Irony
One of the enduring themes in literature is that things are not always what they seem to be. What we see — or think we see — is not always what we get. The unexpected complexity that often surprises us in life — what Herman Melville in Moby-Dick called the “universal thump” — is fertile ground for writers of imaginative literature. They cultivate that ground through the use of irony, a device that reveals a reality different from what appears to be true.
Verbal irony consists of a person saying one thing but meaning the opposite. If a student driver smashes into a parked car and the angry instructor turns to say “Great job,” the statement is an example of verbal irony. What is meant is not what is said. Verbal irony that is calculated to hurt someone by false praise is commonly known as sarcasm. In literature, however, verbal irony is usually not openly aggressive; instead, it is more subtle and restrained though no less intense.
In Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator says, “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in a marriage.” Does “one”? If there were no irony intended in the statement, the reader would chuckle and say, “One sure does! That’s marriage for you! Lots of mockery makes everyone happy.” We know immediately that we’re not supposed to agree. We scowl at John and wonder to what degree the narrator believes her own statement. Is she conditioned to believe she should be laughed at or is she burying feelings of resentment and even anger that might come out as the story progresses?
Situational irony exists when there is an incongruity between what is expected to happen and what actually happens. For instance, at the end of Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” we expect Mrs. Mallard to hug her husband and shed tears of joy when he returns, not to die. In Ellison’s “King of the Bingo Game,” we expect that the protagonist will be handed a check when the bingo wheel lands on double zero, the only number that signifies a win, but he is instead clubbed and hauled off stage. In each of these instances the ironic situation creates a distinction between appearances and realities and brings the reader closer to the central meaning of the story.
Another form of irony occurs when an author allows the reader to know more about a situation than a character knows. Dramatic irony creates a discrepancy between what a character believes or says and what the reader understands to be true. In Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation,” the insecure Mrs. Turpin, as a member of “the home-and-land owner” class, believes herself to be superior to “niggers,” “white-trash,” and mere “home owners.” She takes pride in her position in the community and in what she perceives to be her privileged position in relation to God. The reader, however, knows that her remarks underscore her failings rather than any superiority. Dramatic irony can be an effective way for an author to have a character unwittingly reveal himself or herself.
As you read Raymond Carver’s “Popular Mechanics,” Susan Minot’s “Lust,” and Jim Shephard’s “Reach for the Sky,” pay attention to the authors’ artful use of style, tone, and irony to convey meanings.
Raymond Carver (1938–1988)
Born in 1938 in Clatskanie, Oregon, to working-class parents, Raymond Carver grew up in Yakima, Washington, was educated at Humboldt State College in California, and did graduate work at the University of Iowa. He married at age nineteen and during his college years worked at a series of low-paying jobs to help support his family. These difficult years eventually ended in divorce. He taught at a number of universities, among them the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Iowa; the University of Texas, El Paso; and Syracuse University. Carver’s collections of stories include Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976); What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (1981), from which “Popular Mechanics” is taken; Cathedral (1984); and Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories (1988). Though extremely brief, “Popular Mechanics” describes a stark domestic situation with a startling conclusion.
Early that day the weather turned and the snow was melting into dirty water. Streaks of it ran down from the little shoulder-high window that faced the backyard. Cars slushed by on the street outside, where it was getting dark. But it was getting dark on the inside too.
He was in the bedroom pushing clothes into a suitcase when she came to the door.
I’m glad you’re leaving! I’m glad you’re leaving! she said. Do you hear?
He kept on putting his things into the suitcase.
Son of a bitch! I’m so glad you’re leaving! She began to cry. You can’t even look me in the face, can you?
Then she noticed the baby’s picture on the bed and picked it up.
He looked at her and she wiped her eyes and stared at him before turning and going back to the living room.
Bring that back, he said.
Just get your things and get out, she said.
He did not answer. He fastened the suitcase, put on his coat, looked around the bedroom before turning off the light. Then he went out to the living room.
She stood in the doorway of the little kitchen, holding the baby.
I want the baby, he said.
Are you crazy?
