Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life Read Free

pacing, using repetition of what’s obvious in the action almost as an anesthetic swab that precedes the shot. In “Are These Actual Miles?” Carver works with staccato sentences to hypnotize the reader. He narrates a story about a married couple who are complicitous in what they’re doing: the wife is not merely selling their car on theeve of their declaring bankruptcy, she’s also selling herself sexually to the used car salesman. Her husband, Leo, waiting at home for news he hopes to hear and news he does not want to hear (they are synonymous), is described: “His undershirt is wet: he can feel the sweat rolling from his underarms. He sits on the step with the empty glass in his hand and watches the shadows fill up the yard. He stretches, wipes his face. He listens to the traffic on the highway and considers whether he should go to the basement, stand on the utility sink, and hang himself with his belt. He understands he is willing to be dead.”
    If the undershirt is wet, then it follows that he is sweating, so we accept the sweat rolling. If he sits on a step with an empty glass instead of a full glass, he’s watching the shadows in a different way than he would if he had a drink, so, okay, they “fill up the yard” (shadows are doing what the liquor is not doing—there’s none in the glass). He makes two conventional gestures: stretching and wiping his face. Then we move a bit outside him—he moves a bit outside himself—and he’s reminded /we are reminded that there is a larger world, a world of “traffic on the highway.” We’ve moved from something small and personal, how he feels in his damp shirt, to not knowing how he feels exactly (he doesn’t tell us here), but we register the other people driving cars (a loaded subject in this story, given what his wife has set out to do) on the big highway, with their inherently metaphorical connotations.
    This is already a lot to keep track of, though nothing much is happening overtly: we’ve moved from the personal to the larger world, but a world that is nevertheless eluding the character. We go from close-up to long shot.
We
are considering him from a lot of angles, so it may even come as a slight relief to know that he’s doing some considering, too. Except that in completing this sentence—as opposed to the ones that have come before—we wouldnot have anticipated this explicit revelation: “He listens to the traffic on the highway and considers whether he should go to the basement”—and then the sentence surges, gains too much speed—“stand on the utility sink”—so far, a possible yet strange inclusion—“and hang himself with his belt.” He is not thinking in the abstract, and we had no way to outguess the thought he was formulating because it does not logically unfold. “He understands he is willing to be dead.” We had no idea this was at stake. Perhaps Leo did not understand, either. Perhaps, following his own thoughts, there was an internal emotional change analogous to a tonal change and—chillingly—his realization makes him able to step outside himself, seeing inside the same way the reader does, now. The last sentence might elicit a nervous laugh from us, since we’re plodding along with Leo, and what does this guy in his undershirt
understand
that we wouldn’t be able to think circles around? And then we get our answer. Time stops. The paragraph ends. Wherever we go from here, we will go knowing that the stakes are different, and that we were lured into something we thought almost ploddingly banal, only to find ourselves facing mortality.
    No one could infer from Mrs. Nixon’s conventional “Didn’t she look beautiful?” that the stakes are as high as they are in the Carver story. But we can’t make the mistake of feeling superior to Leo or Mrs. Nixon, both capable, in the hands of a capable writer, of catching us off guard. The premonition that we are willing to be dead is available to all of us.
    Writing a story is