ENDINGS
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| LAND, PROVINCETOWN, 1976. Photograph by Joel Meyerowitz. |
“Unlike novels or poems, but more akin to a play, the short story is also an end-oriented form, and in the best ones the endings shine a light back upon the story, illuminating its meaning with both surprise and inevitability.”
-Lorrie Moore, 2004
One of my favorite Lorrie Moore stories is about a Middle-aged divorcee named Ira who is trying out dating again. It’s titled “Debarking” and was published in the New Yorker in 2003, a couple of years after Lorrie Moore’s own divorce. The story has a few tricks and turns that I have quite shamelessly aped over the years, but what I’m thinking about now is its ending.
After Ira jokes his way through the sorrows or divorce and indignities of dating (as only a Lorrie Moore character can), he meets Zora, a lovely but eccentric (and likely unstable) woman who is also divorced and has a problematically close relationship with her drip of a son. By the time we get to the story's final scene, nothing is resolved. Ira’s loneliness remains and his sense of emotional instability is as peaked as ever. In the background of the story is the Easter/Passover holiday (Ira is jewish; his friends are not) and the looming threat of the Iraq War (but they are all Democrats). The final scene gives us Ira at a bar, quite alone and quite drunk. He goes on a long soliloquy to no one about the promise of spring and the resurrection, but it’s sarcastic and strained. Somebody at the end of the bar tells him to shut up and then the story is over.
It’s the perfect ending for this story, perfectly framing what the story is about. It is about debarking: coming off the vessel that carried you to this new strange place. It’s about being a foreigner there, without a home, without a guide. It’s about uncertainty and chaos: the war looming, the world seeming a little more crazed than usual, reality feeling a little unreal. And so, it is a perfect ending. Ira communicates something true about his interior life, except it is in the wrong environment, under the wrong conditions. And so, a stranger tells him to shut up. I think he’ll be fine eventually, but he’s not fine right now. The story is about not being fine.
The quote at the top of this entry is from Moore’s lovely introduction to 2004's Best American Short Stories anthology. Her words describe something I’ve felt for as long as I’ve been writing but never thought to articulate. Endings are incredibly important, especially to a short story. They, if you ask me, must transform and elevate everything that came before. A good ending is half the value of a good story.
Perhaps one of the reasons I like short stories so much is the potential power of their endings. It’s the short story ending that twists the realism of a short story, makes it so that no matter how naturalistic and true-to-life the content of the story is, it can never be a mirror-to-life that it is so often pretending to be. The short story can only be a waking dream because the short story ends. Real life, on the other hand, does not. There are no final pages in real life that shine back on what came before like a searchlight of meaning. Sure, there are moments where you get a feeling like something happened that was important, but then life just keeps on going in all its tedious unceasingness.
The closest you can come to the feeling of a short story ending is your death, and even then, life just keeps on going for everyone else. Sure you can say something wise and true on your deathbed, but after you’re gone, eventually those people kneeling around you in that beautiful silence are going to have to get up. Eventually someone is going to come by with a form to fill out. Eventually one of your family or friends is going to dry their tears and have to ask where the bathroom is, or who’s bringing what to the wake, or how they can validate their parking for the hospital lot. Eventually someone—a couple of strangers—will have to move the leather bag of cold stew that was your body to make way for someone else. And eventually that room, the scene of your dramatic end, will become the scene of someone else's anonymous ongoing story.
But in a short story, on that magical page, there is just that last line and then that perfectly blank white space forever.
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Moore mentions stage plays as needing to adhere to this ending-is-everything rule. I don’t necessarily disagree, but I do think that movies are maybe the closer equivalent. While a movie's power may not totally rely on the final scene, good movies are made into masterpieces by what happens before that last cut to black. Just like with fiction, I like endings that are melancholy and a little jarring (surprising but also inevitable). I like endings that make you think, "Oh, this whole thing was really about that." The best example I can think of is the final scene in No Country for Old Men. After we, the audience, have sat through what we were tricked into believing was a crime thriller, after our hero has been anticlimactically killed off-screen, and after our villain has been injured by random chance and has limped off into the void, we get to watch a world-weary Tommy Lee Jones recount a dream he had to his wife. In the dream, he and his father were riding on horseback through a mountain snowstorm. His father rode past him, carrying the embers of a fire in a hollow horn. Tommy Lee Jones, or rather his character, knew that his father would be riding ahead, that he would make a fire, and that would be waiting for him. Then Tommy Lee Jones woke up. Then the screen cuts to the black.
