“Fat”
A first-person account of a waitress relating an anecdote about how last Wednesday the fattest man she’s ever seen was seated at her station. He is polite and complementary, but physically struggles as he proceeds to order and eat his way through just about everything on the menu. That turns to be the entire story about the fat man, but the waitress’ story goes into accounting of having sex with her boyfriend during which she felt fat while he hardly even seems present. The story ends on the lyric pondering that it is August and her life is about to change.
“Popular Mechanics”
Although one of the shortest of Carver’s stories, this is one which lingers in the mind the longest. It is a snapshot of the lowest, most degraded moment in the failed marriage of a young couple who are apparently in the midst of a divorce (or at least a separation) shortly after the birth of a child. With stunning rapidity an argument escalates from nowhere into a literal struggle over the tiny body. Everything leads to the horrific implications of the final line.
“Nobody Said Anything”
This is also a tale of domestic degradation told by a young boy whose parents are arguing. He pretends to be sick the next to get out of going to school as both parents leave in divergent shapes of anger. He decides to spend the day fishing at the nearby creek, is offered a ride by a woman in a car, catches a fish and with the help of another boy tries to land a much bigger fish. Finally they catch it and decided the only fair thing is to slice it halfsies. He gets the tail and when he gets home to show it to his mother she’s sickened and his father makes him throw it away. The final image is of the boy illuminated by the light on the porch, half a fish in his hands.
“Cathedral”
Carver’s most famous and anthologized story is the story of the night an old friend of his wife—a blind man—stays over. What seems to be headed toward a story of repressed rage stimulated by jealousy instead becomes a surprisingly moving story of how the two men bond not over the woman which has brought them together, but the ability to describe what a cathedral looks like.
“Intimacy”
Finally having attained some success later in his career as a writer, a man decides to stop by his ex-wife announced after not having seen each other for four years. Immediately upon seeing him, she launches into a long, emotional monologue filled with bitterness and anger directed toward his betrayal of her. Through the vitriol and pain is the clarity of genuine emotional connection she still cannot help but feel toward him. When at last the attack begins to fade into normalcy, the writer is on his knees holding fast to the hem of her dress. This moment of possibilities is broken by the sudden dawning of the potential for trouble if her current husband were to show up just then. Suggesting that he is only there to use her as fodder for more stories, she asks him to leave and he obliges.
“Chef’s House”
Following a period of separation, an alcoholic husband and wife attempting recovery get together while renting the house from Chef, a friend and yet another drunk. After two years apart, the summer provides a glimpse of sunshine until Chief interrupts with the sudden request that they vacate by the end of the month in order that he might give the house to his daughter. The summer experience has burned so deeply into Wes, the husband, that he has attached a talismanic power to the house as a means of ensuring his recovery and the obligation to leave puts him at a dangerous crossroads.
“Gazebo”
Duane and Holly are having a difficult conversation. Duane is forcing himself to confess his sexual relationship with Juanita, the maid who worked at the hotel where he and Holly were employed at the time. The thing is over and done with. The morning began with the intimacy of licking alcohol off his stomach, but the night she was trying to defenestrate herself out of the unbelievable pain and sadness. The story ends on a memory of believing they’d grow old together sitting on the gazebo and the realization that they will not.
“Viewfinder”
The strangeness of the story begins with its startling opening paragraph:
“A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.”
In fact, there is nothing exactly ordinary about this story. The narrator has become a recluse after his wife and kids abandon and there the strange suggestion that somehow the visitor at the door has insight into his very psychological condition. Most of the story consists of conversation over a cup of coffee; conversation which reveals the narrator’s domestic background. The story ends with the hook-handed man taking photographs of the narrator standing on the roof of his house throwing rocks which had apparently been tossed there by neighborhood kids.
