The sticky intractability also stands as a symbol for Ruthie’s own position, where she is trapped like a fly in amber, not even allowed to attend the weekly meetings of Daughters of Eve—that is, until another member pipes up and reminds her that she might as well go on strike and enrage her parents, since she’s already effectively grounded.
The other new girls, in ways large and small, are also locked in their positions. Laura Snow, both “cringing” and overweight, is an easy target for a boy who lies to her to use her for sex, while Jane Rheardon is the daughter of a brute who beats his wife for anything—as when, in one of the most terrifying, memorable scenes of wife-beating I’ve ever read, she refuses to sing the secret song all Daughters of Eve are taught:
“That sounds like a winner,” Mr. Rheardon said. “Let’s hear it.”
“Oh, I can’t,” Ellen Rheardon said…. “It’s just that we took an oath. We would sing the song anywhere except within the sisterhood. It was—sort of—sacred.” Ellen gave a short, nervous laugh….
“But this is almost twenty years later! You’re a grown woman, for God’s sake, or at least you’re supposed to be. You’re a married woman whose husband is making a simple request of you, and you sit there and tell him—”
No, Jane cried silently, no, no, no!…
Jane pressed her hands against the sides of her face to control the twitching. From the room below there came a thud and a high-pitched cry.
A moment later a thin, wavering voice began to sing.
That’s a far cry from the sexism of the Grange household, which, besides enslaving Ruthie to devote all her labor, gratis, to her spoiled, obnoxious, messy, ungrateful brothers, is subtle, if no less dictatorial:
“What Ruthie said was true, George; Peter and Niles don’t lift a hand to help out. She was right when she said that it isn’t fair. It’s not fair.”
“What’s unfair about it?” Mr. Grange asked impatiently. “Pete and Niles are boys. You can’t expect them to put on aprons and flit around polishing the furniture. I didn’t do that when I was a boy, and
God help anyone who suggested it.”
…“How about some coffee?” her husband said now. His eyes were back upon the newspaper.
“It’s on the back of the burner, and the cups are on the drying rack.”
“I didn’t ask you where it was. I said, how about some?”
KEEP CALM LADIES. It’s the girls growing up in households like these that, in effect, lay the groundwork for Irene Stark—who, as we learn, has arrived in Modesta after being passed over for promotion in favor of a man who assures her it’s better in the end, since she’s going to need to devote her time to her babies any day now. (Also key to the physically plain Stark’s twisted psyche: overhearing her father say, “We’d better get her all the education we can, because God knows, she’s never going to find a husband to support her.”) While Irene is fond of reciting appalling statistics on female hires, rapes, and domestic exploitation (facts I remember to this day!), her real arsenal is the built-in injustice the girls have already experienced, if they would only open their eyes to it: “You are not like your mothers!…You don’t have to let yourselves be ground under foot as your mothers have been. You can rise—fight back—show the world that you know your own worth!”
When standing up involves refusing to hand over the money they’ve raised to get the boys’ basketball team new warm-up suits when the girls don’t even have a soccer team, this is terrific. (By the way, young ladies—have you thanked an older athlete for Title IX today?) Unfortunately, Irene is also fond of such methods as shaving the head of a male malefactor, trashing the science lab, and chopping up the wood-based objects in the principal’s office. There is also the matter of Jane eventually bringing down a cast-iron skillet on her father’s skull and killing him dead. (Oh, THAT’S why psychic Tammy, at the initiation, saw a candle dripping, as Duncan puts it, “BLOOD!”)
However you shake it, Irene Stark is, like her name, a character far less scary than the world around her. (Okay, I admit the part where she threatens to bean poor old Tammy Carncross’s dad with a glass bottle in the face for keeping Fran—justifiably, as it happens—out of the state science competition is a little rattling.) But with her bombastic pronouncements and gloomy indictments, she’s almost a parody of a revolutionary—and of a monster.