And with that cut, the whole story is suddenly not about money or gunfights or cowboys and outlaws. Suddenly, this is a movie about making sense of a world ruled by chaos and senselessness. It’s about finding meaning at a time where everything seems to insist on being meaningless and horrifying, certainty when the only thing that seems certain is death. I love it so much that I’ll watch the whole movie just to feel the perfectly articulated hopelessness buried underneath those final two images—the image of Tommy Lee Jones’s dream and the image of his tired and troubled face.
I once had an idea of writing a collection of endings to stories that didn’t exist. I guess the idea was that I was trying to capture the tone and pacing of a good ending without going through all the trouble of telling the story that led to it. It was a fun idea that I never really committed any time to. Maybe I should try.
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Here’s an attempt:
…After her pickup truck disappears around the corner, the three of us stand for at least two minutes on the sidewalk, eyes locked on the spot where she just was, our last point of contact. Davie breaks first. “Whatever, man,” he says, but his nonchalance is unconvincing. “Forget her,” he tries again.
Behind us, the fluorescent lights from the Candy Land awning click and buzz awake. The sun is starting to set and the grapefruit blear of summer twilight is collecting on the horizon. I look up at the pink haze of clouds, then back to the corner. With her gone, it’s just the end of the junky street again, the intersection of Chester and Monk, the one with the Amaco and the A&W.
“Let’s go to Jem’s,” Davie says after another quiet minute. He is getting antsy. “Let’s go somewhere. Shit.” He kicks the gravel. “We’re gonna just sit around because some dumb girl flaked? Come on. That’s what they do.”
Mac finally moves his gaze away from the corner, but he doesn’t look Davie in the face. He just turns his head halfway, fixing his eyes on the space in front of Davie’s feet. “Chill the fuck out,” he says, and Davie stops moving.
A car pulls into the Candy Land lot a few spaces down, a big tan Seville full of kids. Mac looks toward the Cadillac, and then jerks his head forward without looking at us, gesturing that we are leaving. He starts walking down the sidewalk and Davie follows. But after about five steps, Mac stops and looks over his shoulder. I haven’t moved.
I can’t explain it, but with Jackie gone for good, I feel suddenly like I can see all of them—Mac, Davie, Jem, and Casey even—clearly. They’re okay guys, but they have nothing I want. Even if I don’t know what I want, I can know that.
Jackie knew what she wanted, and she's gone.
And after watching her go, I'm surprised that I'm happy for her. In that happiness I feel something shift.
“What's up?” Mac says. His face is clouded in shadow but I can hear a challenge in his voice.
I open my mouth to try to explain, but I don’t even want to give him that. “I’m going home,” I say. “I’m just…” I shrug, wishing perhaps that maybe more words are needed to undo all that we have done, but I only need two. “I’m out,” I say with more defeat in my voice than I like.
Mac turns more so that I can see his face, his eyes. They look glassy and red, but I can’t tell for sure. I can see that he knows that I am gone for good too. And I can see him, right in front of me, harden over the loss. First Frank, then Jackie, then me—just three more figures in his short life who can’t live up to their promises. I can see him tighten, squeezing out any bit of hurt from his face so there is only disgust left.
“I knew it,” he says, a tiny shake of his head. “A bunch of fucking frauds.” He spits on the ground in my direction. “Worthless,” he says, turning with a snap. Davie follows but keeps looking over his shoulder every ten steps in disbelief about what I have just given up. I watch them until they cross the street, and then until they are gone.
The sky is now ablaze with the sunset, all oranges and blues. I can hear the jukebox in Candy Land break into the opening string-section swell on Rhinestone Cowboy. I want to go home.
Maybe if I run home, I think, mom will still be reading in the front room. Maybe Sam might still be awake too. If I run home, maybe I can tell her that I will teach her how to swim, so that she can fall asleep knowing that.
Glen Campbell is belting inside: “There’ll be a load of comprimisin’, on the road to my horizon!”
Go, I say to myself. But I don’t move.
On the count of five, go.
When we were kids and played tag, Sam always insisted on getting a five second head start. When I count to five, run! She would say. But she would be so worked up she would count too fast. Or maybe, she wanted to get caught.
“On the count of five,” I say aloud.
Glen keeps crooning inside.
I start to count, turning the other way down Chester, away from the street lights and the Amaco, away from Jem's, and away from Jackie too, towards home.
Someone in Candy Land belts out a stupid, “Yee-haw!” as the chorus kicks in.
I say, “five,” out loud. And when I do, I’m finally running.
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Moore, Lorrie. "Introduction." The Best American Short Stories 2004, edited by Katrina Kenison. Houghton Mifflin,
Media:
Consider accompanying your reading with this track from the debut album of ambient/folk supergroup Cowboy Sadness: