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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
PMB 248
4820 Yelm Hwy SE
Suite B
Lacey, WA 98503-4903
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| PAST COMMENTARY | MORE COMMENTARY |
Endings : Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
In Bausch’s story, the granddaughter, Brenda, who is overweight and clumsy, doggedly rehearses for an elementary school gymnastics demonstration to which all the families have been invited. She, alone among her fifth-grade classmates, has been unable to perform the necessary vaults and jumps and for all her practice and disciplined dieting it does not seem any likelier, on the day of the event, that she’ll be able to. Deep down, both Brenda and her grandfather feel this, and through conversations of brave encouragement and support and declarations that the whole thing isn’t important anyway there’s a thickening air of doom as the hour approaches. In the crowded gymnasium, the loving grandfather, sick with worry, waits and watches.
…The last of the sixth-graders goes over the horse, and Mr. Clayton [the physical education teacher] says into the microphone that the fifth-graders are next. It’s Brenda who’s next. She stands in the doorway, her cheeks flushed, her legs looking too heavy in the tights. She’s rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, getting ready. It grows quiet. Her arms swing slightly, back and forth, and now, for a moment, she’s looking at the crowd, her face hiding whatever she’s feeling. It’s as if she were merely curious as to who is out there, but he knows she’s looking for him, searching the crowd for her grandfather, who stands on his toes, unseen against the far wall, stands there thinking his heart might break, lifting his hand to wave.
And Bausch leaves the story there, at exactly the right place, the point of the reader’s most intimate involvement. It’s easy to imagine an untalented writer believing the scene should continue beyond this point, so that readers would watch Brenda either miraculously making or failing to execute her jump. Both such endings would in opposite ways be equally horribly sappy. What helps to make Bausch’s closing so effective is his understanding of a reader’s human nature, which he legitimately manipulates to create a glorious tension at the end as we feel our sense of what is surely about to happen fighting, against all the evidence, with what we sentimentally want to happen.
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Finally, to show that the novel, also, can partially close and thereby confirm that my earlier statement was indeed too sweeping, I offer the ending of Alice McDermott’s That Night.
The narrative behavior of That Night is a wonder of leaps back and forth in time, a deliberate weave of speculation and reinvestigation which never leaves readers wondering where they are. This is an important factor in terms of its closing, for the final scene of the book is not the story’s last one chronologically. Instead, at the end, McDermott invites us again to be with her heroine, Sheryl, as she leaves the hospital after delivering her illegitimate baby and giving it up for adoption.
By this time the novel has shown us fragments of Sheryl’s life long after the moment of the day on which it closes, and we’ve also spent a future hour with Rick, Sheryl’s boyfriend and the baby’s father, in his defeated adulthood some twenty years after that night. Consequently, with the narrative so segmented and directed this way and that, a strong underlying impression has been created that its completion will be in no way chronologically inevitable. McDermott makes use of that license to end her novel, her narrator a kind of responsible anarchist. After paragraphs describing Sheryl before her pregnancy, impatiently counting the minutes at the dinner table until she can flee the house to be with Rick, and following the next paragraph, which refers once again to Sheryl’s attempted suicide after she’d been whisked off to family in Ohio to have her baby away from the shame of local neighborhood inspection, we finally read:
In the front seat, Pam [Sheryl’s earnestly well-meaning cousin], her mother and her aunt were keeping up a bright conversation to which the three children added their own bright and nonsensical things. Sheryl pulled her small cousin closer to her, held him more tightly in her arms. She tossed her hair back over her shoulder as Pam drove out onto the highway and the car picked up speed.
Some of what makes this ending seem partial, open-ended, is the image itself – the car accelerating, gaining speed as it drives away toward a destination not precisely described. Reading it, we feel the narrative circle nearly coming closed – in the way I described the effect of the ending of Housekeeping – but then, at the last moment, veering away from that point where the two ends touch and, as with the car, shifting into a faster gear, gaining a new, or renewed, power and continuing on into the American day. The visceral sense of the last passage is itself one of sudden redirection and acceleration.
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