This story appeared in the Aug. 7, 2023, issue of The New Yorker. Here’s a link:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/07/yogurt-days-fiction-jamie-quatro

(Spoiler alert: I pretty much give away the whole story.)

In Jamie Quatro’s “Yogurt Days,” a mother’s faith-driven altruism is seen through the eyes of her adult daughter trying to make sense of childhood events, of her mother, and her mother’s lasting effects on her. A disturbing image emerges of a person whose obsessive attempts to imitate Christ mask her limitations as a parent and a person. Through effective use of religious imagery, Quatro challenges the reader to consider who is Christlike, and who is not.

“Yogurt Days” begins with the mother telling Anna that on Thursdays she’ll be late picking her up from school because she’ll be taking frozen yogurt to a “very sick boy” across town. Anna explains this action by saying her mother was “always putting herself in the way of the sufferings of others.” Later her mother tells her, “Places of suffering are the places Christ shows up.” By showing up in situations where someone is suffering, the mother believes she is imitating Christ. “Showing up” and its opposite, absence or leaving, become recurring motifs in the story.

The narrative backtracks several years to when Anna is eight, and her mother volunteers the family’s pool house to a prostitute named Nan. Nan had put out calls to local churches, wanting out of the condemned house she shared with four other sex workers and a goat. The mother gets a call from a deacon — they’re all men – at her fundamentalist church. Nan’s in.

Anna comes across Nan smoking by the pool – a setting whose significance will become clear later – in a macramé bikini that reveals her nipples. Nan makes sure that Anna knows what she does for work and assures her she doesn’t have to be nervous. Nan seems comfortable with who she is. Perhaps too comfortable for someone who apparently is trying to put her past behind her.

Anna observes that Nan’s – notice the similarity in names — thighs are tiny like her own. And like the Yogurt Boy who appears later, she’s also very skinny, the bodily ideal we’re told is praised by Anna’s mother and grandmother. An ideal we also learn will lead to Anna’s developing anorexia and bulimia in high school.

Within five days Nan’s gone, taking the family’s antique silverware, much of the father’s whiskey collection[1], and the mother’s rings, which the latter downplays as “all costume” – a fitting word for the superficial nature of Nan’s show of repentance, and perhaps for the mother’s gesture of aid. Before Nan flees, she tells Anna, “You have an angel for a mother. She’s stupid about practical things like money, how people live, and how shit gets done.” She adds, “Someday you’ll realize it, and you’ll think she’s the dumbest person in the world. Then you’ll remember what I just said” (I.e, that she’s an angel). She concludes the matter by qualifying her appreciation with contempt. She calls the mother “a fucking saint.” Nan’s concern for how Anna might judge her mother shows more nuance than we see from the mother toward her daughter.

By the end of the story, after the mother tries to maneuver Yogurt Boy into a bathtub, it seems that her apparent altruism masked her hope of talking Nan into being baptized. Her church teaches that salvation can be ensured only by full-immersion baptism.

Some words about the mother: she’s never named. That makes sense because we see her through her daughter’s eyes; it keeps the focus on her role as a parent. She’s a salesperson for Mary Kay and the Cambridge Diet, “a mail order powder you mixed with water and drank in place of meals.” She runs a pyramid (“umbrella”[2]) scheme with “women working under her.” She’s good at selling — a talent she incorporates into her faith by selling the idea of salvation to vulnerable people in times of crisis.

Some words about the father. When Anna was nine, he’d used the family pool to baptize[3] her before hurrying off to work. The only other mention of him comes on the yogurt day when the mother fails to pick up Anna. After calling her, Anna tries him but similarly gets a recording. He’s busy in surgery. His appearances in the story, like his wife’s[4], are marked by leaving and absence.

In the story’s second scene, the mother calls Anna, now almost twelve, to the kitchen for help. They load the car with bags of food and hurry off. Anna is left in the dark about where they’re going, what they’re going to do, and what might be expected of her. After they arrive, she is left in the car, separated from what’s going on inside the house, until her mother comes out. “Jilly would like to play with you,” she says. The mother directs Anna like one of the women working under her. There’s an odd sense of propriety here. As if Anna has been called out of a waiting room for an important appointment.

