Writing the Future: Conflicting Anticipations in “no one’s a Mystery”

Writing the Future: Conflicting Anticipations in “No One’s a Mystery”

Elizabeth Tallent’s one-scene short story, entitled “No One’s a Mystery,” takes place in a pick-up truck on a two-lane highway in rural Cheyenne, Wyoming. It shows people moving down the American highway of life; no one has time to stop and connect with anyone else. Tallent wants people to wake up or we will live in the same way, just passing by each other. The story features a love triangle, narrated by an eighteen year old girl, who is involved with an older, married man. She thinks her relationship is destined for marital bliss. This narrator, trapped in a meaningless affair and blind to the situation, definitely does not get life. We have to read the story against her youthful and dreamy expectations of the future. At the same time, while her jaded partner sees that she is going nowhere, we have to reject his very accurate and realistic view of what the future holds for them. Seeing the truth, as he does, is not enough. Life should be more than the desperation that it will ever be for either of these two. Tallent’s story of two lost souls makes us realize how we must accept responsibility for each other.

Three actions occur in the story. First, the narrator is attempting to pry open her birthday gift from a married man, named Jack. It’s a “five–year diary” and she cannot get it open. This symbolic inability to write her future discloses how little control this naïve girl has over her future. Her future is a blank, trapped in the journal of blank pages, just as she is a prisoner trapped in the pick-up truck. This imprisonment is signaled by the second action, the narrator being pushed down onto the “dirty floor,” out of sight, when Jack’s wife is seen coming toward them in the opposite lane. Jack can identify his wife in the distance since she drives during the day with the headlights on, because “‘she thinks it’s safer,’” according to her disgruntled husband who dislikes this habit (1). Tallent builds irony into the story through the metaphor of vision. A woman who has a husband cheating on her clearly cannot see where she is going in life. It takes more than headlights and staying to the speed limit. On the road of life, these three characters are hopelessly blind and lost. These people are aimless and shiftless. They live in a cowboy world of country music, drawing their philosophies from the happiness and sadness in country and western music. During the five minutes of the story, a popular song is on the sound system, being sung by the daughter of Johnny Cash. Rosanne Cash sings, “‘Nobody’s into me, no one’s a mystery’” (1). In this world of marital infidelities and drinking all afternoon to get high, people are pretty shallow. There is not much character or substance in which to get “into.” Everyone is fairly predictable and self–centered, without much depth or “mystery.”

The third action in the story is the dispute between the naïve narrator and the jaded driver. She tells him how she thinks that she is going to write their future together, that he will get divorced so that they can marry, and that, ultimately, they will bring a baby boy and a girl into this world, forming a perfect nuclear family that lives in an elegant world of gourmet meals. She sees “trout a la Navarra” on the table awaiting his arrival from work (2). How is this guy who lives on cigarettes, beer (with “pop tops on the floor” of the truck), and tequilla, a guy who has been wearing the same old boots every day during the two years of this sordid affair, a guy who presently expects to get “meat loaf” tonight from his current wife, how is this guy going to graduate to gourmet dining? The reader is disinclined to believe that Jack is going to change and create a perfect world of domestic bliss for his eighteen year old mistress, who is already giving him everything that he wants. He, of course, laughs at her version of their future. He knows that she does not understand how tough life can be. He even calls her a “little kid.” His view is that in a year she will ponder in her diary about why she ever got involved in her first affair, other than to learn “something about sex” (2). In two years, according to his version, she will not even remember his name. He will probably still be married and involved with another young, naïve, unsuspecting girl who believes in the dreams and fulfillment promised in country and western songs.

In this story we have a girl who is totally dependent on the man, and he is using her for his own escape from a marriage to which he

does not want to commit. These people are on the road, presumably going somewhere, but in terms of life, they are going nowhere. The narrator’s

purpose in life is to wait for Jack to turn into Prince Charming, set her up in a dream house, and let her take care of the kids and cooking. His purpose is to have a good time and to take what he can from life, giving back as little as possible. He is a taker. Her purpose, which is to settle down with him, blinds her from seeing his true nature. The narrator has a double passion: her external conflict involves about a battle with Jack over what her future will really be. These two are at odds with each other. Jack is the narrator’s antagonist. Because of her lack of maturity, she is divided against herself. Her internal conflict stems from her total lack of experience that blinds her to the way life is. Never having done anything to acquire an education — along with the self-esteem and self-empowerment that come from taking control of one’s own future and writing one’s life in educated terms, she is forced to depend on others and on dreams that are really fantasies.

The story highlights the difference between a dream and a fantasy. A dream is a choice that an individual writes for oneself. It