I was a writer from as early as I can remember (at around 8 I started writing novel-length stories!), but past the self-consciousness of adolescence I didn’t come back to it in any serious way until I did an MA in my 20s. It was around this time that I discovered Raymond Carver and loved his deceptively simplistic style, and how much is said through pauses and blank spaces. I also loved how often the dialogue was awkward and repetitive, but how natural it felt in that awkwardness. I could name any number of short stories that I loved, but this is the one I return to now.
It’s interesting to read it again now knowing what I know. So many of his stories were about drinking and alcoholics, with a subtext of crisis. In this particular story, there is a steady mood of provocation, in the furniture out in the yard, the main character challenging the young couple and getting them drunk, dancing with the young girl, and the hold he has over her and her inability to admit to it. How it lingers and stays with her beyond the page.
First published in Quarterly West, 1978 and subsequently in the Paris Review, 1981. Collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1981, and Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic, 1988
A Personal Anthology 