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Yes, but Fred has a bad heart. The rest of the story is about how kind and understanding they both are until Fred dies. Then Madge devotes herself to charity work until the end of A. If you like, it can be “Madge,” “cancer,” “guilty and confused,” and “bird watching.”
As “Happy Endings” begins, the narrator suggests that readers (or writers) looking for “happily ever after” should try story variation A. It is a bland story in which two people fall in love, succeed in marriage and family, have a pleasant life, and die. This is the story variation that Madge, cheated on by John and left a widow, and Fred, her sympathetic second husband, follow toward their “happy ending.” Variation D gives some details of their life, but variation E begins with an ominous “Yes, but” that redirects expectations. In this case, it’s a health condition that steers the story away from “happily ever after” to death. Any health issue will do, and Madge could be the one to die, the narrator points out. A reader or writer may substitute in any variables preferred, but the outcome is the same: “Eventually they die.” This may be why, as the narrator says elsewhere, “connoisseurs” of stories do not prefer beginnings or endings but instead the middles of stories, with their exploration of characters’ “How and Why.” It also suggests that the cultural expectation that people should seek, their “happily ever after,” may prioritize an unrealistic goal and cause people to underappreciate the “stretch in between” beginnings and endings.
You’ll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it. Don’t be deluded by any other endings, they’re all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality.
The only authentic ending is the one provided here:
John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.So much for endings.
These lines come from story variation F, or from the coda that follows it. In that story, the narrator suggests that Mary and John could have mysterious or glamorous careers, but nothing essential would change about their stories. In a clear example of the narrator addressing aspiring writers of fiction, the narrator calls out “happy endings” for what they are: “fake.” Perhaps the writers of “happily ever after” stories mean well, or perhaps these writers themselves are “deluded,” but only one ending plays out in any relationship, loving or abusive, fictional or real. The narrator seems to call, in this section, for a memento mori (“Remember you must die”) awareness to pervade fiction. Since the outcome is always the same, the narrator seems to suggest, writers and readers should concern themselves less with “happy ending”—which in terms of story are essentially and metaphorically dead ends—than with what characters encounter in life and how they react, the “How and Why” of a story. The motivations and interactions of characters, with their many variations, are the human element of a story’s structure and the primary reason readers consume story after story. A fairy-tale happily-ever-after ending, a lovers’ suicide, or a quiet deathbed at the end of eight decades of life—the end is the same, but the details of how characters reach that end are what draw readers to stories.
