Something is created of value and substance, or, better, something is revealed that no one knew was there before-and often by hobbyists, like Daniel’s father. This may have led me to Daniel’s viewing habit, though once I understood what he was watching it made perfect sense-things happen on home-improvement shows. My niece worked for HGTV, and my sister renovates old houses for a living, so talk of “balloon framing” and “hand-hewed beams” is like talk of the weather in my family. What’s the appeal, do you think, for Daniel, or for any viewer? “She walks in, she walks out, she comes back, he looks up,” might have been a better title!ĭaniel has taken to watching home-improvement shows. And maybe this is because nothing happens and less is said. Mary Jane and Daniel may have long conversations outside of the frame of this moment, but it became pretty clear to me, pretty quickly, that the truth of the story was in the details of their inner lives through the eve of a sunset-maybe a half hour? an hour?-when nothing actually happens, and less is said.

Each seemed to know when it was time to take over the narrative, although I can’t say enough about the usefulness of a space break. Thinking about it now, I’d say the phrase “yammering, or hammering” in the first sentence was the clue, since it seems to contain the DNA of those vying perspectives: I heard the voice of both Mary Jane ( yammering) and Daniel ( hammering) in this correcting, redefining description of how it is for the two of them, which I suppose then naturally led to their intersecting, interrupting versions of how it was-familiar to the long-partnered. I try to resist knowing the structure of a story until I actually have a first draft, so, yes, the perspective, as it loops from the narrator to Mary Jane to Daniel and then around again, came about in a fairly organic way. Did you sketch out the structure of the story ahead of time, or did the transition from one perspective to another emerge as you were writing? The story is told in the third person, but the perspective often shifts between the wife, Mary Jane, and the husband, Daniel. (The only other time a story has started this way for me is with “ Playdate.”) I guess I thought that there might be a lot to excavate in “Marriage Quarantine”-with both of the words, for obvious reasons, potent. I thought of the title first-just the words, side by side, which felt like they might have some humorous possibilities.

All night long mary jane