Anthony, the protagonist of “Static,” is a man struggling to negotiate between what his family expects of him and what he wants out of life. While he longs for a supportive family and seems to like children, he feels trapped rather than excited by his wife, Marie’s, businesslike approach to marriage and conceiving a baby. He also has a fraught and unsupportive relationship with his mother, which readers see play out during the family Christmas party that takes place during the story. Anthony’s interactions with his family members, as well as his private thoughts, suggest that a family is only a source of joy and fulfillment when it’s rooted in unconditional love and genuine connection. Otherwise, marriage and family relationships can be intensely stifling and dissatisfying.
Anthony’s relationships with his mother and Marie are characterized by criticism and hostility rather than love and acceptance. Anthony’s mother makes numerous underhanded remarks to him during the party, subtly criticizing everything from the appetizers to his choice of home décor. Anthony knows that she thinks “he'll never grow up, no matter what sort of high-powered job he seems to find for himself,” discounting the major life milestones (i.e., getting married, cultivating a successful career, buying a home) that her son has achieved. Rather than supporting Anthony, his mother is highly critical of him and places high expectations on him, making him feel like nothing he does is good enough.
Anthony’s marriage is similarly strained, as he misses who his wife used to be before she became controlling and antagonistic. Marie desperately wants a child, obsessively researching fertility and conception “like someone gathering evidence for a case they have to win,” and she resents Anthony because she doesn’t think he wants a baby as much as she does. This conflict in their relationship causes Marie to act coldly toward him: at the party, she looks at him “murderous[ly]” and makes demands of him rather than asking him for help. At one point, Anthony looks across the room at her and wonders if she even loves him. Although one might assume that Anthony’s wife and mother are the two women he should be closest to, they don’t seem to love him unconditionally—and so his relationships with them are stressful and dissatisfying rather than comforting and fulfilling.
Despite his troubled relationships, Anthony does seem to want a family—but one that’s easygoing, supportive, and loving. On the night of Christmas Eve, Anthony rushes to the supermarket to get a last-minute ingredient for Christmas lunch. He notices that the person in front of him in the checkout line is buying simple premade food, which is quite the contrast to the elaborate feast that Marie insists on making for the party. This is enough to make him feel “an overwhelming, childish longing to follow them out and curl up in the back of their car and go home to their place,” suggesting that he feels trapped in his own family and wants to be part of one that’s more laidback and doesn’t put so much pressure on him. Anthony’s positive relationships with his sister Margaret and her son Tom provide further insight as to what he wants in a family. He fondly thinks of Margaret as warm and “loyal” for always defending him against their mother’s snide comments, whereas he’s not sure whose side Marie will take when he leaves the room. In addition, the one point in the story when Anthony seems genuinely happy is when he and Tom go outside to play with the walkie-talkie set that Tom got for Christmas. From these relationships, readers can glean that Anthony simply wants all of his family members to support and love him unconditionally, the way his sister does. Furthermore, if he’s going to be a father, he likely wants it to feel organic and effortless—like his interactions with Tom—rather than forced.