No, but I want the baby. I’ll get someone to come by for his things.
You’re not touching this baby, she said.
The baby had begun to cry and she uncovered the blanket from around his head.
Oh, oh, she said, looking at the baby.
He moved toward her.
For God’s sake! she said. She took a step back into the kitchen.
I want the baby.
Get out of here!
She turned and tried to hold the baby over in a corner behind the stove.
But he came up. He reached across the stove and tightened his hands on the baby.
Let go of him, he said.
Get away, get away! she cried.
The baby was red-faced and screaming. In the scuffle they knocked down a flowerpot that hung behind the stove.
He crowded her into the wall then, trying to break her grip. He held on to the baby and pushed with all his weight.
Let go of him, he said.
Don’t, she said. You’re hurting the baby, she said.
I’m not hurting the baby, he said.
The kitchen window gave no light. In the near-dark he worked on her fisted fingers with one hand and with the other hand he gripped the screaming baby up under an arm near the shoulder.
She felt her fingers being forced open. She felt the baby going from her.
No! she screamed just as her hands came loose.
She would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby’s other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back.
But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard.
In this manner, the issue was decided.
Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing
- FIRST RESPONSE. Discuss the story’s final lines. What is the “issue” that is “decided”?
- Though there is little description of the setting in this story, how do the few details that are provided help to establish the tone?
- How do small actions take on larger significance in the story? Consider the woman picking up the baby’s picture and the knocked-down flowerpot.
- Why is this couple splitting up? Do we know? Does it matter? Explain your response.
- Discuss the title of the story. The original title was “Mine.” Which do you think is more effective?
- What is the conflict? How is it resolved?
- Read 1 Kings 3 in the Bible for the story of Solomon. How might “Popular Mechanics” be read as a retelling of this story? What significant differences do you find in the endings of each?
- Explain how Carver uses irony to convey theme.
Connections to Other Selections
- Compare Carver’s style with Ernest Hemingway’s in “Soldier’s Home.”
- How is the ending of “Popular Mechanics” similar to the ending of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark?”
Born and raised in Massachusetts, Susan Minot earned a B.A. at Brown University and an M.F.A. at Columbia University. Before devoting herself full-time to writing, Minot worked as an assistant editor at Grand Street magazine. Her stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Harper’s, the New Yorker, Mademoiselle, and Paris Review. Her short stories have been collected in Lust and Other Stories (1989), and she has published five novels — Monkeys (1986), Folly (1992), Evening (1998), Rapture (2002), and Thirty Girls (2014), as well as one volume of poetry, Poems 4 A.M. (2002).
Lust 1984
Leo was from a long time ago, the first one I ever saw nude. In the spring before the Hellmans filled their pool, we’d go down there in the deep end, with baby oil, and like that. I met him the first month away at boarding school. He had a halo from the campus light behind him. I flipped.
Roger was fast. In his illegal car, we drove to the reservoir, the radio blaring, talking fast, fast, fast. He was always going for my zipper. He got kicked out sophomore year.
By the time the band got around to playing “Wild Horses,” I had tasted Bruce’s tongue. We were clicking in the shadows on the other side of the amplifier, out of Mrs. Donovan’s line of vision. It tasted like salt, with my neck bent back, because we had been dancing so hard before.
Tim’s line: “I’d like to see you in a bathing suit.” I knew it was his line when he said the exact same thing to Annie Hines.
You’d go on walks to get off campus. It was raining like hell, my sweater as sopped as a wet sheep. Tim pinned me to a tree, the woods light brown and dark brown, a white house half hidden with the lights already on. The water was as loud as a crowd hissing. He made certain comments about my forehead, about my cheeks.
We started off sitting at one end of the couch and then our feet were squished against the armrest and then he went over to turn off the TV and came back after he had taken off his shirt and then we slid onto the floor and he got up again to close the door, then came back to me, a body waiting on the rug.
You’d try to wipe off the table or to do the dishes and Willie would untuck your shirt and get his hands up under in front, standing behind you, making puffy noises in your ear.
