A Simple Exchange of Niceties
The narrator is a teenage girl whose view of herself and others definitely is critically bad. She starts telling the story about herself, without mentioning anything good at all. She kind of demeans herself by using the words “trashy whore,” which she was called by the father of her child. She mentions these words a couple of times in the story, and it seems like she doesn’t see herself as anything, like when she says: ”I’m bad news,” or “I’ve never done anything with my life. I’m not going to amount to anything, it’s not like I’m going to find a decent bloke and get married.” However about other people she isn’t positive neither. She has many prejudices, like of the woman with the bottle of water. She calls the old lady’s action of joining her on the bench, without asking: “Do you mind?” or “May I?” for bad manners. She simply doesn’t like other people, which she shows by telling the woman that her mother doesn’t love her, what she surely does, and by saying that being alone isn’t the worst thing at all.
The bench is very precious to the girl, and it means a lot to her. She considers it her property, and has always thought of the bench as her own bench. The reason why she chose exactly that bench, and not one of the other hundreds in the park is, that it’s the one just to the left of the big duck pond. Because it’s comfortable and doesn’t have stats that protrudes into your back. Simply because it’s the best bench in the park, and she have spend much time of her life on that bench.
The Main theme of the story is young pregnancy, and unrequited love. The narrator is a young girl, actually a teenager who has become pregnant without intending to be – “I didn’t ask to be pregnant”, she says. She was expecting a baby, with a man who pretended to love her without doing it, and with her being pregnant, he left. She expresses that she loved him, and thought that he showed every sign of love to her, but even though he suddenly began treating her badly, calling her trashy whore and left her.
The narrator’s language in the story is a slang/street language. She uses many swear words like when she thinks: ”hell she reads fast.” She uses the word “hell” a couple of times in the story. Already in at the fourth line the narrator starts using the word “fuck”, when she thinks to herself: “I know you’re not supposed to smoke when you’re pregnant, but fuck it, I didn’t ask to be. And: “I laughed out loud – it was a fucking cigarette...” Later she tells about her having sex with this guy Damien, but instead of using fine words, she expresses herself this way: “He fucked me from every direction and on every surface in my apartment. I still have bruises in places I can’t see without contorting myself into a yogic position from which I couldn’t disentangle myself without professional help,” in which she just say things the way they are, without being considerate to the reader by using any kind of a fine language.
The narrator just writes the story with the language she normally would use to tell the story, - with her own everyday language, which is very slangy.