What Duncan has to say about the ways in which the Daughters of Eve are oppressed is far more interesting. Mr. Rheardon beating his wife is clear-cut abuse. Also easy to object to is the sly way Peter deflects Laura’s attempts to make their relationship public. (“Don’t push me, Laura. I don’t like being nagged at, okay…there are better ways to get a guy to do things than by nagging at him. A sweet, a loving girl can get just about anything she wants as long as she doesn’t keep pushing and getting a guy irritated.” Uh-huh.) But what about paternalism dressed up as love? Arguing with her husband again about letting Ruth join the group, Mrs. Grange thinks:
Her husband’s voice had settled into that solid, reasonable tone that she knew so well and liked so little. It made her feel diminished somehow, childish, as though nothing she said was of any real value, yet at the same time it contained affection. There had never been a moment in the duration of their marriage that she had doubted George’s love for her, and that, in a way, made everything harder.
Being held down is hard—but being held down in the name of love is harder. In the case of Ann Whitten, the budding artist whose scholarship to art school, arranged by Irene, gets thrown off track by a (surprise!) pregnancy, Duncan takes the gray area even further. Her fiancé is disappointed by the idea of putting off the marriage, but he makes a solid effort at being happy about it. (“I’m trying. That’s the best I can do. I’m trying.”) Her father, noticing she’s throwing up every morning, becomes a surprising advocate:
“There’s a friend who thinks I ought to have an abortion.”
She had expected a violent reaction, but she did not receive one.
“That’s one answer, I suppose,” her father said. “I hear they do them real easy and safe nowadays right in the hospital.”
“Do you think it would be wrong?”
“What I think doesn’t matter,” Mr. Whitten said.
“It doesn’t matter what your mother thinks either, or what this friend of yours thinks. I don’t know about Dave. I guess what he thinks ought to matter some, but then again, maybe it shouldn’t. It all comes down to you. You’ve got to make a decision you can live with and once you’ve done this, you’ve got to accept it and go on from there.”
“It’s not fair,” Ann said miserably…
“Of course, it’s not fair,” her father said. “Why should it be? Whoever said life is fair was a moron.”
As far as I’m concerned, Mr. Whitten is the true feminist in the novel. And he’s made a good point. As Duncan finally boils down the problem, it’s not an issue of whether things are fair—it’s whether they are just. Wife-beating, sport-fucking, attempted-raping, labor-stealing: unjust. Getting pregnant by accident: Them’s just the breaks. It’s not that men need to be punished. (I mean, they do, but whatever.) It’s that no one should have to subsume one’s life for another—unpaid, un-thanked, and abused—merely because a set of cocky, entitled people (men! men! men!) prefer it that way.
Daughters of Eve may indict extreme feminism—but it’s also as grim a tally as I’ve ever seen of a world without it. So what if Irene isn’t actually a scary warning to would-be revolutionaries, but simply an avatar for the rage engendered when half the people get to leave cereal bowls on the table and the other half have to clean them up? “How could anyone know for sure what went on in all the neat white houses that lined the streets of a pleasant little town like Modesta?” Jane asks, hearing her mother being beaten downstairs. Before you lace up your steel-toed boots, ladies—if you could see what went on, you’d find quite a range of things happen. But Ms. Irene Stark’s point still obtains—the people in houses leaving half-f
illed cereal bowls around for other people to clean up better watch out.
BOOK REPORT
The Grounding of Group 6
By Julian F. Thompson 1983
A Killer Course
The people in their group, Group 6, were all sixteen, all five of them, and none of them was fat.
It’s been a while since literature gave us a good teen slaying. I mean, parents in books kill their young charges all the time—or, rather, mothers do, generally by drowning them or letting them be drowned, if they can’t manage to rustle up the funds to pay a fake abductor. (Men, in their Gone Baby Gone mode, tend to STEAL them away from such pitiable mothers…for their own good!) In any case, you are still hard-pressed to find a group of well-off parents offing their near-adult offspring—who have, by the way, managed not to be fat—for no good reason at all.
