Cathedral

Edna drops a healthy relationship and everything in her life when her ex-husband Wes tells her that he is sober and asks her to live with him at a rented house near the ocean. Despite their clearly tumultuous past due to Wes’s alcoholism, Edna gives him yet another chance. Edna is cynical at first, but allows herself to be optimistic, even wearing her wedding rings again, only to have her hopes dashed when they must move out of the house. Wes ends the relationship because he does not believe that he will be able to remain sober if they live elsewhere. Wes’s decision to part ways demonstrates that the two lived under very different expectations about what their reunion meant. Edna sacrifices everything because she believes that they are reestablishing a future together. But Wes saw the relationship as temporary, a beautiful, fleeting affair that would eventually come to an end. 

Sandy is the type of person who takes action. Therefore, she cannot understand why her husband becomes passive and frozen in place after losing his job. Rather than accept that her husband is depressed and try to help him overcome his inability to move, Sandy develops a fear that he will become frozen forever. She keeps her frustrations to herself until she comes home to find that the refrigerator is broken. Sandy’s impatience with her husband demonstrates the pressures and stresses of the working class, and how the ability and opportunity to perform labor for capital becomes essential to being a useful and productive member of a household.

While Myers does not appreciate the company of others, he also experiences profound loneliness. He travels through Europe alone, finding it extremely frustrating and isolating to be unable to communicate with those who speak foreign languages. Although the train takes him toward his son, Myers longs to return to his home and solitude. Myers is conflicted about his desire to relate to other people. When his son writes him a letter after eight years and extends an olive branch, Myers is careful with his response, hopeful that his son genuinely wants to reconnect. But at the last moment, Myers decides that he does not like his own son or care about repairing their relationship. He sheds his metaphorical baggage by choosing not to show up and his literal baggage when his compartment is uncoupled from the train. Only then, when Myers is completely alone among strangers with no obligations, is he able to relax and sleep. 

Ann is a worried and then grieving mother who feels alone in her grief until she connects with a former adversary. At the beginning of the story, Ann expects the baker to connect with her as she imagines that being a parent is a universal human experience. But after her son’s accident, she feels that no one else understands and is surprised and grateful even to realize that her husband is in the same pain with her. When Ann meets Franklin’s family in the waiting room, she is drawn to them because they are in the same type of limbo, waiting to see if their child will live or die. Franklin’s mother begs her for an update on her son, echoing the pleading and demands that Ann makes toward the doctors and nurses since her son entered the hospital. When Ann calls her family members to inform them of Scotty’s death, each of them weeps with her for a moment. Upon confronting the baker, Ann discovers that even a stranger with no children can connect and comfort her. Human connection does not require common experiences, just compassion.

An extremely isolated man, the baker and his world are largely contained in his livelihood, the bakery. He works alone for 16 hours a day, spending his entire life to keep the bakery above water. When he first takes Ann’s cake order, he is disinterested and cold, unable to connect to someone whose life occurs in a home surrounded by people who care about her. Certainly, his harassing calls are particularly atrocious because of Scotty’s accident, but even if Ann was simply been a forgetful person who neglected to pick up the cake, this response is excessive. The baker shows that such isolation can make a person solipsistic. Forgetting a cake is a small matter in the context of the larger world, but to the baker, it’s a complete disregard for his silent desperation to make ends meet. When confronted with the much larger tragedy of the death of a child, the baker suddenly gains perspective on his disconnection from the world. He gives Ann and her husband free food, now less concerned with money than with human connection. 

The narrator in “Vitamins” is beaten down by the monotonous mediocrity of his life and disassociated with everyone and everything around him. He talks about his wife, Patti, as if she is a roommate, unsympathetic and distant from her crisis at work. Like the rest of the characters, he drinks excessively. He even drinks before work, not caring if anyone notices but also continuing undetected because no one seems to see him either. He approaches the brief affair with Donna with the same disconnect and is once again never caught or held accountable. He frequents Off-Broadway and seems to be a familiar fixture, but he refers to all of the people there by a racial slur, demonstrating that he does not see them as people either. In the encounter with Nelson, the narrator sees another version of dehumanization and disconnect as Nelson carries the disembodied ear of a dead man and propositions Donna for money. At the end of the story, as the narrator meets Patti’s breakdown with annoyance, he knocks things over in the bathroom and discovers that he does not care what falls apart in his life.

