The Elusive Happy Ending

by Tricia Dower

My parents didn’t want me to read horror comics but I did. One that deeply affected me when I was ten was about a rubbish collector the children loved. He’d take them for rides on his horse drawn wagon. (Just such a man lived a few blocks away from our house; he did all the hay rides in town.)

The comic book parents didn’t like their kids hanging out with the rubbish man. Such lowly, dirty work. And the flies! He wasn’t good enough for their future doctors and nurses. So they got together and came up with a plan.

On Valentine’s Day they sent him cards signed with their kids’ names. You can imagine the sentiments: ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, your horse is disgusting and so are you.’ That sort of thing. For days after, no one saw the rubbish man. The children got increasingly fretful. They cried and cried from missing him. Finally someone broke into the man’s house and found him hanging from the rafters, the cruel valentines scattered on the floor below his swaying feet. (Okay, maybe his feet weren’t still swaying.) Here’s the kicker: his house was spotless with china teacups and little doilies under everything. The parents were sorry, of course, but it was too frigging late, wasn’t it? I was devastated by that story. I wanted the kids to form a mob and murder their parents.

At twelve or so I read a novel that was loitering on the family bookshelf. Only one scene remains in my memory: a man tells a woman who’s in love with him, “Go home and wash. You look like your armpits smell.” He says it in front of friends, no less. How is the woman supposed to recover from that? In the book the man never gets his comeuppance. I didn’t like that. Although at twelve I was over my need to see someone murdered, I wanted swift and satisfying justice nonetheless.

I became obsessed with Henry VIII’s hapless wives at age thirteen and read whatever I could find about them. I concluded they were doomed by ambition, something reserved for men. (A past life channeler once confirmed I’d been in Henry’s court but as a lady-in-waiting, not as one of the queens. How boringly risk averse of me.) Henry was too fatly powerful for effective revenge and I trace my early fatalism to the stories of his wives.

Why is that the stories I remember most from early years are about injustice? Perhaps I was preparing myself for my vision of adult life. I used to concoct imaginary scenes of humiliation and rejection, rehearsing my brave response to them. Not the usual humiliation and rejection that occurred every day at school. More dramatic and tragic stuff.

As a writer I can’t get away from what affected me as a young reader. Occasionally my characters triumph over fate but more often they simply accept and endure. A couple struggles to hang onto their marriage after the death of their baby. A son rejects his mother. An Army wife believes her husband volunteered for Vietnam to punish her for wanting a career. A young woman is kidnapped for marriage. Racial prejudice condemns a marriage. A woman is treated cavalierly at retirement.

It’s not that I don’t believe in happy endings. I just haven’t written any.