He likes it when I wash my hair. He covers his face with it and if I start to say something, he goes, “Shush.”
For a long time, I had Philip on the brain. The less they noticed you, the more you got them on the brain.
My parents had no idea. Parents never really know what’s going on, especially when you’re away at school most of the time. If she met them, my mother might say, “Oliver seems nice” or “I like that one” without much of an opinion. If she didn’t like them, “He’s a funny fellow, isn’t he?” or “Johnny’s perfectly nice but a drink of water.” My father was too shy to talk to them at all unless they played sports and he’d ask them about that.
The sand was almost cold underneath because the sun was long gone. Eben piled a mound over my feet, patting around my ankles, the ghostly surf rumbling behind him in the dark. He was the first person I ever knew who died, later that summer, in a car crash. I thought about it for a long time.
“Come here,” he says on the porch.
I go over to the hammock and he takes my wrist with two fingers.
“What?”
He kisses my palm then directs my hand to his fly.
Songs went with whichever boy it was. “Sugar Magnolia” was Tim, with the line “Rolling in the rushes / down by the riverside.” With “Darkness Darkness,” I’d picture Philip with his long hair. Hearing “Under My Thumb” there’d be the smell of Jamie’s suede jacket.
We hid in the listening rooms during study hall. With a record cover over the door’s window, the teacher on duty couldn’t look in. I came out flushed and heady and back at the dorm was surprised how red my lips were in the mirror.
One weekend at Simon’s brother’s, we stayed inside all day with the shades down, in bed, then went out to Store 24 to get some ice cream. He stood at the magazine rack and read through MAD while I got butterscotch sauce, craving something sweet.
I could do some things well. Some things I was good at, like math or painting or even sports, but the second a boy put his arm around me, I forgot about wanting to do anything else, which felt like a relief at first until it became like sinking into a muck.
It was different for a girl.
When we were little, the brothers next door tied up our ankles. They held the door of the goat house and wouldn’t let us out till we showed them our underpants. Then they’d forget about being after us and when we played whiffle ball, I’d be just as good as they were.
Then it got to be different. Just because you have on a short skirt, they yell from the cars, slowing down for a while, and if you don’t look, they screech off and call you a bitch.
“What’s the matter with me?” they say, point-blank.
Or else, “Why won’t you go out with me? I’m not asking you to get married,” about to get mad.
Or it’d be, trying to be reasonable, in a regular voice, “Listen, I just want to have a good time.”
So I’d go because I couldn’t think of something to say back that wouldn’t be obvious, and if you go out with them, you sort of have to do something.
I sat between Mack and Eddie in the front seat of the pickup. They were having a fight about something. I’ve a feeling about me.
Certain nights you’d feel a certain surrender, maybe if you’d had wine. The surrender would be forgetting yourself and you’d put your nose to his neck and feel like a squirrel, safe, at rest, in a restful dream. But then you’d start to slip from that and the dark would come in and there’d be a cave. You make out the dim shape of the windows and feel yourself become a cave, filled absolutely with air, or with a sadness that wouldn’t stop.
Teenage years. You know just what you’re doing and don’t see the things that start to get in the way.
Lots of boys, but never two at the same time. One was plenty to keep you in a state. You’d start to see a boy and something would rush over you like a fast storm cloud and you couldn’t possibly think of anyone else. Boys took it differently. Their eyes perked up at any little number that walked by. You’d act like you weren’t noticing.
The joke was that the school doctor gave out the pill like aspirin. He didn’t ask you anything. I was fifteen. We had a picture of him in assembly, holding up an IUD shaped like a T. Most girls were on the pill, if anything, because they couldn’t handle a diaphragm. I kept the dial in my top drawer like my mother and thought of her each time I tipped out the yellow tablets in the morning before chapel.
If they were too shy, I’d be more so. Andrew was nervous. We stayed up with his family album, sharing a pack of Old Golds. Before it got light, we turned on the TV. A man was explaining how to plant seedlings. His mouth jerked to the side in a tic. Andrew thought it was a riot and kept imitating him. I laughed to be polite. When we finally dozed off, he dared to put his arm around me, but that was it.