A toddler emerges Lazarus-like from a “shadowy interior” wearing a concrete cast around her midsection. She runs around in circles, and Anna responds by chasing her, thinking that’s what she wants. In an innocent-enough scene, Anna is made to play a part orchestrated by a mother who has put herself in the way of her daughter’s play. She has made play purposeful. More like work.

Jilly soon tires, slumps, and the visit ends. Only on the drive home do Anna and the reader get the full story. Jilly is suffering from terminal cancer. But the mother’s explanations just raise more questions for her daughter.

The medical expenses had pushed the family to the edge, she said. The edge of what I wasn’t sure. Starvation, maybe. I wanted to ask why the girl had a cast encasing her private parts – what kind of cancer did that to a child? – but my mother had pulled the car over and was sobbing.

On first read, the mother’s tears would seem to express sympathy for Jilly. By story’s end, we’ll see it’s more likely that she’s crying for having failed to ensure her baptism.

The Yogurt Boy (YB) episode begins, “One Thursday evening, my mother didn’t show.” Anna waits in the school library finishing homework and leafing through magazines before she eventually goes into a soundproof room to listen to music. The titles she mentions — “Maniac,” “Hungry like the Wolf,” “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” — suggest primal energy, letting go, sex. Something she would be increasingly curious about and desiring. It’s unlikely she would have been exposed to such songs in a fundamentalist home. Her choices, conscious or no, suggest anger or rebellion at feeling abandoned. Her Christlike mother shows up for YB but not for her.

Having been told little about YB’s situation, Anna wonders why the boy’s mother can’t make the trip across Phoenix herself. She concludes that she probably couldn’t leave him alone. In one sense, her not leaving her son could express both the seriousness of his illness and the depth of her concern. But based on her own experience, Anna associates being left behind as a routine part of a child’s experience with parents. Before even meeting YB, she identifies with him.

The mother’s “not showing” and recurring absence skews Anna’s view of Jesus and his “showing up,” which Anna takes literally: “I was always keeping an eye out for him . . . In my imagination, Christ was forever vanishing around some corner. If I caught a glimpse, it would be the hemline of a robe, an upturned sole.” Anna’s image of Jesus is less one of showing up, as her mother believes, than leaving.

As the story progresses, the number of things Anna doesn’t understand or gets wrong piles up.[5] We suspect that’s not wholly due to her youth and naiveté. It hints at the mother’s neglect, and at prioritizing her religious agenda over her daughter’s learning. That Anna thinks the danger the family faces is starvation follows from the bags of food and yogurt she sees her mother taking on her missions. She doesn’t get that the food is less an end than a means, not for sustenance but for salvation.

Before driving with Anna across town, the mother has alerted the boy’s parents that their son has had a change of heart and is willing to be baptized. In his father’s absence, she and her friend Joyce physically maneuver YB toward the bathroom. Quatro portrays Anna’s first sight of him with biblical imagery associated with Jesus and his baptism.

I returned to the hallway and saw my mother and Joyce at the far end. Something white fluttered between them.

The fluttering of YB’s white bathrobe suggests a dove, a symbol of the Holy Spirit that appeared when Jesus himself was baptized (John 1:32). It also suggests an angel, a word that will appear as the last word in the story, when the mother recalls what Ben looked like after taking the plunge (face down, no less).

For Anna, YB’s image doesn’t jibe with her mother’s words. He isn’t a boy but a sexually active adult who, nonetheless, like Jilly is wearing a diaper. He has a name (“Ben” or “Benjamin”). He is emaciated, and much of his body is covered by “stains like birthmarks.” The diaper and birthmark images reinforce a birth association, which connect to the evangelical emphasis on being born again, of which baptism is the outward symbol. They also recall Jesus’s numerous positive allusions to children, e.g. “Ye must become a child . . . the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”[6]

Like Nan, Ben is both skinny and associated with sexual activity gone awry (prostitution, AIDS). He echoes Nan’s calling Anna’s mother “a fucking saint” by saying she’s “clueless as fuck but means well.” These early impressions for Anna of adult sex are negative, alarming. She associates sex with sin: “All that sin bound up in such a small, flailing thing (a penis). And God so concerned with it.” Sin is the central act separating God from Man, necessitating Christ’s appearance on Earth to redeem humanity, atone for or pay the cost of sin, and reunite God’s children with their Father.

