Essay One for Comp Class

This is my first essay written for my Composition class.  We were asked to take any short story from our text book and wind our own personal narrative in with relevant quotes from the authors story, as well as provide a summary.  This seemed impossible when I started but once I got going it turned out to be pretty great.  I am proud of this piece of writing as it is very personal and took some guts to get it out and onto paper.  I am providing a link to the short story if you want to read it first. I highly recommend it, it is funny and wonderfully sarcastic.

 "Happy Endings" by Margret Atwood

I Can and Will, Do Anything I Want

            Margret Atwood’s “Happy Endings” gives us a satirical glimpse into the cliché Atwood thinks is the middle class life most of us muddle through on a daily basis.  She starts with two characters appropriately named John and Mary, I believe Atwood uses these generic names to get her point across that society today continues to be quite stereotypical, sexist and unfair.  She says “if you want a happy ending try A” (394).  A describes the cliché of modern middle class life, or what it appears to be on the surface.  “John and Mary fall in love” they get great jobs, buy a house, have kids that turn out great, they have a good sex life, great friends and vacations. Eventually they retire and get hobbies, and then they die, “This is the end of the story” (394).  Atwood is giving us her interpretation of romantic fiction, which also, Atwood believes, happens to be the dream of a good portion of the modern middle class.

For a long time I thought this was my dream as well.  Everyday I thought about having a husband and a house and possibly a kid or two.  I looked on with envy as all of my friends and siblings got married and started their lives.  What about me?  I thought, why can’t I find a great guy?  Why can’t I have that kind of relationship?  What is wrong with me?  Then when I really started looking through the cracks in the wonderful shell, I realized that these are not storybook romances, these are two real people struggling to keep it together. The more I look in the cracks in some of these relationships, the better a spinster’s life seems to me.

            Several years ago I met a guy that I thought was perfect.  We spent two and half happy years together and I thought one day we would get married.  While I was reading “Happy Endings” I realized how close our relationship mirrored B.  I met this guy and we fell in love.  I always felt like I loved him more but that didn’t matter, I had found Mr. Right.  He wasn’t perfect but he seemed to be a great guy and who is perfect really?  I did many things to try and make him love me.  I cooked great meals; didn’t at all mind doing his laundry and put up with his football addiction. Occasionally we went out to dinner I made him look good in public and in return he made me feel good about myself.  Sometimes I would bring up marriage but he would always change the subject or tell me that his business wasn’t as great as he wanted it to be; all the same he kept me hoping. 

As was with Mary, I too thought, he’ll come to depend on me and we will get married (394). I spent countless hours trying to make myself available for this man. I tried really hard to make him comfortable at my place. He even moved in for awhile but then after a year or so of this he told me he didn’t want to marry and didn’t want kids.  We split up and had an on again off again, mostly sexual, relationship for another two years. 

Eventually I found out that he had been seeing someone else throughout our entire relationship.  My friends said he was “a rat, a pig, a dog, he isn’t good enough for her,” trying to make me feel better about myself, which is after all, what friends are supposed to do.  I felt like such a doormat.  Why didn’t I see what was going on?  I kept thinking that I could change him.  Atwood says it perfectly “Inside John, she thinks, is another John…This other John will emerge like a butterfly from a cocoon, a Jack from a box, a pit from a prune, if the first John is only squeezed enough” (394). How did I get to this place?  I had always considered myself an independent, smart girl.  I can only imagine that I got here with my incessant drive to live the middle class American dream.  I was willing to put up with more and more crap to get what I wanted.  I had lost sight of myself completely.  Some of my friends had noticed early on that I was doing things I had never done before.  Like eating poorly and spending more time alone, but I blew them off, I was happy dammit!  How dare they try and ruin my happiness!  They had their happy little lives, they had their husband and house and baby on the way.  I finally had a great guy that thought I was pretty. I just knew he would come around and marry me someday, how foolish I was, how disillusioned I had become, and all for this dream of a life that really is just a cliché. 

Atwood has Mary kill herself in the end and that is where my story differs from hers.  I didn’t kill myself far from it, I threw that jerk out of my house followed by his stuff and told him to leave, never come back and don’t even think about calling me.  Of course he has called however, all calls save one that I used to make him feel like a small piece of nothing, have been ignored. 

Atwood then moves on to C.  This is the married man and younger women scenario.  I have never done this but have met people who have and it always seemed like a bad idea to me.  The end of C rings truest for me, “Madge after a suitable period of mourning, marries an understanding man called Fred and everything continues as in A”(395) I am unsure as to how many women I have met that have a marriage, are unhappy, get divorced and then are dating and have an engagement ring on their finger six months later and divorce papers in their hand two years later.  I wonder why they don’t figure out that they might be making bad choices.  Why don’t they figure out that they don’t need a man to feel good about themselves?  Of course that wasn’t so easy for me either.

D, E and F all explain different scenarios and F even gives us an intriguing relationship between “John a revolutionary and Mary a counterespionage agent” (396) in fact, no matter what you try and insert into the story the endings are all the same, you still end up with A. Atwood mentions that “though in between you may get a lustful brawling saga of passionate involvement” she also explains that “the endings are all the same however you slice it”. She warns that we shouldn’t “be deluded by any other endings, they’re all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent … or just motivated by excessive optimism if not downright sentimentality.” (396).  I learned after the break up with the long term man that my happiness is based solely on what I think it is, not on some contrived notion of the masses.  Like Atwood mentions, “True connoisseurs … are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with” (396).  I think she is telling us what I learned after my bad relationship that, we need to savor our time on this earth or the “stretch in between” if you will (396).  I take time daily to look at the positive things in my life.  I have a house, a car, matching silverware, my dog pack.  I am grateful for the little things that make me happy, the smell outside after it rains, the way my dogs feet smell when they are clean, a romp at the dog park, the way my cats fur feels on my bare feet, the softness of flannel sheets, a good cup of coffee or a great book before bed.  We shouldn’t be so worried about what others think or see as the perfect life.  Your perfect life is the one you live for yourself not someone else.  We shouldn’t just revel in the beginnings since “they are always more fun” or in fact go back to them when times get rough or things aren’t going our way (396).  I think Atwood is correct in saying that the true connoisseurs of life are the ones that relish the time we have in the middle when we are young and can do anything.