t, trying to fix it would occupy me for at least an afternoon. It was worth the trouble” (118). Unlike the Alna locals, the narrator does not plan to sell the lamp to buy more drugs; she has money from her job in the city. What she’s looking for is something to shed a little light in her life or at least distract her from her unhappiness for a little while. However, the fact that she is also searching for things to dismantle and repair while high suggests that she is not as far removed from the locals as she thought.