Nan’s and YB’s association with sex and sin, combined with their enviable leanness,[7] create a mixed message for Anna. Perhaps Anna’s teenage eating disorders express an attempt to stop growing and stay childlike.

At the age of puberty, Anna is torn between her growing, unexpressed desires (“Girls Just Want to Have Fun”) and the image of fun projected by the nightmarish figure of Ben. For a dying man, he is the most alive character in the story — childlike and playful. As the women take off his robe and diapers, he quips, “No funny business, ladies.” When they get him into the warm bath and he’s asked, “How’s that?” he says, “Perfect. Like a warm bath.” Later, when Anna finally manages to give him the yogurt and asks if he wants a straw, he says, “That’d be no fun.” (Note the repetition of “fun” / “funny”) He rides a red motorcycle that he makes sure Anna knows is a Ducati.

Anna keeps wondering what she should do with the frozen yogurt, now melting, and is perplexed by her mother’s disinterest. She thinks bringing yogurt to him is the whole point; to the mother, the yogurt is just the carrot before the stick. As with having Anna play with Jilly, and peddling powdered drinks in place of food, something meant to be enjoyed is exploited for another purpose. Both object and person are a means to an end.

Ben’s father shows up, further complicating[8] an already tense situation. He has refused to baptize Ben because he hadn’t repented. He probably suspects that’s still the case or else doubts his wayward son’s sincerity. He also disapproves of women performing baptism. The mother goes to talk to him, and Anna hears them arguing. Before Joyce leaves Anna alone with Ben, her comment addresses the appropriateness of the situation for a child, and also hints at the mother’s cluelessness.

I’m sorry you had to see this. I don’t know why your mother didn’t take you home first.

Beyond mere cluelessness, the mother shows a lack of concern for Ben’s privacy and dignity. She and Ben’s mother disrobe him in front of Anna; they are removing his diaper before Anna instinctively looks away.

In the scene that ensues, Anna again is left without adult guidance and forced to deal with a situation beyond her understanding or experience. Ben lies slumped in a tub full of water, “the skull partially submerged, the eyes closed, the lower jaw slung open.” She worries that he’s asleep, and that water might get into his mouth. When he awakens, she’s relieved that she wouldn’t have to save him from drowning. He asks for the yogurt; feeding him proves traumatic.

I held the cup near his face[9] – so close I could see the white sores on his gums and tongue – and felt his wet hands on top of mine. He took a sip, but as far as I could tell he didn’t swallow.[10] Caramel-colored liquid ran down into his scraggly chin beard.[11]. . . I was dizzy. I was afraid I might throw up. [12]

She leaves the room in search of her mother. In the hallway she hears her mother’s voice in the kitchen “so very, very far away.” She thinks wistfully about how her mother would show up while she sat in the library “looking at cakes and doll houses” – kid’s stuff. She wishes she were back there now, “looking at anything but the pink tile, sickly-green tub, jutting limbs.” Ready or not, she’s stuck in the adult world.

With no recourse from her mother, Anna returns alone to the bathtub and reengages with Ben. She’s relieved to see that he has taken the towel from behind his head and floated it over his midsection. Unlike the mother, he senses Anna’s distress; he sacrifices his own comfort for hers. He also shows concern in repeating Joyce’s thought: “How’d you get stuck coming here?” Like Nan he takes a personal interest by asking her name (“It’s Anna, right?”). He also tells her she’s cute and asks her age. He guesses unlucky thirteen;[13] — she’s not quite twelve – but his estimate further implies she’s being pushed toward adulthood before her time. His parting words again express concern, this time for her mother: “Be good to her . . . Your mom. She’s clueless as fuck, but means well.” As with Nan, Anna hears an expression of concern or empathy from an unlikely source — the recipients of her mother’s apparent empathy.

The story ends with a phone call years later, when Anna reminds her mother of the yogurt incident. What the mother remembers is that Ben “loved frozen yogurt,” that she “was the only one who brought it to him. He wanted nothing to do with the Bible, but I kept showing up.” She also recalls what Ben looked like after being baptized: “Lit up like an angel.”[14] The recurrences of “showing up” and “angel” again provide competing images for Anna: Her mother’s showing up for Ben contrasts with her not showing up for Anna. Who is more like an angel, Ben or the mother (as Nan claimed)? What the mother remembers about that experience that made her daughter feel sick, want to vomit, and flee in vain to search for her, says less about her than what she forgets. That Anna was even there.

