This post is the fifth in the Story Course series. If you just subscribed or just discovered this post, please start with the first post.
Let’s start today with a pop quiz. You don’t have to put your answer in the comments or anything, but at least take a moment to think about this question before you read on:
How many characters are there in this story?
There’s the man, and the woman, right?
What about the narrator? Is the narrator a character in the story?
What about you? Did you count you as a character?
I think that we, as readers, are always a character in the fiction that we read. Here’s what I mean: Though we don’t actively participate in the action (we’re real, after all, and the characters are not), we inevitably bring our attitudes, our values, our beliefs, and our preferences — the sum of our conscious mind — to bear upon the story. We interpret stories through the lens of our own experience.
This is what I had in mind in the previous post when I pointed out that the writer has not let us inside the minds of the characters. We don’t know what they’re thinking; we only observe their actions. What the writer leaves out, we fill in, actively and constantly, even if subconsciously.
That’s why one reader might find the actions of the man in this story to be creepy, threatening, and odd, while another might see him as curious, a bit clueless, perhaps lonely. The writer doesn’t give us the answer (or, at least, hasn’t given us the answer yet), and I think that’s on purpose. What is not said creates ambiguity, draws us in, invites us to make assumptions. It may even compel us to pick sides.
The question is, how open are we to changing our minds in the face of new evidence?
Let’s talk about the fourth bit of Until This Is Over. You might find it helpful to open the previous post in a separate window so you can refer to the paragraphs as you read these notes.
What did you notice in this latest bit of the story? Here are a few things that stand out to me.
“He tried another smile.”
That phrasing is unusual, isn’t it? The writer could have said “He smiled again” or “He forced himself to smile” or “He faked a smile,” all of which feel different to me from “He tried another smile.”
When I read that sentence and consider the situation, I land on two possible interpretations (there may be more, let me know if you think of others):
The man is not good at smiling, or doesn’t smile much, or is faking, so it requires effort for him to smile. He has to try to smile.
Or, he smiled at the woman once and didn’t get a warm and fuzzy response, he knows he’s violated a social norm by walking uninvited into her home, so he’s making another attempt at being friendly.
Did you notice that sentence? How did it make you feel? How do you read it?
Here’s another thing that caught my eye:
“Especially with what’s been going on around here.”
That’s the woman speaking, the woman who just today is moving into this neighborhood. Suddenly I have a whole new set of questions. Foremost among them is WHAT is going on around here? The writer doesn’t tell us, but clearly it’s something negative, because she mentions it as a reason for her to have her guard up, to find the man suspect. But the man’s reaction to the woman’s comment doesn’t add any information.
I also wonder if she knew about “what’s going on” before she decided to move here, or if it only recently happened.
There’s one more thing I noticed in those few paragraphs. The characters now have names: Teresa and Scott. Or Scotty; he changes his mind in the course of the introduction. Why, I wonder? Is he just trying to sound friendlier, more chummy? Is this just another instance of him being awkward?
Have the stakes changed now that they’ve introduced themselves?
I’m curious what you thought about that exchange — the spoken introductions, the body language of Teresa crossing her arm over her chest, her strained smile, his wave and his waver about which name he prefers, the handshake. A lot happens quickly there, and it both unsettles me and somewhat mollifies my anxiety.
I waver.
Okay, with our head full of things we noticed and things we felt and things we wondered about and our guesses about what comes next, here’s the fifth bit of Until This Is Over:
The truck had no lift, and the ramp was still rolled up and latched under the cargo box. “I couldn’t figure out how to pull that thing down,” Teresa said, stepping onto the bumper of the truck. She was dressed for the gym — athletic shoes and shorts, a cotton t-shirt with the sleeves cut off in deep scoops down the sides, a light blue sports bra — and he watched as she pulled herself with ease into the back of the truck.
“The ramp will make it a lot easier to get that table out of there,” he said.
“Go for it.” She started pulling the heavy furniture pad off the top of the table.