Not so in Julian F. Thompson’s masterwork, the story of five high schoolers sent to a boarding school, Coldbrook Academy, for what they think is a brief coda to their so far vaguely unillustrious high-school careers. In fact it is meant to be the brief end…TO THEIR LIVES. Their parents have paid, from what my post-Algebra II brain can glean from the narrative, something like $1,500 to have their kids poisoned and thrown into deep crevasses, never to be heard from again. (With inflation, this is something like $57,235, which seems fair.) The service is offered by a select group of psychopathic faculty, including the dean of Coldbrook, who puts it to Nat Rittenhouse, the young man hired to ground said six, thusly:
“We take them off their hands, those lemons. Once and for all. Quick and neat and clean and utterly untraceable. We have those limestone faults quite near the school—these fissures on the surface of the planet. Some of them seem almost bottomless. Drop a lemon into one…we never hear it hit. We call that ‘grounding,’ Mr. Rittenhouse. A natural and wholesome term, I hope you will agree. At Coldbrook, we are definitely…organic.”
Something for Whole Foods to consider, perhaps. Anyway, the players are as follows: sassy Marigold, who has lightning bolts on her panties; dry, lanky Coke, who has vodka bottles stashed in his rucksack; sweet Sully, who is hot but unsullied; sporty Sarah, who is shy but secure; and Ludi, who is, as required by quota laws governing 99 percent of teen novels, psychic. On top of that is the still-young Nat—who has been thrust into this position by a small gambling habit and a run-in with an Italian character in the mafia who is not a stereotype at all. This is three boys and three girls. I wonder if any of them will get it on!
The characters are being shuffled off this mortal coil for the following:
Marigold: Sleeping with mother’s boyfriend
Sully: Rejecting mother’s gay boyfriend
Sarah: Plagiarism
Ludi: Psychic abilities
Coke: Unruly hair
I think! As near as I can tell, so knocked flat am I by a titanic flood of complex verbiage. (I have no idea how I followed any of this at age nine—as I still cannot follow it now.) In just the first chapter, we are graced with the following references: “fleurs du mal de siecle,” Kir, a doorman named Porfirio, cannabis, “Moi?”, and an Abenaki chauffeur. The weary worldliness of the characters—16, un-gay, un-fat—reaches its apex, I feel, as Coke raises a glass of smuggled rum to the crew and ironically declares, “Prosit.” I’m not sure I knew what rum was.
But I am willing to overlook that the author has imbued his cast with age-inappropriate dinner-party game because they still totally have a bunch of YA sex to read aloud at the sleepover. Here’s Sully, feeling up Sara:
Sully could hardly believe he was actually kissing her. Her lips felt wonderful under his, and—whoa—he’d forgotten to move his hand off her breast. He was actually feeling her breast with his hand and it felt just fantastic, and then her lips were moving, and, wow, that was her tongue….
Italics TOTALLY not mine! Marigold and Coke, of course, jump into bed right at the beginning, and somehow, Thompson is even able to finesse Nat sleeping with Ludi—maybe if you are psychic, you are not underage?—zipping their sleeping bags together so quickly time and the rule of law disappear entirely.
So, enter the emotionally sophisticated child, capable of standing up to an adult world allied against her. But whither the emotionally despicable parent, aside from the nasty stepmother? What about tyrants like The Cat Ate My Gymsuit’s emotionally abusive dad? The alkie mom of The Long Secret? The stage mom of I’ll Love You When You’re More Like Me? Even Ramona’s dad brutally slicing his wife’s as-yet-undone pancakes? Guardians like Zindel’s troupe of Bayonne parents—one of whom squeezes margarine from the bottle, spreads it on an English muffin and then tells her daughter, “I love you, kid. I just love myself a little more”—have disappeared, and why?
Because now, parents are co-members of the narrative. We have to deconstruct their little lives, we have to hang with them at the breakfast bar, and love them like they’re just like us before heading off to a commercial break. So, as ascends Gilmore Girls, so dies a golden YA trope—the parent who deserves to die.
Still totally no idea what an Abenaki chauffeur is, by the way.
BOOK REPORT
Summer of Fear
By Lois Duncan 1976
Which Witch Is Which?
It’s summer. Summer—again.
Over the course of the last decade I have been conducting a longitudinal survey on the works of Lois Duncan as experienced by other women my own age (old), often while trying on eyeliner at Ricky’s or attempting to alienate someone’s annoying new boyfriend. Amongst many unsurprising results (“I thought I was psychic until I was 32” “Why are you talking about Lois Duncan to my new boyfriend?”), one surprising one is as follows:
Not one woman—one!—over the course of a decade was able to name the title of the book, even though all had read it several times and confessed to attempting to remember the title in their own idle moments, frequently, and failing.