You wait till they come to you. With half fright, half swagger, they stand one step down. They dare to touch the button on your coat then lose their nerve and quickly drop their hand so you — you’d do anything for them. You touch their cheek.
The girls sit around in the common room and talk about boys, smoking their heads off.
“What are you complaining about?” says Jill to me when we talk about problems.
“Yeah,” says Giddy. “You always have a boyfriend.”
I look at them and think, As if.
I thought the worst thing anyone could call you was a cock-teaser. So, if you flirted, you had to be prepared to go through with it. Sleeping with someone was perfectly normal once you had done it. You didn’t really worry about it. But there were other problems. The problems had to do with something else entirely.
Mack was during the hottest summer ever recorded. We were renting a house on an island with all sorts of other people. No one slept during the heat wave, walking around the house with nothing on which we were used to because of the nude beach. In the living room, Eddie lay on top of a coffee table to cool off. Mack and I, with the bedroom door open for air, sweated and sweated all night.
“I can’t take this,” he said at three a.m. “I’m going for a swim.” He and some guys down the hall went to the beach. The heat put me on edge. I sat on a cracked chest by the open window and smoked and smoked till I felt even worse, waiting for something — I guess for him to get back.
One was on a camping trip in Colorado. We zipped our sleeping bags together, the coyotes’ hysterical chatter far away. Other couples murmured in other tents. Paul was up before sunrise, starting a fire for breakfast. He wasn’t much of a talker in the daytime. At night, his hand leafed about in the hair at my neck.
There’d be times when you overdid it. You’d get carried away. All the next day, you’d be in a total fog, delirious, absent-minded, crossing the street and nearly getting run over.
The more girls a boy has, the better. He has a bright look, having reaped fruits, blooming. He stalks around, sure-shouldered, and you have the feeling he’s got more in him, a fatter heart, more stories to tell. For a girl, with each boy it’s as though a petal gets plucked each time.
Then you start to get tired. You begin to feel diluted, like watered-down stew.
Oliver came skiing with us. We lolled by the fire after everyone had gone to bed. Each creak you’d think was someone coming downstairs. The silver loop bracelet he gave me had been a present from his girlfriend before.
On vacations, we went skiing, or you’d go south if someone invited you. Some people had apartments in New York that their families hardly ever used. Or summer houses, or older sisters. We always managed to find someplace to go.
We made the plan at coffee hour. Simon snuck out and met me at Main Gate after lights-out. We crept to the chapel and spent the night in the balcony. He tasted like onions from a submarine sandwich.
The boys are one of two ways: either they can’t sit still or they don’t move. In front of the TV, they won’t budge. On weekends they play touch football while we sit on the sidelines, picking blades of grass to chew on, and watch. We’re always watching them run around. We shiver in the stands, knocking our boots together to keep our toes warm, and they whizz across the ice, chopping their sticks around the puck. When they’re in the rink, they refuse to look at you, only eyeing each other beneath low helmets. You cheer for them but they don’t look up, even if it’s a face-off when nothing’s happening, even if they’re doing drills before any game has started at all.
Dancing under the pink tent, he bent down and whispered in my ear. We slipped away to the lawn on the other side of the hedge. Much later, as he was leaving the buffet with two plates of eggs and sausage, I saw the grass stains on the knees of his white pants.
Tim’s was shaped like a banana, with a graceful curve to it. They’re all different. Willie’s like a bunch of walnuts when nothing was happening, another’s as thin as a thin hot dog. But it’s like faces; you’re never really surprised.
Still, you’re not sure what to expect.
I look into his face and he looks back. I look into his eyes and they look back at mine. Then they look down at my mouth so I look at his mouth, then back to his eyes then, backing up, at his whole face. I think, Who? Who are you? His head tilts to one side.
I say, “Who are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.”
I look at his eyes again, deeper. Can’t tell who he is, what he thinks.
“What?” he says. I look at his mouth.
