Short cuts
1. Summary
« Tell the woman we’re going » is the ninth short story in short cuts. It tells the story of two very good old friends, Jerry and Bill. They do things together and share everything ( even the girls) all along their school years. Then Jerry gets married to a woman named Carol and Bill does the same with Linda. The two couples get on well, they regurarlly see each others at jerry’s house. Once, during a barbecue at jerry’s, the two men decide to go for a run. They first go to the Rec Center where they drink many beers. On the way back they see two girls riding bicycles. They try to come on to them. After chatting a few minutes, the girls leave. The two men wait for them a few meters further.
2. Analisis
2.1 Jerry’s character
Jerry is the first one who gets married, as he’s still very young. During Bill’s marriage, a while later, Bill already find that his friend looks much older than his age. Jerry settle down very fast with his three children, his nice job and his beautiful house.
During the Sunday when it happend, Bill thinks that his friend is getting odd. « Bill was thinking how Jerry was getting to be deep, the way he stared all the time and hardly did any talking at all » The narrator tells us that Jerry is staring at the clothesline or at his ’68 chevy hardtop as if he was kind of nostalgic and wistful about his life.
We may think that Jerry is unhappy when the two men talk « Anything wrong, man ? I mean, you know. » « He schrugged, you know, he said ». As Jerry asks Bill to go for a run, they first go to the Rec Center. There, Jerry says to Riley (on page 199): «What kind of place is this , Riley, that it don’t have any girls on a Sunday afternoon ?» Here we see that the purpose of this ride was to look for excitment, and eventually for some girls too. Jerry seems to be a bit bored of this orderly life.
When they see the girls, the two men have already drunk many beers and are probably a bit drunk. We can