Duncan fans will understand I owe those italics completely to her. Anyway, let’s review the plot. After the tragic death of her parents, a long lost cousin comes to live with an innocent family, but then turns out to be an Ozark-bred, trash-talking, murdering witch who says things like “varmint” and totally STOLE THE IDENTITY of the cousin, whom she really killed, along with the girl’s parents, in a fiery crash off a cliff.
That numerous women who can remember the names of people I don’t even recall fooling around with or even knowing from, like, eighteen years ago could not scare up the title of a work they’d read at least 5 times WHILE ALSO HAVING read Who Killed My Daughter stems, I wager, from the fact that herein and herein alone, Duncan has taken the typical conceits of her other works of fiction and amped them up to an unsettling degree.
Just to refresh for you, some classic Duncan tropes:
The Malevolent Double
Stranger with My Face, I Know What You
Did Last Summer, Down a Dark Hall,
Summer of Fear
Scary Ringleader
Killing Mr. Griffin, Five Were Missing,
Daughters of Eve
Perky heroine, just getting breasts, believes
she has hotter boyfriend than she deserves
Stranger with My Face, Daughters of Eve,
Summer of Fear, I Know What You Did Last
Summer
Psychokenisis/Telekenesis/Deus-ex-machi-nesis
A Gift of Magic, Down a Dark Hall, The Third
Eye, Stranger with My Face, Five Were Missing
Subtle Indictments of Reagan-era Feminism
Daughters of Eve, plus every mother character
who’s always like, “But I chose not to work”
Helpful Old Person, Happens To Be Expert on Something Key to Plot
Todo
Albuquerque
Toujours
Summer of Fear does not deviate from the above. As I’m sure you now recall, since I told you the title and the end and everything already, 15-year-old Rachel is living the high life in Albuquerque as
a red-haired, freckly, prime-pubescent smarty-pants with a hot boyfriend, Mike, a kindly sage of a neighbor, Professor Jarvis, a spunky BFF, Caroline, two annoying brothers, and parents who inexplicably tolerate them all.
This all goes to hell, however, when Rachel’s aunt and uncle are killed in a car crash, and their daughter Julia (WATCH OUT FOR THIS JULIA PERSON) comes to live with the family permanently.
So far, we are on familiar, roseate-tinged territory. A gawky teen who has recently blossomed into love and B-cups (Mike to Rachel: “Let’s face it, there’ve been some changes in the past year, and in all the right places”), Beave-like brothers (“Pretty soon, Bobby came in smelling like old tennis shoes and chewing gum”), a convenient plot device thinly disguised as an old-person sage (“Pine Crest?” The professor nodded appreciatively. “That’s in the heart of the Ozarks, isn’t it?”), a pet who knows the score before everybody else (“Julia’s body stiffened. ‘I’m not very good with dogs. They don’t like me.’), and subtle hints that something is terribly wrong (“When I think back I realize that this was the moment I received my first hint that something was terribly wrong”).
As I reread the novel, all I could think was that my twelve-year-old takeaway from the entire novel basically was the whole scene in the shopping mall where Julia tries on a bikini and Rae cannot deal, the substance of which is apparently burned in my brain: “…she had the kind of figure I had always dreamed of having someday, maybe when I was about twenty.”
I still dream of that! But what I had forgotten—let’s say blocked—was everything else. First of all, one set of parents, plus one real-life girl your age and everything, is fully killed, thrown off a cliff. Killed! Second, a dog is killed. Killed! A dog! An innocent dog named Trickle! Third: A man is hospitalized and paralyzed and, like, has to send messages by blinking. Paralyzed! Fourth: Did I mention an evil Ozark woman kills and impersonates Rachel’s cousin and moves in and steals her boyfriend and everything, KILLS? And fifth: Once Rachel calls her out as the witch she is, Julia is always wandering around with her eyes narrowing at Rachel and a smile dancing on her lips and saying evil shit like, “Maybe [your dog] choked on his own bad temper” and suggesting that at the end of the day she really wants Rachel’s DAD, not her BOYFRIEND, and it is fucking terrifying.
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