“I’m just wondering,” I say and go wandering across his face. Study the chin line. It’s shaped like a persimmon.
“Who are you? What are you thinking?”
He says, “What the hell are you talking about?”
Then they get mad after, when you say enough is enough. After, when it’s easier to explain that you don’t want to. You wouldn’t dream of saying that maybe you weren’t really ready to in the first place.
Gentle Eddie. We waded into the sea, the waves round and plowing in, buffalo-headed, slapping our thighs. I put my arms around his freckled shoulders and he held me up, buoyed by the water, and rocked me like a sea shell.
I had no idea whose party it was, the apartment jam-packed, stepping over people in the hallway. The room with the music was practically empty, the bare floor, me in red shoes. This fellow slides onto one knee and takes me around the waist and we rock to jazzy tunes, with my toes pointing heavenward, and waltz and spin and dip to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” or “I’ll Love You Just for Now.” He puts his head to my chest, runs a sweeping hand down my inside thigh and we go loose-limbed and sultry and as smooth as silk and I stamp my red heels and he takes me into a swoon. I never saw him again after that but I thought, I could have loved that one.
You wonder how long you can keep it up. You begin to feel as if you’re showing through, like a bathroom window that only lets in grey light, the kind you can’t see out of.
They keep coming around. Johnny drives up at Easter vacation from Baltimore and I let him in the kitchen with everyone sound asleep. He has friends waiting in the car.
“What are you, crazy? It’s pouring out there,” I say.
“It’s okay,” he says. “They understand.”
So he gets some long kisses from me, against the refrigerator, before he goes because I hate those girls who push away a boy’s face as if she were made out of Ivory soap, as if she’s that much greater than he is.
The note on my cubby told me to see the headmaster. I had no idea for what. He had received complaints about my amorous displays on the town green. It was Willie that spring. The headmaster told me he didn’t care what I did but that Casey Academy had a reputation to uphold in the town. He lowered his glasses on his nose. “We’ve got twenty acres of woods on this campus,” he said. “If you want to smooch with your boyfriend, there are twenty acres for you to do it out of the public eye. You read me?”
Everybody’d get weekend permissions for different places, then we’d all go to someone’s house whose parents were away. Usually there’d be more boys than girls. We raided the liquor closet and smoked pot at the kitchen table and you’d never know who would end up where, or with whom. There were always disasters. Ceci got bombed and cracked her head open on the banister and needed stitches. Then there was the time Wendel Blair walked through the picture window at the Lowes’ and got slashed to ribbons.
He scared me. In bed, I didn’t dare look at him. I lay back with my eyes closed, luxuriating because he knew all sorts of expert angles, his hands never fumbling, going over my whole body, pressing the hair up and off the back of my head, giving an extra hip shove, as if to say There. I parted my eyes slightly, keeping the screen of my lashes low because it was too much to look at him, his mouth loose and pink and parted, his eyes looking through my forehead, or kneeling up, looking through my throat. I was ashamed but couldn’t look him in the eye.
You wonder about things feeling a little off-kilter. You begin to feel like a piece of pounded veal.
At boarding school, everyone gets depressed. We go in and see the housemother, Mrs. Gunther. She got married when she was eighteen. Mr. Gunther was her high school sweetheart, the only boyfriend she ever had.
“And you knew you wanted to marry him right off ?” we ask her.
She smiles and says, “Yes.”
“They always want something from you,” says Jill, complaining about her boyfriend.
“Yeah,” says Giddy. “You always feel like you have to deliver something.”
“You do,” says Mrs. Gunther. “Babies.”
After sex, you curl up like a shrimp, something deep inside you ruined, slammed in a place that sickens at slamming, and slowly you fill up with an overwhelming sadness, an elusive gaping worry. You don’t try to explain it, filled with the knowledge that it’s nothing after all, everything filling up finally and absolutely with death. After the briskness of loving, loving stops. And you roll over with death stretched out alongside you like a feather boa, or a snake, light as air, and you … you don’t even ask for anything or try to say something to him because it’s obviously your own damn fault. You haven’t been able to — to what? To open your heart. You open your legs but can’t, or don’t dare anymore, to open your heart.
