What’s Love When It’s Not a Fairytale?
By: Ryan Dimalanta
Tags: Raymond Carver, Love, Lost Love, Hope, Essay

In Raymond Carver’s America, love is not a fairytale.

Far from it; in a compilation of fictional anecdotes surrounding love, loss, and the working-class, Carver’s collection of short stories What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, depicts a world that is helpless, booze-ridden and broken.

Yet in Everything Stuck to Him, a story of a shamed father reconnecting with his daughter, Carver’s survivors — father and daughter — get the chance to regain a love lost — for a moment, anyway.

The boy loved to hunt, you see. That’s part of it.

Fairytale or not, it’s love

In Milan, around Christmas, the snow falls outside the father’s apartment as the daughter visits for the first time in twenty years. She has questions for her would-be dad: she wants to know what it was like when she was a child; when they were still a family.

She sips Strega, waits, eyes him closely.

All grown up, the daughter is a cool, slim, attractive girl, a survivor from top to bottom. Little else is known about the young woman, yet only a courageous heart, an unyielding soul, can get one of Carver’s men to stutter — What do you want to hear, he says. What else can I tell you?

You can remember, the daughter says.

Still, the father is hesitant; he is ashamed, only reluctantly able to recall a story — one that he hopes will justify his absence these past twenty years — I can tell you about something that happened when you were a baby. It involves you, he says. But only in a minor way.

Go on, the daughter says.

He goes on.

The Hunt

The father recounts to the daughter a tale of a boy and a girl, newly married, with a newborn daughter to raise — They were kids themselves, but they were crazy in love, this eighteen-year-old boy and this seventeen-year-old girl when they married. Not all that long afterwards they had a daughter.

This boy and this girl — husband and wife, father and mother — lived in a little apartment below a dentist’s office, working odd jobs around the premises in exchange for rent and utilities — In summer they were expected to maintain the lawn and the flowers. In winter, the boy shoveled snow and spread rock salt on the walks. Are you still with me?

Are you getting the picture? the father says.

Tell the story, the daughter says.

They were very much in love, this boy and this girl.

Yet they also had dreams and ambitions still to achieve — They were always talking about the things they were going to do and the places they were going to go.

So one night after cleaning the dentist’s place upstairs, the boy calls Carl, his father’s hunting friend: he is eager to get out of the cramped apartment and anxious to hunt — to experience the geese beating the air over his head, shotgun plunging against his shoulder.

But it’s not just geese the boy is after, as the father alludes to another sort of prey — The boy was a little in love with Sally, just as he was a little in love with Betsy, who was another sister the girl had. The boy used to say to the girl, ‘If we weren’t married, I could go for Sally.’

What about Betsy, the girl would say. I hate to admit it, but I truly feel she’s better looking than Sally and me. What about Betsy?

Betsy too, the boy would say.

“The boy loved to hunt, you see. That’s part of it.”

Later that night, the boy lights the furnace and helps the girl give the baby a bath, marveling at how much of it looks like him and how much of it looks like her. For a moment, powdering between the baby’s fingers and between the baby’s toes, the boy sees the child he created — and for a moment, Carver’s survivors get the chance to feel what it’s like to be loved; warm.

But then, the baby cries out in her sleep.

When the boy finally gets out of bed to check on the child, the girl is already awake: she rocks the baby back and forth, unsure of what might be wrong — what to do? Hysterical, she says that she doesn’t think the boy should go hunting.

But the boy says that they had plans, him and Carl: they are going hunting. Yet the girl cares nothing for this — ‘I don’t care about what you and Carl planned,’ she said. ‘And I don’t care about Carl, either. I don’t even know Carl — ’ making the boy choose: the hunt or his family.

He chooses to hunt.

Love fades, yet is remembered

But the boy doesn’t hunt, not this time. Rather, he goes out, makes a show of getting the car ready, then heads back inside where he unpacks, undresses, and begins to make breakfast.

Later, the girl comes out and they make up over a split waffle, syrup, and some bacon — The boy looked down at himself, at everything stuck to his underwear.

I was starved, the boy said.

You were starved, the girl said.

He peels off his underwear and they embrace each other in the warmth of the little apartment below the dentist’s office, while the baby sleeps on in the bedroom — for a moment, a family.

We won’t fight anymore, the girl said.

“The boy said, We won’t.”

As we come back into the present narrative, the father finishes his story and gets up to look out the window. Drink in hand, he addresses the daughter as if confessing one of his many long-forgotten sins — Things change, he says. I don’t know how they do. But they do without you realizing it or wanting them to.

The daughter is wary — Yes, that’s true, only — but she drops the subject, as if none of it really mattered — it was just a story, after all. Awkwardness averted, she speaks brightly, asking if he can finally show her the city?

But he stays by the window, remembering. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else — the cold, and where he’d go in it — was outside, for a while anyway.

Closing thoughts

In Carver’s America, little is said. Words are sparse. Each syllable is a dagger into the hearts of his survivors. Because to speak in Carver’s world is to give life to the pain and the memories of a love once possessed.

In Everything Stuck to Him, Carver’s survivors feel this pain. They feel the regret of losing a father, a daughter, and feeling the loss of it all with a pang of longing in their hearts. But in the end, Carver’s survivors learn that love is never truly lost — it changes.

Yet even changed, love is still remembered.