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| Not the best place for a bike ride. |
Another Carver story that left me speechless, "Tell The Women We're Going" deals with the relationship between two friends named Bill and Jerry. Bill and Jerry are inseparable growing up until college when Jerry drops out and gets married to a woman named Carol. Bill becomes a third wheel and whenever he goes to hang out with Jerry, he feels awkward because Jerry and Carol will start making out in front of him. Bill eventually gets married to a woman named Linda. The two couples then start hanging out regularly.
Carver reveals that Jerry and Carol have had two kids and Carol is pregnant with a third. Life has sped up quickly for Jerry who has found himself tied down in his early twenties. Meanwhile Bill seems to have his shit together compared to Jerry. Bill marries later and finishes college. One afternoon Bill and Jerry are relaxing drinking beer when they decide to go for a drive. Each has about five beers playing pool. At this point I realized that both Bill and Jerry are unlikable characters. They're on their way back home when they spot two women on bicycles and Jerry tells Bill to turn around the car so they can talk to them. Bill starts up some small talk but the girls don't really seem interested in what Bill has to offer. They follow the girls who ditch their bikes and start walking on trail. Bill and Jerry follow. Bill doesn't seem interested in following but Jerry urges him to keep up.
During this part of the story, there's a sense that something bad is about to happen. That moment happens when Jerry uses a rock to kill both of the women. Bill says that he only wanted to have sex and would have been fine if that didn't happen but he's still an accessory to murder. The murder is a gut punch to the reader because nothing in the story suggests that Jerry is a murderer. Jerry's actions are irrational so one can assume that he's a psychopath. This story is appealing in its simplicity and bizarre turn of events. It sticks out more than Carver's other stories because of its violent ending.
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I think Jerry kills the girls in front of Bill as a way to bring them together for life. In a way, Jerry longs for Bill and this ending is a method of making his friend accessory to a secret they would have to share for life. Jerry is also subconsciously killing women, the thing that he believed had trapped him. The more I think about this ending, as it too left me more dazed and off-kilter than any of Carver's other stories, I find it fitting and not a random digression. They "banged" the same girls in college and tried to create a bond that was stronger between two men than one for a woman — an early kind of "bros before hoes," neo-masculinist kind of thing. But in the end, Jerry's conventional outlook on life led him to marry someone he didn't have a deep connection with. Secretly, his deepest connection was still with Bill. Killing the girls with the rock was Jerry's way of smashing out of his own self-imposed cage of joyless convention. It was his way of taking Bill's hand for life.
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