It starts this way:
You stare into their eyes. They flash like all the stars are out. They look at you seriously, their eyes at a low burn and their hands no matter what starting off shy and with such a gentle touch that the only thing you can do is take that tenderness and let yourself be swept away. When, with one attentive finger they tuck the hair behind your ear, you —
You do everything they want.
Then comes after. After when they don’t look at you. They scratch their balls, stare at the ceiling. Or if they do turn, their gaze is altogether changed. They are surprised. They turn casually to look at you, distracted, and get a mild distracted surprise. You’re gone. Their blank look tells you that the girl they were fucking is not there anymore. You seem to have disappeared.
Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing
- FIRST RESPONSE. What do you think of the narrator? Why? Do you agree with the definition the story offers for lust?
- Do you think that the narrator’s depictions of male and female responses to sex are accurate? Explain why or why not.
- How effective is the narrator’s description of teenage sex? What do you think she means when she says “You know just what you’re doing and don’t see the things that start to get in the way” (para. 29)?
- What is the story’s conflict? Explain whether you think the conflict is resolved.
- Discuss the story’s tone. Is it what you expected from the title?
- What do you think is the theme of “Lust”? Does its style carry its theme?
- What is the primary setting for the story? What does it reveal about the nature of the narrator’s economic and social class?
- In a Publishers Weekly interview (November 6, 1992), Minot observed, “There’s more fictional material in unhappiness and disappointment and frustration than there is in happiness. Who was it that said, ‘Happiness is like a blank page’?” What do you think of this observation?
Connections to Other Selections
- Compare the treatments of youthful sexuality and attitudes toward intimacy in “Lust” and ZZ Packer’s “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.” Both narrators are characterized by their will to distance themselves from people, including the reader. Do you feel connected to one narrator more than the other? Why?
- Write an essay connecting this narrator to the protagonist of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Sexy.” Where do these characters learn about the expectations for young women with regard to sexual modesty, and what in particular affects the way they view themselves?
Born in Connecticut, Jim Shepard earned his B.A. from Trinity College in Hartford and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brown University. He is the author of seven novels and five short story collections and won the prestigious Rea Award in 2016 for his contributions to the short story genre. He teaches at Williams College in northwestern Massachusetts.
Reach for the Sky 2004
Guy comes into the shelter this last Thursday, a kid, really, maybe doing it for his dad, with a female golden/Labrador cross, two or three years old. He’s embarrassed, not ready for forms and questions, but we get dogs like this all the time, and I’m not letting him off the hook, not letting him out of here before I know he knows that we have to kill a lot of these dogs, dogs like his. Her name is Rita, and he says, “Rita, sit!” like being here is part of her ongoing training. Rita sits halfway and then stands again, and looks at him in that tuned-in way goldens have.
“So…” The kid looks at the forms I’ve got on the counter, like no one told him this was part of the deal. He looks at the sampler that the sister of the regional boss did for our office: “A MAN KNOWS ONLY AS MUCH AS HE’S SUFFERED.” — ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. He has no answers whatsoever for the form. She’s two, he thinks. Housebroken. Some shots. His dad handled all that stuff. She’s spayed. Reason for surrender: she plays too rough.
She smashed this huge lamp, the kid says. Of one of those mariners with the pipe and the yellow bad-weather outfit. His dad made it in a ceramics class.
Rita looks over at me with bright interest. The kid adds, “And she’s got this thing with her back legs, she limps pretty bad. The vet said she wouldn’t get any better.”
“What vet?” I ask. I’m not supposed to push too hard; it’s no better if they abandon them on highways, but we get sixty dogs a day here, and if I can talk any of them back into their houses, great. “The vet couldn’t do anything?”
“We don’t have the money,” the kid says.
I ask to see Rita’s limp. The kid’s vague, and Rita refuses to demonstrate. Her tail thumps the floor twice.
