The couple walked out through the double-wide sliding door as a woman pushed an older man in a wheelchair into the building. The door closed, leaving the couple alone outside.
“Now what?” the man quietly asked his wife.
She considered a moment. “Let’s go to Tim’s Pizza.” It was a normal thing for them to do.
They ordered a hand-tossed Canadian bacon and mushroom pizza and root beers. The girl behind the counter smiled at them because she’d been working there just long enough to realize it was their usual order.
They talked of this and that as they ate, just like always. When they left the restaurant, he opened the car door for her, which he usually did. They stopped at Barnaby’s for a bottle of her favorite merlot. “Always keep that in stock for you,” Mr. Barnaby said with a smile. They smiled back and walked out to the car and drove home.
She turned the TV on as he opened the wine and poured it into a couple of glasses. He handed her one glass and sat on the couch next to her. His wine was at his left and his hand lay between them, next to hers but not touching, as usual. They watched a nature documentary and the news through the weather. Then she turned off the TV and they got ready for bed, as they always did at this hour.
They got in bed, shared a perfunctory kiss and said “ ‘Night.” She turned off the light and they lay together in the dark as they had since getting married. The end of a perfectly normal evening.
Until she said, “I’ve set the alarm for 5.”
And unlike any night in their lives together, tears spilled down his cheeks and he took a slow, deep breath to keep from sobbing. That had been their tacit agreement. “OK,” he said quickly.
They had to be back through the double-wide sliding doors at the hospital by 6. Her surgery was scheduled for 7.
This story rewards re-reading, and that’s one of the definitions I give my students for “literature” as opposed to “writing.” That third paragraph — “It was a normal thing for them to do” — is especially poignant after you know the ending, as are the many desperate normalities they seize throughout.
I also liked this story the first time through. The conspicuous normalcy gradually built a sense for me that something was going to shatter it, and yet what shattered it caught me off guard. That was very effective.
I was confused by the first sentence: Was “they” a group of bystanders with no other job in the story but to observe the two main characters entering a building? This is cleared up pretty quick, when the speakers go out for pizza, not into the building. However, that sentence still trips me up for some reason, even when I know what happens. The most striking, or at least the first, visual description of people is of someone other than the main characters. I wonder if the setup could be clearer. “They” stand aside, but then what do “they” physically do? Where do they go? If they watched the woman push the wheelchair man in, then resumed their direction out of the doors, the confusion would vanish, the focus would be on the main characters, and yet the suggestion of medical problems and hospitals would be accomplised.
But hey, I don’t know. I might be getting carried away. I just think the first and last words are critical, and this opening made me stumble.
Everything else is beautiful.
I reworked that first sentence slightly; does it read more smoothly for you now?
Thanks for all the rest, too. While I was writing, I had the phrase “relentlessly normal” in mind which, to judge from your comment, came through pretty strongly (along with “desperately normal” and “conspicuously normal,” which are good).
Very powerful in understatement with the full impact reserved for the last bit. A nice bit of Robert Frost and O. Henry to me… I really like that you don’t let the storyteller take the story away from its unfolding.
Thanks, Doc, and welcome to catsignal. I hope you’ll enjoy it.
Bryon, I plan to use this as a writing topic in my English 2 class. If you have any objections, stop me now! It seems a good story to illustrate plot and setting, among other things. I may use another of yours, too. A rich storehouse of good fresh fiction.
Yes, the new opening solves the problem for me.
Apparently there may still be a problem with the opening. I used the revised version, and my students like the story, but some were confused. I asked in class whether they understood which of the four characters in the first sentence the story continues with: the “couple,” the “woman,” and the “old man in a wheelchair.” It turns out several of them had assumed the man speaking throughout was in a wheelchair, which means they missed some cues later in the story. One of them had assumed that, but he noticed when they leave the restaurant he opens the car door for her, so he went back and read the beginning again and figured out, as he put it, “the guy in the wheelchair has nothing to do with the story.”
I think the problem is partly grammatical — the only clear antecedent for the pronoun “he” in ” ‘Now what?’ he asked quietly,” when you look at the three nouns in the first sentence, is “the old man in the wheelchair.” (Neither “couple” nor “woman” qualifies.) Also, the old man in the wheelchair is the most recently mentioned, which makes him not only the most likely antecedent but also the freshest, and incidentally the most vividly portrayed, person in the reader’s imagination.
I think it’s worth working on that first sentence until it gets the reader off on the right foot. It’s a really good story after the characters are identified correctly.
The concerns are perfectly valid. See the newly altered version.
I think that clears up the possible confusion. I can’t really say anymore. Maybe you could find one or two new readers to look at it and see if they have any trouble.
Despite that glitch, the students really like the story. I’ve seen papers from a couple of them and they definitely did “get it” that the normalcy they were seeking was a defiant attempt to enjoy what they had, that their normalcy had been shot to hell and they wanted something predictable — just for the evening. They appreciated the importance of the settings, especially the hospital image that opens and closes the story.
All I can say is, I enjoy having this huge supply of fresh fiction to use for educational purposes.