I found that the relation between the story’s title and the story itself to be a little ironic. This is because the narrator continuously makes poor decisions (drug/alcohol abuse, changing test scores, etc.) However, at the end, she quits her job at the school. Could this be a form of bettering herself? She says that she loves the kids, but I think that quitting the job was in her best interest. She needed to put a boundary between them and her and that is what she did. With that being said, perhaps the title isn’t as ironic as initially perceived. I felt as though she shared too much of her life with the kids.
This story is extremely different from those we have read before from Richard Ford. I think that the language used is an obvious observation. However, I felt that the sentence structure of the story seemed different as well. The narrator’s thoughts were usually concise and in a matter of fact kind of attitude. Despite this, they carried a lot of weight.
The relationships outside the narrator and her students was interesting as well. There was “the boyfriend” and the narrator’s ex-husband. I’m not sure why the ex-husband invited her to dinner. The narrator was definitely not welcoming his company, so I’m not sure why she went to the dinner either. It seemed like one of the more weirder situations that occurred in this story, especially considering the ex-husband had a wife back home. This just seemed like a boundary that was being overstepped.
As I think more on the narrator and her ex-husband, it gets stranger to me. Why did she get her nails and hair done prior to seeing him? What was she expecting from him? What was he expecting from her? Also, the narrator arrived to dinner way earlier than him. She had a few drinks. I’m not sure if this was out of habit or if she was preparing herself to see him. By that, I mean that she may have been drinking excessively in order to be able to deal with the presence of her ex-husband. She wasn’t happy at dinner and eventually left. Her ex-husband also offered her money to stop talking to him. Didn’t he ask her to dinner?
The ending of this story was abrupt to me. It was slightly confusing as well. She wasn’t able to give her resignation letter to the church and as a result, she ripped it up. Does this mean she decided to stay at the job?
So, about the dinner that the narrator had with her ex husband, I did have a few thoughts about why that may be. She’d constantly stuck in a bad cycle of self-destructive and bad habits that usually ended up with her feeling discontent with her current life. It mentioned that she would drunk-call her ex as well, which led me to think that she misses him to some capacity. Maybe she equates him at that point in the story when the dinner took place as some sort of connection back to before her life was as miserable as it now is. So for her to get dressed up and put in effort leads me to believe that she either wanted him to want her, or she didn’t want him to see her in her usual haphazard state of hungover misery. While he did ask her to come to dinner, he probably thought that the conversation that they needed to have wouldn’t have been as resonant if he had have told it to her while she was drunk. The narrator is pretty materialistic too, which is also probably why he offered her money to have her stop calling/talking to him. Those were just my thoughts though!