Before Ben gets reunited with his father, he asks Anna if she can keep a secret. She agrees, and they seal the promise by touching pinkies, an act which leaves her feeling “sick sick sick.” His secret? “I’m doing this for her . . . for them.” Literally he’s referring to his mother and father; figuratively (that “them”), his selfless act parallels that of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross for humanity.

Anna asks, “Doing . . . the baptism?”

“All of it,” Ben replies. “I am who I am, you know.” This is an ironic echo of Yahweh’s reply to Moses when asked his name: “God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am.’”[15] Ben’s name further connects him with Christ. “Benjamin” is Hebrew for “son of the right hand.” The right hand of God is where Jesus takes his seat after ascending to heaven.[16] He is the Son of God.

You can’t get more any more Christlike than Christ himself. How telling that the mother doesn’t recognize him in Ben.

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[1] Somewhat unusual for a fundamentalist Christian.

[2] “Umbrella” recalls the fundamentalist guru Bill Gothard’s umbrella analogy in which Jesus holds an umbrella over the husband, the husband holds one over his wife, and she holds one over the children. The image has been heavily criticized for its patriarchal ordering that keeps women subservient to men. In the Eighties, such umbrella businesses were popular among Christian wives, giving them a sphere of influence outside of marriage.

[3] Anna relates that he’d performed her baptism “at my mother’s insistence.” For something central to his daughter’s salvation, his laissez faire attitude is troubling.

[4] The mother leaves Anna alone at the school; alone with Nan by the pool; alone in the car while she is inside Jilly’s house, and alone with the yogurt boy when he’s in the bathtub.

[5] Anna’s not clear why YB’s mother can’t buy her son yogurt herself; she’s not told what he’s suffering from; she’s surprised to discover that the “boy” her mother has been supplying yogurt to is a full-grown man; she’s never clear on what the “age of accountability” is; she wonders whether her mother is risking her life by touching a person who has AIDS (which she learns later); she says she can’t understand what kind of illness would merit a concrete diaper; she doesn’t understand her mother’s “umbrella” business; why her mother is attempting to baptize YB, an act only men are allowed to perform; and that “bike” is slang for “motorcycle.”

[6] Luke 18:16-17

[7] “Skinniness was important to my mother. Food fell into two categories, fattening and nonfattening. She put my sister and me on the swim team each summer because she loved to watch the flab on our legs melt off. Your little bottoms just harden right up, she said. Honestly it makes me envious.”

[8] Cheryl: “If Mike finds out it’ll make things worse.”

[9] Anna’s act of feeding Ben is like a mother tending to a child, putting her into an adult role. As others have noted, it’s also like performing communion.

[10] This “tasting but not swallowing” mirrors Jesus’ response to the “vinegar mixed with gall” offered to him while dying on the cross. (Matthew 27:33-34). Note also that Anna’s first impression upon entering the house was that it “smelled like . . . something I couldn’t identify. Vinegar?” Vinegar has a long history as a folk medicine; Ben’s fundamentalist parents might have been using it on him.

[11] Jesus too likely had a beard, in keeping with Jewish customs of the time.

[12] This traumatic scene for Anna recalls an earlier scene at Jilly’s funeral. Seeing the dead girl in her coffin, Anna freaks out. She covers her ears at the unbearably loud sound she hears in her head, overwhelmed by the corpse’s ashen hands, sunken blue eyelids, and small frowning face. Looking back on the experience, the older Anna reflects, “Strange that . . . my mother took me to see a dead toddler and let me hang out with a prostitute.” This is tossed off without judgment of her mother’s cluelessness about letting a child attend such events. Or awareness of the trauma they might have caused her.

[13] For Protestant and Catholic churches, seven or eight is considered the age of accountability. That Anna’s parents have her baptized at nine “to be safe” suggests that their church followed the Jewish tradition of thirteen.

[14] This recalls Anna’s first sight of him as a “white fluttering.” “Angel” is also what Nan called the mother – a fucking angel. Two competing images for Anna of who is an angel: Ben and her mother.

[15] Exodus 3:14 (NIV)

[16] Mark 16:19, Acts 7:55, Rom 8:24, Eph 1:20, Col 3:1, Heb 1:3 et al.