A story that works at the sentence level: "Julia and Sunny" by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

I got through my now-annual blogging of all the stories in the Best American Short Stories Anthology in good time back in the fall, but even though I scaled back what I intended to do with the O. Henry anthology to just blogging about the ones I liked, I've gotten very waylaid. It's actually a good thing; I've been using some of the time lately to do my own writing. The end result has been several stories revised, three news ones written, and now, over the last five weeks, a draft of a novel. I'm going to let that draft marinate for a few days while I forget it, so I can go back to it with fresh eyes for editing. In the meantime, I'll go back to the O. Henry anthology and blog about a few of the stories I connected with.

Maybe it's the different approach I chose, but I didn't find much to like in the O. Henry anthology. There weren't a lot of stories that enraged me, the kind where I feel honestly offended the editors chose to use one of the precious, career-enhancing spots in the anthology for a story so clearly undeserving, but I also didn't find many stories I was still thinking about days later. That might be because I only read the ones I didn't really like once. Often, when I blog on BASS, where I read every story twice because I'm going to be blogging about them all, I find a story I didn't like that much after one reading suddenly seem much better after the second go-through. Maybe if I'd read this whole anthology twice, I'd have found more to like.

Be that as it may, "Julia and Sunny" by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum was a story I liked not only after the first read, but very much during it. There's a little bit of serendipity in that. The story is about a divorce, as witnessed by the married couple who are best friends with the two people getting divorced, Julia and Sunny. It so happens that a couple Mrs. Heretic and I are very close to, a couple we've known since we were dating, is getting a divorce. They've been on the ropes for a while, but they split up definitively in the last few weeks--during the COVID-19 lockdown, no less, which made it a lot more shocking. (One of our first questions was, "Where is he going to live?")

When couples get divorced, they often feel shunned by their friends who are still married. The general thinking is that the ones who are still married are looking at the divorced friends like they are carrying some sort of disease, like divorce is contagious, so you'd better stay away from the ones who caught it. Or maybe it's just that nobody likes a reminder that what happened to someone else could happen to them, too, especially when it's a couple whose friends mostly have only known them during happy times, like parties or shared vacations.

The narrator is still dealing with this shock in the first sentence of the story: "Our friends, our very good friends, are getting a divorce." On one level, this repetition of "our very good friends" may sound like simple emphasis, and it is: the two couples shared a long friendship together with a lot of happy memories. On another level, though, this sentence is protesting too much. The narrator is no longer certain of her friendship with these two, a fact that is leaving her unsure of a number of other things. She is trying to reassure herself--these guys are our very good friends, right? Because she isn't really that sure: "There are moments when we feel as if we don't know them anymore." Her concern is that if the friends can get divorced, maybe they were never really friends, and if that's true, then what else might not be true? Maybe our own marriage isn't really that solid.

These "talking yourself into something" passages are all over the book. When dissecting Julia's happiness, which the narrator and her husband had always taken for granted, they equivocate a bit too much on why she should have been happy: "True, they had landed in a city that was a bit off the beaten path, it was hard to get direct flights, the school options weren't terrific, he had persuaded her, for (their daughter's) sake, to adopt a small hypoallergenic dog that she hadn't wanted, her father was showing signs of dementia--but still, on balance, in fact by all imaginable measures, her life was good." (One of the funny, easy-to-miss details in this story is that Julia will later use the dog she didn't like as an excuse to stay home by herself instead of go on a vacation with Sunny.)

On a sentence, level, much of the language of the book registers a shock the narrator is trying to process. What makes it so hard for her is not just all the things that make it tough for every couple to watch friends getting a divorce, it's that so much of her own internal conception of her own marriage comes from Julia. The narrator and her husband were already married when Julia and Sunny started dating. They got to know Julia first, as she came over to their apartment to ask for advice on dating early in her relationship with Sunny. (Sunny is a man. I was confused in my first read-through for a while, because it wasn't "Sonny," and I thought they were a lesbian couple until the text clearly spelled him out as a man.) Julia saw the narrator and her husband in a particular way: wise in the ways of love and cute together. Seeing themselves the way Julia saw them changed their own self-image: "She made us feel romantic." Or: "We were new to this, and sometimes just the sight of our clothes hanging companionably in the closet, or our large and small shoes jumbled in a heap by the door, would send us into a sort of diabetic swoon. With Julia around, we wanted more than anything to while the day away discussing Sunny, and never to have to send ourselves to the library, or to class."

Julia looked at the narrator and her husband and saw them as in love, and this helped confirm for them that they really were in love. Without Julia and Sunny as a couple, though, this undoes all of that foundation the couple had built on for years. This is why the narrator is so in shock and half in denial throughout much of the narrative.

What finally enables the narrator to get over the loss to her self-image or her marriage is another shock. The narrator and her husband kept hoping for Sunny and Julia with a "stubborn hope," but when the narrator meets Sunny unexpectedly at an airport, she realizes that the relationship between her family and Julia's may not have been to him what it was to her. I won't give it away, but it's a more profound shock, perhaps, than the divorce itself, partly because the narrator's couple was, if anything, sort of on Sunny's side in the divorce.

This second shock ends up being a good thing, though, and it shows not only in the resolution, but in the very language of the last page. The narrator is able to finally accept that although the divorce does not make sense to her, it is reality, and she should accept her own reality, rather than continuing to rely on the self-image she has built out of her own imagination of what was. Or does it? With the story's last sentence, there is still just a hint of the redundant equivocation, suggesting she is still the same person with the same tendencies, but now slightly more under control. It's a more subdued equivocation. Her focus on the details of what is actually in front of her is what frees her from her enslavement to her own memory: "The three of us lean into each other, and it's not exactly a group hug but more like the kind of huddling that animals do in the cold, our flanks rising and falling with our breaths. We stand there sleepily for a minute or two, and once in a while, I'll think I smell something faint and intoxicating...Then, as easily as we came together, we break apart and go about our business, knowing that soon enough we'll be bumping up against the same bodies, whether on the landing or in the kitchen or somewhere else. Just knowing that, it seems to me, is plenty as it is."