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I can’t remember if this is true, if this is the person I was at the time or the person I became later. Certainly we preached it to the girls growing up: Work for the good of the collective, root for the team, get over yourself.
In Chapter 16, when Emily asks Lara incredulously if she really went to go see Pallace play Laura in Our Town, Lara responds that she did almost without thinking. This rapid response, however, makes her reconsider why she would do something so admittedly painful. It makes her self-conscious, and she begins to question the accuracy of her memories and whether they represent who she was, or who she became over time. Lara has always preached to her daughters that they need to “work for the good of the collective, root for the team” and “get over yourself.” The values she was raised around were those of selflessness and communal responsibility. Even though Pallace had hurt her deeply, the thought of not going to the play didn’t even cross her mind. In the present, Lara is not sure if this was actually a healthy thing for her to do. Her younger self, who had not learned to advocate for herself, didn’t even question whether she should support Pallace: she just did it.
They are reminding me of the years when they were small and it was just me in the house beneath all that snow and Joe was in the barn trying to fix a tractor he didn’t know how to fix, and I felt like the children would eat me. Nell was eating me, still at my breast, and the other two rushed to crawl in my lap whenever I sat down. I thought, Joe will come home and find the three of them framing out a playhouse with my bones.
This quotation comes from Chapter 19, when Lara is growing exhausted and frustrated with telling the story of Peter Duke. Even though she has told Emily, Maisie, and Nell everything that she thinks they should know about Duke, the girls continue to ask questions about her love life. Immediately, Lara’s defenses go up, as she had not agreed to answer questions about her relationship with Joe or about the time after she was involved with Peter. The playhouse image she describes in this paragraph is both grim and darkly funny as she compares this moment to a time when she felt utterly alone and vulnerable on the farm when the girls were babies. The weight of her daughters’ need for her and expectations of her are so heavy that she feels they might literally cannibalize her. She worries they will keep asking her things until they have consumed everything she has.
She stayed with me after the rest of them had faded, maybe because we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.
Lara is talking about Veronica in this quotation from Chapter 17, which comes from a moment in her story where she remembers asking Pallace to run lines with her. Pallace and Duke are already sleeping together by this point, but Lara doesn’t know this for sure. As she reflects on the situation from 2020, she realizes that the reason she remembers Veronica so much more clearly than everyone else is because she had done the same thing to Veronica as Pallace did to her. Veronica was her best friend in high school, and Lara slept with her boyfriend Jimmy when they played opposite one another in Our Town. Lara hadn’t realized how much she hurt Veronica until she was, herself, cheated on. She’s only able to feel truly accountable for what she did to Veronica long after the time has passed to apologize.
