A Story I Loved: “Why Don’t You Dance” by Raymond Carver

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This is also a pretty prototypical Carver story. You’ve got the hallmarks of what he became so famous for- failed marriage, alcoholism, a sense of ennui pervading the work. His characters, I note, are always slightly jaded. They’re cynics. They have to be transformed. Sometimes they leave without transformation, only observation.

This story’s short, clocking in at only a couple of pages. It goes over a couple that visit a man having a front yard sale. He’s trying to sell everything in his house. We figure out, pretty quickly, that this man is having a divorce, likely a contentious one, and most certainly created by his own self-destructive issues: drinking and arguing. He watches the couple, asks them if they want to dance. They dance in front of him, in order to get some of his junk for cheap. He watches them, and then he dances with the girl. She leans in and says he must be desperate or something- and it’s laced with dual meaning. He’s desperate for selling his stuff to them for so cheap, and he’s desperate for wanting to dance with a stranger girl, to get a little bit of intimacy out of pity. 

Carver drops these details really nicely. The story moves along well, and with any other writer I might feel as though they were trying to hit benchmarks. But Carver is fluid about it, and everything feels natural and lived-in. I’m most interested in the paragraph that the story ends on. The girl goes around telling her story to anybody who will hear about it- this strange tale of a man who wanted to voyeur her and her boyfriend dancing, and sold them some furniture. But she can’t quite figure out how to articulate the story, how to poke fun of the man in language that feels right. So she stops trying to tell it.  

That kind of haunts me. The image of a man, asking for a dance, not because he is interested in this girl, but because he is so clearly not. It's not about the girl, but the idea of dancing. His mind is elsewhere, and he wants anything approximating human connection, love, the ideals of romance and tenderness. We aren't supposed to feel sorry for him in the traditional ways. He's implied to be a nasty piece of work, but he's human, in this moment, asking to dance. “Give the neighbors something they haven’t seen before,” he says to her before they slow-waltz in the ruins of his emptied home. The ghost of a past layered on top. Almost like love is meant to be watched, observed by other people, in order to make it real. A story, a feeling you have, is only real when you try to tell it to other people, but you can’t phrase it quite correctly, and so you quit trying to tell it at all. This is the kind of story that delves, with a strange verve, into the strange nuances of human connection, of transmitting emotion, the messiness and specificity of both the emotion and transmission. Something has failed here, on both ends. Human failure everywhere, and the attempt to cover up that failure, with somebody else’s girl for a dance, or somebody else’s story, maybe, somebody else’s life, to get a cheap laugh of another stranger. It’s very raw. It’s human, and eloquently done. Even if the girl cannot tell her story properly, Carver certainly can.

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