I explain the bottom of the form to the kid: when he signs it, he’s giving us permission to have the dog put down if it comes to that. “She’s a good dog,” he says helpfully. “She’ll probably get someone to like her.”
So I do the animal shelter Joe Friday, which never works: “Maybe. But we get ten goldens per week. And everybody wants puppies.”
“Okay, well, good luck,” the kid says. He signs something on the line that looks like Fleen. Rita looks at him. He takes the leash, wrapping it around his forearm. At the door he says, “You be a good girl, now.” Rita pants a little with a neutral expression, processing the information.
It used to be you would get owners all the time who were teary and broken up: they needed to know their dog was going to get a good home, you had to guarantee it, they needed to make their problem yours, so that they could say: Hey, when I left the dog, it was fine.
Their dog would always make a great pet for somebody, their dog was always great with kids, their dog always needed A Good Home and Plenty of Room to Run. Their dog, they were pretty sure, would always be the one we’d have no trouble placing in a nice family. And when they got to the part about signing the release form for euthanasia, only once did someone, a little girl, suggest that if it came to that, they should be called back, and they’d retrieve the dog. Her mother had asked me if I had any ideas, and the girl suggested that. Her mother said, I asked him if he had any ideas.
Now you get kids: the parents don’t even bring the dogs in. Behind the kid with the golden/Lab mix there’s a girl who’s maybe seventeen or eighteen. Benetton top, Benetton skirt, straw blonde hair, tennis tan, and a Doberman puppy. Bizarre dog for a girl like that. Chews everything, she says. She holds the puppy like a baby. As if to cooperate, the dog twists and squirms around in her arms trying to get at the pen holder to show what it can do.
Puppies chew things, I tell her, and she rolls her eyes like she knows that. I tell her how many dogs come in every day. I lie. I say, We’ve had four Doberman puppies for weeks now. She says, “There’re forms or something or I just leave him?” She slides him on his back gently across the counter. His paws are in the air and he looks a little bewildered.
“If I showed you how to make him stop chewing things, would you take him back?” I ask her. The Doberman has sprawled around and gotten to his feet, taller now than we are, nails clicking tentatively on the counter.
“No,” she says. She signs the form, annoyed by a sweep of hair that keeps falling forward. “We’re moving anyhow.” She pats the dog on the muzzle as a good-bye and he nips at her, his feet slipping and sliding like a skater’s. “God,” she says. She’s mad at me now, too, the way people get mad at those pictures that come in the mail of cats and dogs looking at you with their noses through the chain–link fences: Help Skipper, who lived on leather for three weeks.
When I come back from taking the Doberman downstairs there’s a middle-aged guy at the counter in a wheelchair. An Irish setter circles back and forth around the chair, winding and unwinding the black nylon leash across the guy’s chest. Somebody’s put some time into grooming this dog, and when the sun hits that red coat just right he looks like a million dollars.
I’m not used to wheelchair people. The guy says, “I gotta get rid of the dog.”
What do you say to a guy like that? Can’t you take care of him? Too much trouble? The setter’s got to be eight years old.
“Is he healthy?” I ask.
“She,” he says. “She’s in good shape.”
“Landlord problem?” I say. The guy says nothing.
“What’s her name?” I ask.
“We gotta have a discussion?” the guy says. I think, This is what wheelchair people are like. The setter whines and stands her front paws on the arm of the guy’s chair.
“We got forms,” I say. I put them on the counter, not so close that he doesn’t have to reach. He starts to sit up higher and then leans back. “What’s it say?” he says.
“Sex,” I say.
“Female,” he says.
Breed. Irish setter. Age, eleven.
Eleven! I can feel this dog on the back of my neck. On my forehead. I can just see myself selling this eleven-year-old dog to the families that come in looking. And how long has she been with him?
I walk back and forth behind the counter, hoist myself up, flex my legs.
The guy goes, like he hasn’t noticed any of that, “She does tricks.”
“Tricks?” I say.
“Ellie,” he says. He mimes a gun with his forefinger and thumb and points it at her. “Ellie. Reach for the sky.”
