The dinner was half ready and she had only twenty minutes to finish. The air in the kitchen was boiled, and the piquant smells from the pots and saucepan were trying to escape throughout the window. Margaret was running around the messy kitchen and trying to handle all things at once. Chopping carrots and stirring the sauce, adding milk and whisking the eggs. It is almost done. Removing the pan from the fire and washing the dishes, setting the table and taking off the apron. She quickly swallowed a pill aspirin, hesitated for a minute and swallows one more. A slight glance into the mirror – she looked tired, but still pretty. Margaret smiled and whispered to herself, “Pretty enough for a young widow.” Smoothing out the wrinkles on her black dress, she went upstairs.
“Jenny, the dinner is ready!” she said. “Don’t forget to put on your dress!”
Jenny went out of her room looking upset, “Mom, but I do not want to see them.”
“But you don’t want them to think that you do not love your father, sweetheart?”
“I don’t,” Jenny hesitated for a second, “but what is the point in pretending?”
She tried to remain calm, but her voice grew more assertive, “You know perfectly well what the point is. They are coming to share our grief. And we are going to act accordingly.”
Jenny frowned and went back to her room. It was not the first time they had this conversation. She understood how her daughter felt, but she acted this way for Jenny’s own sake. They were coming here to express their support, and of course they expected to see a wife and a daughter in grief. They had to see what this unexpected loss did to their little family. Margaret was sure that she was doing the right thing. She would do everything to protect her family from any type of gossip, so she had to stay calm and give them what they were coming for.
As she was going down the stairs, her glance met the old stripped sofa. She shuddered, looked aside and went straight to the kitchen. Her heart started beating faster, and she was trying to calm it down, because the guests were to come soon, and she couldn’t allow the emotions to overflow her. It is not the time to return to those memories of her filthy drunk husband’s heavy breathing over her poor little Jenny. If she had not come home earlier that night, she would probably never find out, she would never see the crooked shadows on the wall and the hairy back of her husband above her scared daughter. Her head started aching again. “I did not have a choice. It was the only right thing to do.”, she whispered, “We are a decent family. Everything will be different know. Just the last dinner and that’s it.” She felt that she has managed to relax a little, and smoothed out a few wrinkles on her dress.
The doorbell rang. Just the last dinner and that’s it.
The rationale
The short story’s protagonist Margaret struggles with having the last dinner with the people, who come to express their support for her family’s loss. However, the dinner leads to the crisis as both Jenny and her mother have something to hide. The protagonist faces three conflicts: the first is the awful deed of her husband; the second is her inner conflict between guilt and pleasure, and the last – the conflict with her daughter. The plot of the story develops around the dinner, and the story has an open ending. The main theme and the conflict are revealed gradually, as the crisis deepens from the moment, when she mentions with the smile that she is a widow, and is further evolving in the dialogue with her daughter, where it is shown that they do not treat the death of their husband and father, as it is expected from them. The climax and the major power struggle are realized through Margaret’s flashback of the day, when she found out that her husband abuses her daughter. However, it is only hinted to the reader that the wife contributed to the death of his husband, as it is not explicitly stated.
The story is similar to the stories by Foster Wallace, Blackwood and Le Guin, as all four stories touch the themes of guilt and morality, as in the story of Foster Wallace it is guilt of parents, who did not managed to protect their child, in Blackwood’s story it is a moral conflict of pregnant girl and in Le Guin’s story it is the moral dilemma of happiness that has a price. On the contrary, the ways the authors lead the stories to their resolutions differ, as the theme of my story opens gradually, the same way as Le Guin’s story, which gives slight hints up to the final paragraphs, and Foster Wallace story’s crisis starts from the very beginning.
