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Mary is constructed through distance—even her death occurs “offscreen”—creating both her pathos and the story’s ethical friction. Because the narration follows Ray’s perspective, Mary’s characterization is beholden to his framing. She is near and yet inaccessible, a presence that resists interior access. For instance, the opening exposition regarding her marriage to Roy unfolds through the lens of his grievance; they relitigate “the same argument” over and over again (53). Similarly, Ray’s perspective mediates the discussion of the couple’s infertility, which becomes a medical verdict delivered without her feeling attached to it. That it is “her problem” suggests both Ray’s emotional detachment (it is not “their problem”) and his faintly accusatory stance on the issue. Ray’s initial response to her death solidifies the impression of distance: When Ray kneels beside her, he insists that she is “healthy as a horse” (58), a line that is pointedly untrue and suggests that Ray has no idea about his wife’s true state of health. Mary thus exists as the object of Ray’s observation, rebuke, and logistical negotiation, not as a voiced subject whose private troubles might undo his version of events. 

Mary’s “vices,” as Ray catalogs them, mirror his, and this symmetry becomes their battleground as they avoid addressing their anxieties—about each other, about their lives, etc.—directly. She buys Little Debbies and hides a secret stash that Ray exposes with relish because it proves his point about her weight and about hypocrisy. She lashes back with the accusation that he was “snooping,” an accusation of violation that also reveals the shame of being found out. However, the exchange has as much to do with Ray’s shame as hers: He is ashamed of smoking cheap cigarettes and weaponizes this against Mary. Their habits suggest several levels of emotional displacement: Both seek to manage fear and love through consumption, and both have habits that they can police in the other and excuse in themselves. The dog, Biznezz, sits at the center of this economy of substitutes. From Ray’s perspective, the dog is Mary’s tacit compromise on their childlessness. He hates that she calls the dog her “baby,” viewing this as a subtle dig at their marriage. 

Mary’s absence is multiplied by the loss of the creature through which she expressed unembarrassed love. Ray’s immediate recognition that he can now “smoke right there at her dining-room table” exposes how Mary functioned as the only effective constraint on his self-destruction (62). In that sense, Mary’s character is defined not by psychological exposition but by the space she has left. Her wants are simple within the story’s terms—a birthday ball that is the right color and a house that can be sold—yet her disappearance collapses the fragile scaffolding that Ray both resented and relied on.

Like Mary, Mr. Ghosh is rendered entirely through Ray’s eyes, and that filter makes him a compact study in racism, projection, and small-town belonging. The first characterization that Ray receives is visual: Mr. Ghosh is “a dark-skinned man in khaki pants and a white shirt” (57). Though he is wearing a name tag, Mr. Ghosh’s skin color is the first thing Ray notices. The tag confers authority inside the store, but his race marks him as slightly apart in Ray’s eyes. Similarly, when Mr. Ghosh admits that he administered artificial respiration, Ray imagines his mouth on Mary’s and recoils at the image of a “dark-skinned man” in intimate contact with his wife (57). These passages tacitly expose Ray’s unconscious racism, which he will later try to launder when he wonders if Mr. Ghosh is sleeping with the clerk and insists that his disapproval would not be “because of Mr. Ghosh’s brown skin” (60-61), only because of the age gap—an insistence that implies the opposite. The store becomes a microcosm of small-town America, in which a man of color holds local authority and extends real care yet is seen through lenses that foreground his skin and his “foreign” name.

As events worsen, Mr. Ghosh is the closest thing the scene has to an authority, and the story aligns his limits with a broader powerlessness rather than personal failure. He has the keys, the phone, and the uniform of responsibility. He calls 911, tries CPR, and then manages the spectacle by policing the edges of the crowd. He grabs a souvenir T-shirt “to cover her face” and then chases teenagers from the window as they voyeuristically stare at Mary’s prone body (58). When the EMTs arrive, Mr. Ghosh’s role shrinks to the pragmatic courtesies of hospitality. The result is a portrait of a local manager whose competence is bound by the retail space he oversees. His gestures of humanity are filtered through the store’s commercial logic, which is all the town has available as a social language. He hands Ray a purple ball “on the house” and then sodas “also on the house” (61), gifted items that carry a weight of sympathy that they were never designed to bear and thus come across as both sincere and inadequate. 

Later, when Ray returns for cigarettes, Mr. Ghosh’s “generosity doesn’t stretch that far” (63). In the story’s portrayal of Poverty and Small-Town Discontent, even compassion has to be reconciled with margin and policy, especially once the emotional turmoil of the moment has passed and order has seemingly been restored. The story uses Mr. Ghosh to show how, in a consumer landscape, solace is offered in the units of commercial exchange.