Ellie is all attention. Ellie sits, and then rears up, lifting her front paws as high as a dog can lift them, edging forward in little hops from the exertion.
“Reach for the sky, Ellie,” he says.
Ellie holds it for a second longer, like those old poodles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and then falls back down and wags her tail at having pulled it off.
“I need a Reason for Surrender,” I say. “That’s what we call it.”
“Well, you’re not going to get one,” the guy says. He edges a wheel of his chair back and forth, turning him a little this way and that.
“Then I can’t take the dog,” I say.
“Then I’ll just let her go when I get out the door,” the guy says.
“If I were you I’d keep that dog,” I say.
“If you were me you would’ve wheeled this thing off a bridge eleven years ago,” the guy says. “If you were me you wouldn’t be such a dick. If you were me you would’ve taken this dog, no questions asked.”
We’re at an impasse, this guy and me.
He lets go of Ellie’s leash, and Ellie’s covering all the corners of the office, sniffing. There’s a woman in the waiting area behind him with a bullterrier puppy on her lap and the puppy’s keeping a close eye on Ellie.
“Do you have any relatives or whatever who could take the dog?” I ask him.
The guy looks at me. “Do I sign something?” he says.
I can’t help it, when I’m showing where to sign I can’t keep the words back, I keep thinking of Ellie reaching for the sky: “It’s better this way,” I go. “We’ll try and find her a home with someone equipped to handle her.”
The guy doesn’t come back at me. He signs the thing and hands me my pen and says, “Hey, Ellie. Hey, kid,” and Ellie comes right over. He picks up her trailing leash and flops the end onto the counter where I can grab it, and then hugs her around the neck until she twists a little and pulls away.
“She doesn’t know what’s going on,” I say.
He looks up at me, and I point, as if to say, Her.
The guy wheels the chair around and heads for the door. The woman with the bullterrier watches him go by with big eyes. I can’t see his face, but it must be something. Ellie barks. There’s no way to fix this.
I’ve got ASPCA pamphlets I’ve unboxed all over the counter. I’ve got impound forms to finish by today.
“Nobody’s gonna want this dog,” I call after him. I can’t help it.
It’s just me, now, at the counter. The woman stands up, holding the bullterrier against her chest, and stops, like she’s not going to turn him over, like whatever her reasons, they may not be good enough.
Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing
- FIRST RESPONSE. It takes a certain kind of person to be able to work in a shelter that euthanizes dogs. Does this narrator fulfill your expectations of that profile?
- The narrator tells us that sixty dogs are dropped off each day in his shelter. Why does he choose to tell about these three dogs in particular?
- The narrator makes a point of identifying the ages of the people who drop off dogs: Why does it matter? How old do we assume the narrator is?
- Does your opinion of the narrator change when he generalizes about “wheelchair people” based on his interactions with the third dog owner? Is this consistent with his reactions toward the first two dog owners?
- Why does Ellie’s trick — standing up on her hind legs when her owner says “Reach for the sky” — affect the narrator more than his other interactions with dogs?
- How does the narrator exert authority over the people who come into his shelter? How is that authority compromised by his interactions with Ellie’s owner?
- The man in the wheelchair is almost cruel to the narrator, especially when he says, “If you were me you wouldn’t be such a dick.” Are his words understandable? Justified? Do they cause us to reassess our opinion of the narrator?
- On two occasions the narrator tries to refrain from saying things to the man in the wheelchair that he ends up saying anyway: What does this suggest about his character that we might not have understood in a story told from someone else’s point of view?
- We are likely to sympathize with the dogs in this story. Do you sympathize with any of the humans? Why or why not?
- The story ends rather abruptly. Does it feel incomplete? Can you identify the classic dramatic story elements (conflict, complication, rising action, climax, and dénouement)?
Connections to Other Selections
- Compare and contrast the narrators of “Reach for the Sky” and John Updike’s “A & P.” Both are defined in many ways by their less-than-appealing jobs; is that the only thing that connects them?
- Which story displays more hope for humanity, this one or Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery?” Where do you find that hope?