Some stories about childhood are really stories about the adults we become — and about the things we understand differently when we look back.
Stephanie Vaughn’s “Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog” is a beautifully complicated story about memory, family and a daughter trying to understand her father. The story’s narrator, Gemma, looks back on her childhood as the daughter of an Army officer, moving with her family from place to place. Her father is a larger-than-life figure: intelligent, demanding, funny, unpredictable and deeply interested in language and the world around him.
He is an intensely curious man. He teaches Gemma the military alphabet — Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog — and, in many ways, he becomes the force around which the family revolves. His career falters. His marriage becomes strained. And the qualities that make him fascinating — his precision, his force of personality, his insistence on order — can also make him frightening and unpredictable. He drinks. His temper can be frightening. His ambitions and disappointments affect everyone around him.
What makes Vaughn’s story so compelling is that she doesn't reduce her father to either a good man or a bad one. Instead, she allows him to remain complicated. The adult narrator can recognize things about her father that the child she once was could not. But that new understanding doesn't erase the affection, confusion or even wonder she felt as a child. She tries to hold all of him in her memory — the brilliant man, the difficult man, the father she loved and the father she couldn't always reach.
And that may be what makes this story feel so true. Memory isn't a neat record of what happened. It's something we continually revise as we grow older, adding context to moments we once couldn't understand.
Vaughn's prose is funny, precise and deeply observant. She captures the strange intimacy of family life — the private language, rituals and memories that can seem ordinary when we're living them and become almost mythic when we look back.
“Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog” is ultimately a story about a daughter trying to see her father clearly — and discovering that seeing someone clearly doesn't necessarily mean arriving at a simple answer.
Andrew Porter joins Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides to discuss “Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog” by Stephanie Vaughn.
Stephanie Vaughn is the author of the story “Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog” from the collection Sweet Talk.
Guest: Andrew Porter is the author of five books, including “The Imagined Life” and “The Disappeared.” He is a professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio.
