"Neighbors" by Raymond Carver

This is my second dive into Carver's waters, following my reading of "Cathedral" in the fall.  I have a strange reaction to Carver, in that his minimalism speaks to my frugal heart but it still leaves me feeling cold.  There are few things that turn me off more than dense prose.  Carver shoots straight to the heart of the matter.

The challenge for me as a reader is that when I finish a Carver story, I'm always left thinking, and rarely left feeling.  A good Ann Hood story can leave me melted like hot butter, but Carver?  Reading his stories is sort of like when you would stick a pin under the top layer of finger flesh as a kid and marvel at how you felt no pain.  He's a master, few would deny that, but I don't connect with his characters.  

Neighbors tells the story of a couple, Bill and Arlene, who are asked (or who offers perhaps) to housesit for their neighbors, Harriet and Jim.  Bill and Arlene are compelled to make themselves a little too much at home in Harriet and Jim's apartment, and proceed to drink their booze, wear their skirts (Bill, not Arlene) and borrow their prescription pills.  Carver tells us that Bill and Arlene are disillusioned with their own lives, which pales in comparison to the lives of their friends.  I imagine they were also motivated to commit these neighborly sins because they knew they could get away with it.  These were, of course, the days before nanny cams hidden in teddy bears and ornamental vases.  It's been said that you are who you are when nobody is watching.  

I wonder if Bill and Arlene noticed that their neighbors' lives were quite similar to their own.  They took pills, drank decent booze, and hung their clothes in the closet just like the next guy.  I have to believe if given the chance to speak, we'd find some envy beneath Jim and Harriet's kicky facade.

For me, this story is about what happens when our rebellious subconscious is allowed a moment of release.  Our own lives can feel so constrained at times.  I bet when Bill put on that skirt, he felt like a million bucks.  We aren't privy to the details of Arlene's secret apartment capers, but we can imagine they are equally as bizarrely mundane.

I'm paying a lot of attention to endings these days, as my own confidence as a writer seems to fall apart in that last paragraph, and I thought this was a perfect, deceptively simple, quirky ending.  I won't dare spoil it for you.