Yet Anthony doesn’t seem to consciously realize what he wants out of life until the end of the story, which is a testament to how limiting and emotionally deadening dysfunctional family relationships can be. While Anthony and Tom are joyfully playing outside, Anthony looks at Marie through the kitchen window. His walkie-talkie has been emitting deafening static up until this point, symbolizing how Anthony’s controlling wife and mother have left him figuratively deaf to his own desires and his ability to make decisions for himself. But as he gazes at his wife, “something dislodges in him with a delicate gush of pressure, something shifts to let bright sound in”—the static dissipates, and Anthony suddenly understands that “nothing of him” could ever grow inside Marie. That is, he can never bring himself to have a child with her. Tom’s voice comes through the walkie-talkie clearly just after this—“the clearest thing [Anthony has] ever heard.” This moment represents a turning point for Anthony, as the effortless connection he shares with his nephew seems to free him and help him realize that his relationship with Marie is a dead end, devoid of any real care or affection. The static, both literal and figurative, has given way to clarity: Anthony can now see that while he couldn’t choose the family he was born into, he does have a choice when it comes to marriage and fatherhood. The story ends on a somewhat optimistic note, then, as Anthony realizes (at least momentarily) that he isn’t trapped in his dissatisfying life—he’s free to create the kind of family he wants.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Family, Marriage, and Dissatisfaction ThemeTracker
Family, Marriage, and Dissatisfaction Quotes in Static
Anthony listens to the asthmatic wheeze of the leather chair his father’s just vacated, sucking back air into itself as if desperate for breath, the only noise in the room for a few seconds. In the deoxygenated silence, he feels what he thinks of as Evil Rays, like something in one of his old comics, jagged lightning bolts shooting across the room. They’re crackling from the fingertips of the archenemies seated on either side of him. Take that, Ice Maiden! No, you take THAT, Bitch Crone!
She can get every secret weapon into those rays—contempt, accusation, disdain, puzzled faux-innocence, the works. Anthony is determined, fully determined, to thwart her with unrelenting good cheer today.
She flashes him a smile as she heads for the door. The ghost of an old smile, one he misses; she’s trained herself not to do it because it shows the tooth she’s convinced is crooked. He’s told her he loves that tooth, but she just rolls her eyes. In every one of their wedding photos, stored over there in the handtooled leather albums, she has on the other smile, the trained one—lips closed and chin raised like a model of cool serenity, a perfected study of herself. But somewhere in a drawer, Anthony has an old photo of her, pulling off her mask and snorkel at the Great Barrier Reef, just out of the water and her grin broad and unselfconscious. Years ago.
She used to call him Ant. He can’t put his finger on when it started being Anthony. It was like his attention had waned momentarily, and then there it was, a new name and a new smile, to go with the new granite-topped Italianate kitchen bench and the whole brand spanking new house. He’d closed his eyes signing the mortgage on the house, suffering a brief swooping dizzy spell of nauseated disbelief, and he thinks of that title document now stacked away in some bank vault somewhere, his signature slumping below the dotted line like a failing ECG.
[…] Anthony’s praying for her to just shut up for a minute, just one fucking minute for once in her life, but she can't, of course, she has to start in on how he’s got to look after it because it cost a lot of money and he can’t take it to school, it’s just to be played with at his house, and she accepts Tom’s muted kiss on the cheek without even looking at him, not really, because what she wants are babies, she only likes them when they're babies, by the time they’re Tom’s and Hannah’s age they’ve learned to be wary and submissive and not to trust her, and who can blame them?
Anthony squeezes his hands between his knees again and looks over at Marie clasping her gift basket of toiletries. He thinks of the kilometres she tries to cover each night on that stationary bike, the endless net surfing she’s done on sperm motility and ovarian cysts, like someone gathering evidence for a case they have to win. Does she love him? She lets him see her in the morning without makeup, does that count?
He watches as Marie takes the sifter and starts dusting the pies with icing sugar and something dislodges in him with a delicate gush of pressure, something shifts to let bright sound in.
He watches her wrists flex, the air going out of him, certain, all of a sudden, that nothing of him will ever take root inside that thin, tightly wound body, nothing. Tom’s voice comes through the handset again. Clear as a bell now, the clearest thing he's ever heard.
But he finds, in the luxury of those seconds, that he can’t take his eyes off the cacti in their pots. They don't seem to have grown an inch since they were planted there at the advice of the landscaper six long months ago. Totally unchanged. Zero care.
Anthony puts the handset down onto the stones and gazes at the plants, so steely and barbed and implacable, something that even neglect and drought put together can't seem to kill. He reaches out with a fascinated finger to press a curved spike, hard, against the cushion of skin. He just wants to see a dot of hot, red blood well reliably up, as if he needs proof that such things are real.
