A Story I Loved: "Sweethearts" by Richard Ford
- Staff Writer
- Aug 26
- 4 min read
Updated: Aug 28
All I can really think about for this short story is how this is a great premise for a short story. Truly. It’s so simple, and yet Ford executes it so well.
Here’s the premise: a man must drive both his girlfriend and her ex-husband to the jail, where he will serve a year for robbing a convenience store.
Sweethearts observes what binds people. Even if they are not technical, legal bindings- like the binding of a girlfriend and a boyfriend, as opposed to her and ex-husband, who are no longer legally bound up but are entangled in all the other ways people can possibly be entangled to each other. Then, the strange, much more murky binding between the narrator, Russell, and the ex-husband, Bobby. Arlene, the ex-wife and now current girlfriend, is what stands in-between them.
They are people grown, people who have seen something of life. And yet Bobby has not been able to mature, to cross that final precipice of developing a moral code. Russell, it seems, has. So has Arlene. The friction comes because Bobby and Russell seem to symbolize both Past and Present, and Bobby aggrieves this role. He has been put-down and set aside, physically into jail, and mentally, he senses this as Arlene getting rid of him, or recuperating. But what Ford is also getting at here is that people aren’t symbols. They aren’t nothing as clean as a past, or a metaphor, something you can pick up and discard. They recur, in strange ways. Arlene should be done with Bobby. He’s good-for-nothing, and he can be violent and unpredictable, which a climax later in the story proves. And yet something holds them in place- that shared past, that shared affection. It’s not useless, it simply is. We are made up of our pasts and our present.
Russell seems to understand this, and it’s why he drives them all to the jail, why he does a good thing for Bobby, talks with him and empathizes with him though he has never been in this situation himself. He understands Bobby but does not let the understanding of somebody turn into recognition. This story is all about love. Kind of like “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”, the famous Carver story, there’s all kinds of love going on here. What is love? the question of the story seems to be. Love, as some people would call it, means not getting into a lick of trouble, and leaving some people and things well enough alone. It means not putting your ex-wife through the ordeal of putting you into jail. It means having enough to lose and enough people you love to avoid getting into trouble in the first place. But these are only human answers. We all have our own ideas, and Richard Ford uses this paradigm, this very human story, to show all of these themes.
The last paragraph is one of my favorites in all of literature. It describes, very simply, one man’s worldview, and it is not nearly as complex as you would think, though the situation described above is complex. The trick, Russell seems to be saying, is not to live your life constantly adapting, though your circumstances may. It means to hold steady, and to keep what you know to be true to yourself. Let me give it to you here, in all of its raw eloquence, though, of course, the paragraph means nothing with the rest of the story backing it up. “Though I knew, then, how you became a criminal in the world and lost it all. Somehow, and for no apparent reason, your decisions got tipped over and you lost your hold. And one day you woke up and you found yourself in the very situation you said you would never ever be in, and you did not know what was most important to you anymore. And after that, it was all over. And I did not want that to happen to me—did not, in fact, think it ever would. I knew what love was about. It was about not giving trouble or inviting it. It was about not leaving a woman for the thought of another one. It was about never being in that place you said you’d never be in. And it was not about being alone. Never that. Never that.”
Never that. Never that. The beauty of that repetition, which reminds me of similar lines that have come before it- like Bullet in the Brain, though, different, in its own important ways. Like something as repetitive and instinctual as a mantra against evil, a crossing of oneself. We have to keep those boundary lines firm so as to make sure we do not cross them. Love is simple, Russell says. It means not compromising on certain principles, and compromising on others. Like giving a condemned man a ride to jail. Like never going to jail yourself in the first place. Ford writes about this conclusion in a way that is not dogmatic or cold. Instead, he writes it as almost as the natural truth of the situation occurring to Russell in various ways throughout the story. He has become a good man, or his own approximation of one, through force of will, and that is what separates him from the Bobbies of the world. It is a beautiful conclusion, because the language makes it so.
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