He flipped down the latch and pulled the ramp out and down, jerking at it as it stuck on its rollers.
“Really? It was that easy?”
“Well, the latch was jammed a bit. I can see why you had trouble.”
She smiled at his lie, nodded, and watched him climb the ramp from the sunlight into the shaded interior with her. They each wrapped their hands under the apron of the table and lifted, and he began to walk backward across the floor of the box toward the ramp. “Can you see where you’re going?” she asked.
“Not really. But as long as I don’t step off the edge, this shouldn’t end badly.” He smiled. “Tell me when I get there.”
“Now.”
They descended the ramp cautiously and awkwardly and turned to shuffle across the grass to the front door. They twisted the table onto its side to maneuver the legs through the door. They continued as they had, him shuffling backward and looking at her, and her looking past him to see where they were going. When they had the table centered under the hanging lamp, she nodded to him and they set the table down, the legs clacking onto the tile.
“Mercy!” she exclaimed, and he smiled at the word. She pulled some stray strands of hair from her face and rolled her eyes. “The rest should be easy,” she said, her breath labored. “As weird as it was, I’m glad you showed up.”
“I wasn’t doing anything else.”
She leaned back against the bare wall and looked slowly over the room as if she were examining things that only she could see. “So, you’re on Acacia. Is that the one with thorns?”
“Everything in the desert has thorns.”
She gave a surprised laugh. “That’s a cheerful thought.”
“Don’t say nobody warned you.” He watched her as she swept her eyes across the room again. “You already unloaded the bed by yourself?”
“No bed. I left him the bed. I’m having a new one delivered tomorrow.”
He gestured left and right with his head, sweeping the emptiness of the room with his gaze. “Looks like you left him just about everything,” he said.
“Yeah. Well. We didn’t have much by the end.” He nodded, waiting for her to continue. She walked into the next room and he heard the refrigerator open. She came back with two bottles of water, opening one and taking a long drink as she walked. She offered the other to him. He took the bottle from her, then set it unopened on the table. She gave a small shrug and leaned back against the wall. “I don’t care. Stuff doesn’t matter to me,” she finally said, looking past him across the room and out through the open front door. “All I wanted was to get out. And I got that.” She drew a long slow breath, then exhaled in an audible sigh. “That’s enough.”
He shifted, waited, watched her face. After a moment she looked back at him, and he saw her face relax, reshape, rejoin him in the room. “Anyway,” she said, drawing a full breath, “what’s going on in this neighborhood? I mean, two days after I close on this house, they find that family.”
“Yeah.”
What are you feeling? What did you notice? What are you wondering about? What do you think will happen next? Drop your thoughts in the comments.
When you’re ready, here’s the next post.
We're learning a lot of new information. The woman, Teresa, is moving in, seemingly from another part of the country, after a breakup or divorce, and with few resources. I was wondering before why she didn't have any helpers. She's "dressed for the gym" and apparently attractive to the guy, Scotty. It's hard to feel the same apprehension as in the earlier bits with a guy called Scotty, by the way. He's being helpful for some reason, seems to be good at handy kinds of tasks like knowing how to pull down the ramp on the rental truck, but he "wasn't doing anything else." So he's a slightly less creepy but still unknown character. But when he's thinking about what she unloaded by herself, the only heavy piece of furniture he thinks of is the bed. Is that significant in some way? Teresa doesn't seem bothered by it.
She seems to be an independent kind of person yet a little old fashioned (using the expression "Mercy!" which makes him smile).
We get one bit of info about what's going on in the neighborhood: "they find that family," meaning dead? Murdered? If there is an unsolved murder(s) in the neighborhood, why would Teresa be so trusting with someone she finds in her house while she's moving in? Also, she's been through some kind of bad experience: "We didn't have much by the end." Was the man she was with a gambler who used up all her money? Still questions to be answered. So far, she has revealed more about herself than Scotty has.