Birdyline Book Blog

Like many other stories in The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, Stuart Dybek’s “We Didn’t” is written candidly about a taboo sexual topic. The short story follows a couple who start off passionate with one another but begin to experience issues after witnessing a dead pregnant woman be pulled out of the water on a beach where they were actively hooking up. After this incident, the tragic moment will not leave the young woman’s mind and her partner, our narrator, becomes frustrated that she won’t let it go. The relationship is permanently affected, and this leads them to separate but not before the man begins to ruminate on how easy and happy their relationship was before- notably with all his happy memories being those of a sexual nature.

The first thing that struck me in this story is not only the way that this particular woman vs. this particular man reacted to witnessing the body, but rather the way men and women would react on a wider scale and how these reactions could be influenced by the realities of their gender. Right towards the beginning, before the body, the woman notes that she is afraid to become pregnant. Later when discussing the fact that the dead body was pregnant, she suggests with near certainty that the woman killed herself. The implication here is that she would have done it because of the baby. The only other possibility either character dwells on is the one in which the dead woman’s lover killed her. Either way, only the narrator’s partner cares while he is apathetic, even frustrated, only concerned with when normalcy will be restored.

The narrator’s perception of normalcy is far from innocent. He does not wish simply for his partner’s peace of mind. It all revolves around sex for him. He tells us about how they begin to drift apart. When he describes one particular night on which he walked her home into the rain, we are told that he thinks for a moment she is going to invite him in but instead simply asks if he would like an umbrella. He is disappointed of course and begins to think about the drift between them. Yet, he makes it all about sex by calling this “the blue ball express.” The very next paragraph he continues by listing memories, all of which are sexual in nature. “…myself on the night when I unbuttoned your blouse and kissed your breasts, myself on the night when I lifted your skirt above your thighs and dropped to my knees…” The narrator does not have even a scrap of empathy or recognition for the scope of the complicated emotions his girlfriend has expressed.

For her, the dead woman was not just the body that blocked the narrator and her from hooking up. She sees herself in the woman because she has recognized, even before she knows of the body, the potential to become pregnant. That is something she holds in common with the dead woman and even fears while the narrator has no comprehension because he never could become pregnant and as a result, he struggles to personify the corpse, even joking about a threesome while his girlfriend is confiding in him. She confesses how she dreams about her, only to be mocked.

The narrator never respected his partner’s emotions or self. In one flashback he describes a golden cross she wears around her neck and notes “I had always tried to regard [the cross] as merely a fashion statement.” It was important to him to disregard any way in which the cross symbol could be interpreted to mean he could not be sexual with her. If her religious beliefs had meant she chose not to be intimate with him, he may have respected that physically, but not mentally, as he admits multiple times pushing her consent to a limit. She warns him of the police lights on the beach and asks him to stop and he pretends not to hear just for a brief moment. That brief moment illuminates his disrespect for her that he himself may not be cognizant of.

Dybek’s “We Didn’t” is incredibly powerful. It is presented by an unreliable narrator who fails to grasp a concept that the audience can grasp right away. The narrator will move on to other sexual encounters and women and what not, and so may the girlfriend. She will never be able to move on, however, from a reality which she faces that her male partners do not. A reality in which becoming pregnant is a danger she is in but not them. A reality in which suicide or being murdered is within the realm of possibility. The reader can only hope that she will find a man who will love her for more than her body and will support her physical and emotional needs.