Lloyd is in denial about his drinking problem and the way it affected his marriage. He tries to convince himself and his wife that his alcoholism isn’t serious, and that switching to champagne is an improvement. But he demonstrates the slippery slope toward the bottom. On his slow descent into destruction, he notes that at some point, champagne and doughnuts became a suitable breakfast. He convinces himself that this is unremarkable. When Inez visits, he sees her look at him through sober eyes. Lloyd’s life falls so far that his plugged ear feels like the last straw. He wishes for death if he can’t find relief. After Inez leaves, Lloyd slips further, rationalizing drinking from the bottle and passing out on the couch. Inez and Mrs. Matthews know that Lloyd is on a path toward an untimely death, but for the moment, Lloyd isn’t convinced that he needs to stop drinking. 

The narrator is in a treatment facility to get sober for the second time. On one hand, he sees himself—and allows J.P. to see him—as a veteran of the process. But on the other hand, he is embarrassed to go through it a second time. He doesn’t mention his tremors to J.P. or the fact that Tiny’s seizure has made him acutely afraid of having one himself. The narrator is stuck, unsure how to repair his relationship with his wife or whether he wants to repair the relationship with his girlfriend. He is at a crossroads, and his wife is on the path to sobriety while his alcoholic girlfriend is on the opposite path. But there’s also no reason to believe that either woman will accept him again. Therefore, the narrator is isolated from everyone in his real life and forges a new connection with J.P. He shows that connection is necessary to overcome addiction, but that non-addicts can’t always handle serving as that support.

Miss Dent is the only character in the story with a name, but she is just as mysterious and incomplete as the others. The only real information provided is that she just threatened a man with a gun for treating her badly in some way, and that her threat was credible enough threat that it terrified the man. She is acutely aware of the gun’s presence in her purse, and although she remains mostly silent, when the older woman demands that she speak, her first instinct is to tell the couple about the gun. The essential details that are missing from her story are the ones that would define her as a character. Did she threaten the man for ending a relationship? Rejecting her love? Or did he commit some act of violence against her, perhaps even raping or stealing from her? Whether or not her actions are justifiable or even self-defense, or whether she simply became angry and lost control, are necessary but absent.

Carlyle defines his entire adult life by his relationship with his wife, which began when they were only 19. Although his primary challenge is to redefine himself when she suddenly leaves him, he also must learn to live with the fact that the connection between them remains, even as the nature of their relationship changes. Mrs. Webster helps Carlyle by relieving him of the pressure of keeping his children safe so that he can explore himself. He suddenly feels freer as a teacher, in his relationship with Carol, and in his ability to love and care for his children. But in the end, Mrs. Webster has to leave as well because Carlyle must learn to become an independent person, regardless of the relationships that come in and out of his life.

Marge is the narrator of the story, but although she gives the details of Holits and Betty’s marriage from her perspective, she is very vague about her own struggles and frustrations. Marge tries to connect with Betty, offering her a free manicure while she dyes her hair, but although Betty opens up in the salon chair, she becomes distant immediately after. When Marge starts to tell Betty about her own troubles in her marriage, her husband interrupts. Lonely and trapped, Marge uses hairstyling as an outlet to deal with the mundanity of running an apartment building. Her husband works hard but doesn’t notice or listen to her. When Marge and her husband attend the party and see Connie’s fiancé give away a free divorce, their discomfort while others participate gleefully betrays a deep-seated insecurity in their marriage. Marge stays largely silent about her dreams and disappointments, but the brief moment when she imagines her husband as a farmer shows that she wonders if her life could have been different or more exciting.

When Betty married Holits, she signed on for a different life than the one she now lives. Holits was a farmer with two sons whose mother had abandoned them. Betty willingly becomes their mother and loves them like a birthparent. But Holits is stubborn and reckless. He buys a racehorse and won’t stop betting until he loses everything they have. Once the family is homeless, Betty is already too invested in the family to leave. She believes she is too old to dream and resigns herself to a life as the sole provider for the family, working as a waitress—a job that she says she has no talent for. While Betty appears to be friends with the other two couples, on the night Holits injures himself, she is clearly an outsider, both sober and wearing her work uniform at the pool. 

At the beginning of the story, the narrator is bitter, jealous, insecure in his life and his marriage, and disdainful of anyone else’s happiness or profound experiences. Therefore, he disparages his wife’s poetry, dismisses her past suicide attempt, and grows jealous of her intense feelings about allowing Robert to feel her face. He also mocks Robert’s blissful but tragic marriage. The narrator has a deep-seated angst that manifests at night when he sits awake and smokes marijuana, unable to satisfy his ennui or conquer his insomnia. Although Robert and the narrator’s wife share nothing but a deep friendship, the narrator envies their easy connection. He doesn’t understand how someone can be blind and happy while the narrator’s life is so unfulfilling. But at the end of the story, the narrator has the first profound experience of his life when he allows Robert to feel his hands while he draws the cathedral. With his eyes closed, the world around the narrator disappears as he transcends the trappings of his life. And although Robert tells him to open his eyes again, the narrator lingers in this state of disorientation.