Response to "We Didn't" by Stuart Dybek

The concept of this story fascinated me.  I could picture this being in an episode of a TV drama because it's about a couple who are about to have sex and are then interrupted by police who are investigating the death of a young girl who was pregnant.  Though, the story isn't really about the dead girl who is found, it's about how it affects the couple, particularly the narrator.  He desires to have sex with his girlfriend and assumes that he is going to be satisfied, but ultimately, he isn't.  His girlfriend cannot stop thinking about the dead girl and it interrupts their night of pleasure entirely.

The dialogue between the narrator and his girlfriend is superb. It's so clear that the narrator really has no interest in this dead girl and is deadset on getting his girlfriend to believe that her death was an accident and they could not have done anything to help her.  She was, after all, there for a while, as one of the cops had remarked earlier. Still, his girlfriend refuses to believe that the girl's death was an accident and the two of them argue over whether or not they could have helped her in any way. The way that Dybek frames this conversation between them, by choosing distinct diction for both of the characters in order to distinguish their voices from one another and using zero dialogue tags, was, in my opinion, brilliant. It's so clear who is speaking that the dialogue tags are unnecessary, and the dialogue between the two of them felt like a scene in a play.  I could picture it so clearly in my head.

I loved the shift from the couple arguing about the dead woman to arguing about just about everything else. It was such a well-done shift that described the passage of time and the state of their relationship in just a few sentences. And then, a few paragraphs later, the narrator just says "there wasn't a particular night when we finally broke up, just as there wasn't a particular night when we began going together, but I do remember a night in fall when I guessed it was over." In just one sentence, the narrator summarizes the type of relationship he had with this girl. Granted, we already know more about their relationship prior to this, but if I had read this sentence on its own, I feel like I would've understood the context of their relationship already. It's also just the type of thing a guy would say after a break-up. 

The ending satisfied me. The narrator realizes that he and his girlfriend never did have sex and he finally accepts that he could not have her the way that he wanted to. To me, it feels like he achieved peace with that at the end of the story, and I think it ties everything together nicely.