Arlene, “Miss Clairol”
Arlene, the single mom who is the protagonist of “Miss Clairol” could very well win the title Miss Ironic in a contest consisting of nothing but characters from the short stories of Viramontes. She is irony personified in her near-absolute oblivion to the reality existing outside her self-imposed bubble of misplaced beliefs. The irony almost reaches a breaking point with the narrator penetrating into the character’s mind to assert “Arlene is a romantic” just before she begins thinking about how once her daughter starts menstruating, she will relate to her offspring the tale of her own loss of virginity; a story that is as lacking in romance as Arlene is lacking self-awareness.
“The Moths”
The titular winged creatures in this story are described almost at the very end of the story as entities “that lay within the soul and slowly eat the spirit up.” This revelation of the meaning of the title arrives coincident with the death of the narrator’s beloved grandmother. It is a story overwhelmed by regret and pain in which two souls seemed to have been consumed. But at the grandmother’s death, the moths are released with them the almost unbearably anguished narrative dominated by images of physical and spiritual agony becomes, at the last moment, an ironic fable of about the possibility of rebirth and redemption.
Calling the Cops, “Neighbors”
Aura Rodriguez, the elderly protagonist of “Neighbors” who wants nothing more than her desire to be left alone respected learns the hard way the inherent irony of depending upon the police to make a bad situation better. When a gang of neighborhood boys terrorizing of her private space reaches a climax, finally calls the cops on them only to watch in horror as the LAPD exhibit their legendary ham-fisted approach to using excessive force to the degree that one of the boys being ruthlessly taken in custody vows “We’ll get you. You’ll see.” Those charged with serving and protecting Aura ironically seemed to have seal her sentence to a much worse fate than mere invasion of property.
“Snapshots”
The middle-aged divorced woman narrating this story is obsessed with photo albums as a result of having to spend months bedridden and with nothing else to do. Most people who develop an obsession with their photographic record of their own life do for the same reason she does: nostalgia. But most people don’t reach the ironic conclusion that the narrator does: the snapshots in her family albums reveal that the nostalgic past she was clinging to as the best years of her life already behind her are actually a book of photographic evidence confirming that the past she was longing for “never really existed.”
“Growing”
The protagonist of this story is a 14-year-old girl who has just come off a three-month-long grounding resulting from leaving her little sister to ride a Ferris wheel over and over again while she made out (or possibly more) with a boy she had just met. True, she is “almost 15” but still the gap between her and the rest of the kids playing stickball with joyous abandon cannot possible be that great, chronologically speaking. And thus, the gentle irony of her wistful role as spectator to the game:
“She knew that the only decision these kids made was what to play next, and for a moment she wished to return to those days.”
