I was very touched by the revelation at the end that Evelyn "had" to get married, as evidenced by the grey dress and weird wedding date. The same thing happened to my mom, and to this day she has never told me that she "had" to get married. The shame that attended an unwed pregnancy stayed with her, even though she herself, like Evelyn, would never judge another woman for that. Evelyn even tells Tuff "not to judge" somewhere in the book. And I remember my mom telling me that "getting pregnant is not the worst thing" that could happen to a girl, and I think it was her way of countering all the idiots who acted like it was, of making her daughters not feel Dorrie's desperation in "A Kiss Before Dying."
I think Tuff had a persistent sadness about her mom's life, even though it was also a source of great joy and inspiration to her. She knew that in another world her mother could have been a professional writer, could have traveled all over, could have afforded new girdles, or wouldn't have felt compelled to wear a girdle at all! could have ended up with a man who was a better companion in life. And yet she has this beautiful admiration of how her mother began her married life by being trapped (by the pregnancy) and made more of her fate than most people could imagine. She lived her life.
It also has struck me that Tuff grew up to be a lesbian. And I could see the generous-hearted Evelyn, if she knew, submitting a poem to the local paper: My kid is gay, and that's OK.
3 comments:
Excellent post.
Tuff clearly thought her mother deserved more in her life and could have had it under different circumstances. That obviously made Tuff crazy as a young person (as you can see during her car trip with her mom), and I think it wasn't until she was an adult that she truly appreciated her mother's life and what she had managed to accomplish.
Yeah, the car conversation was excellent. Remember the part where she asked her mom why she quit working for the newspaper (a job she apparently loved), and her mother made up something like it just got to be too much, and Tuff wasn't really buying it but had no reason to argue, and then all those years later she found out she quit because she got pregnant.
Maybe she also resolved early on to not be like her stepmother -- Evelyn described her as having no sense of humor who thought life was a "cold, dark thing."
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