2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
COURTESY OF CAROLINA WREN PRESS
maid.” Connor, desperate after five nights when Sweetie wakes at three a.m., asks Sidney if she can move in to take care of the child day and night, offering her fifty dollars a week – about double what household help made in the early 1960s. She responds apologetically but firmly that she cannot, but Claire willingly tends to Sweetie, who, appropriately, eventually calls her big sister “Care.” Claire’s devotion to Sweetie is her salvation, even as her own life is rendered bleak by her mother’s illness. She loves Sweetie not only as a sister, but with a deep, maternal commitment. The author takes us into the mind of pre-adolescent Claire, who tells the story in first person. There’s an occasional shift to second person when Claire speaks in an aside to the reader, which tends to be mildly jolting, and the voice of a young narrator doesn’t seem to ring true in such places; for example, Claire thinks of her mother, “I suppose you could say she was a person who
advocated for a condition she only barely endured: the condition of being obsessed with one’s exterior, one’s beauty” (92). However, Claire does seem to be a reliable narrator, and perhaps the whole story is being told by the adult Claire looking back. A clue to an older narrator behind the scenes is in the oft-repeated phrase “I remember” as in the line, “A few nights later I had a dream I still remember” (30). Then, close to the end of the book, we are told, “I know now what anger truly is, but when I was a child, the rage roamed around and nailed me sometimes or dispersed, went into the air, flew out and then entered again through my very breath, made me serious, moody, driven, funny at the wrong times. Love did nearly the same” (189). The word indigo is first used in the novel to describe a bruise. But after a horrific scene in which Claire finds Sweetie alone and about to drown in Diana’s tub, indigo becomes metaphor: “The world was . . . uneven, thick and indigo in places” (129). The color is internalized when Claire feels the indigo is tailing her. Ultimately, she is enveloped: “the indigo swooped down at great speed and took me” (184). She is experiencing the deep moods her mother endures, but has no way to articulate what is happening, as the indigo becomes an element like water or air or fire. Claire’s mother is disconnected from her children to such an extent that she cannot fathom that they may also suffer. Diana is an absent mother, though she seldom leaves home. Her only reprieve from the gloom that engulfs her comes from playing
ABOVE Moira Crone reading from her new novel at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh and RIGHT at Pomegranate Books, Wilmington, NC
classical music on the piano. Claire is adept at deducing from her mother’s music – whether she caresses or pounds the keys – fair weather or emotional storms to come. Diana’s beauty is emphasized in the book, as in her description as “a blue-eyed, broad-shouldered blonde who went through a room like a magnet, pulling men’s heads behind her.” But Diana comes home from the birth of her second child, “her hair like straw . . . worn down, soft, even harmed” (3). The way the once-stunning Diana feels about herself is clear when she asks Claire, “What else is there? But pretty?” (91). Diana’s deterioration affects Connor, too, but he remains dazzled by her beauty, excusing his wife’s behavior in the classic pattern of an enabler. When Sweetie is twenty-two days old, a ray of light comes into the family with the arrival of Aunt C, Connor’s sister, Cecelia. She sweeps into the story like Mary Poppins – in a Rambler instead of under an umbrella – with a tiny dog named Cleopatra, who delights Claire. Aunt C bustles COURTESY OF CAROLINA WREN PRESS
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