It was perhaps the third or fourth class session, early in the term in any case. I arrived a few minutes late to find class just starting. We were sitting, as usual, in a circle, though for some reason the circle was oriented differently than it habitually was, crowded on the side of the classroom with the door on it rather than on the side close to the window where we’d have at least the hint of a breeze. Bell generally sat with her back to the window, nearly touching the wall just below it. Now she sat closest to the door, almost backed against it. Coming into the classroom I had to sidle past her. It felt like she was guarding the door, either keeping people from entering or keeping people from leaving.
I was just taking my seat directly across from her (the only seat left) when she announced that we were going to start by listening to a tape recording of a writer reading his work. Raymond Carver, she said his name was, and I could tell by the appreciative nods that some of the grad students gave that they knew who he was. I had never heard the name. She pressed play and we began to listen, all of us—or me at least—trying to look attentive and thoughtful, staring through each other instead of catching one another’s gaze.
The story was “Nobody Said Anything.” It’s told from the perspective of a boy who wakes up to hear his parents fighting, then fakes illness so he can stay home from school, steals cigarettes (which he calls “weeds”) from his mother’s purse, beats off, explores his parent’s drawers, speculates on how Vaseline might be used for sex, and then leaves the house to go fishing. On the way, he’s picked up by an older woman who he fantasizes fucking, though it’s clear from the way he imagines it (“She asks me if she can keep her sweater on and I say it’s okay with me. She keeps her pants on too. That’s all right, I say. I don’t mind.”) that he has little idea what that might actually entail. The boy’s thoughts often stray to sex. He has frequent boners, “shoots off” over a stream, talks about swearing on a bible to stop masturbating but getting jism on the bible in the process. He’s very consciously not thinking about his parents’ fight, though it continues to wait there, just beneath the surface of his consciousness.
But when he’s fishing, when a trout strikes or when he’s trying with another boy to catch a long but oddly thin fish, he does almost seem to forget. Pure delight seeps in. Carver’s details of that process—descriptions of hooking salmon eggs or affixing the sinkers to the line by biting them—are simple and stripped down, but have great authority. They reminded me vividly of fishing with my father.
In the end, he and the other boy manage to catch the oddly thin fish. They’re incredibly proud, but have a hard time knowing how to share the spoils—the glory of the fish is its sheer length, but if one of them takes it home, the other will go home empty-handed. The narrator manages to convince the other boy, shivering because of a fall into the water, to cut the fish in half, then strikes a deal so he can take the half home with the head on it. Excited, he hurries back home, only to find his parents home already and vehemently arguing. When he tries to present his catch, partly as a way of distracting his parents, getting them to share in his joy, they turn on him. “Take that goddam thing out of here!” his father says. “What in the hell is the matter with you? Take it the hell out of the kitchen and throw it in the goddam garbage!” The story ends with the boy outside and alone near the trash can, holding his half fish, not quite willing to let go of the magic of it.
•
What Bell played must have been from the American Audio Prose Library’s 1983 recording of three Carver stories—“Nobody Said Anything,” “A Serious Talk,” and “Fat.” Would “Fat” or “A Serious Talk” have had as much impact on me if either had been my first Carver story? I don’t think so. The characters in “A Serious Talk,” when I did read it, reminded me of older versions of friends I had, people I worked with at Hamburger World, the local burger joint where I’d been employed throughout high school, or the older brothers and sisters of kids I’d gone to school with. But I was insulated from that life: I knew I wasn’t those people. “Fat” might have—the viscerality of that story, a fat man eating and the dislocation between the waitress’s sense of him and everybody else’s view of him, the way she feels at once driven to talk about him and unable to express herself in a way that captures what the experience was for her listener, were different from anything I’d read before. And the story offered a painful insight into the complexity of sexuality that, idealistic and eighteen, I probably was far from ready for. It was a story I thought about often once I did read it. But even that, because it had a female central character who was quite different from me, felt safer to me. But was that just because it was the second Carver story I read, not the first? That I’d already begun to understand what to expect?
What hurt me about “Nobody Said Anything” was the thought that I might be more like this masturbating kid, coyly called only “R.”, than I wanted to believe. Joan Didion speaks in My Year of Magical Thinking of how “People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces . . . The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.”2 That was something the story expressed to me: the boy, despite his bluster, managed over the course of his narrative to lay himself bare, recounting for the first time his consciousness of the collapse of his parents’ relationship and a trauma that he would continue to have to recount for years to come. It struck me that Carver was giving voice not only to his character’s trauma but to a trauma of his own, and calling upon me, uncomfortably, to share it because of all the ways that I was like this kid. It was a story that did a great deal more work for me after it was finished than it did on the page: it was a story that would continue to evolve and change as I thought about it. Until I read “Nobody Said Anything,” I didn’t know a story could do that.
I remember Carver reading the story flatly—nonchalantly and almost crudely, it seemed to me—which made the story’s impact all the greater. I suspect that Bell chose to have us listen to that story just because it was the first one on the tape. If not, perhaps it was because it was the longest story and we hadn’t yet reached the point in the class of workshopping so there was ample time to fill. As we all listened to it, facing one another, my façade began to break. Soon I was darting glances at others, but people were still going to great pains not to react and to look serious. The story upset me, and I had a hard time not revealing that it had. I did not want people to know how deeply it had spoken to me, because that would reveal, I feared, too much about me.
Once the story ended, Bell clicked off the recorder. She swept us with her gaze, and then said, “Thoughts?” When nobody volunteered, she began to go around the circle, asking us one by one what we thought of the story.
I don’t remember specifically what anybody said, but I do remember growing more and more agitated, partly because my turn was coming, and partly because the measured responses that the more advanced students were giving seemed to me to have very little to do with what the story was or what it was trying to do—what, anyway, it had done to me. I felt dully angry, but resentful too that I would soon have to speak.
When my turn came, I don’t remember what I said either. Something offhand and semi-sarcastic, just a sentence or two, a vague lashing out partly at Carver’s story for ambushing me, partly at the other students for not having a more visceral response. I was young and fairly naïve, and probably a bit of an asshole. Looking back at the story now, just having reread it, I have a hard time seeing why it shocked me so much. But it still strikes me as a great story, and a painfully honest one.
I remember Bell listening and then asking if I could clarify what I meant. I struggled, offered something equally vague, tried again, failed, and then shrugged, hoping perhaps she’d be able to give me a way to phrase what I’d failed to express. Instead, she simply looked at me for a moment without expression and then moved on to the student sitting beside me.
As it would turn out, this was for me the best possible response.
•
I was looking for a box to put the story in. It had made me uncomfortable, and if I’d had an easy way to dismiss it, I would have. I was groping for that in the few words I was forced to say after just having listened to it. But my response was complex in that I was objecting to the other students’