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Commentary
I had mixed reactions after my first reading of this story by Mary Robison. I was engaged and curious in some parts, and puzzled by others. Beginning with a strong part, she presents clearly, in very few words, the relationship between Allison and Clark, as sincere and deep. In just two pages, we come to care for them. Robison tells us nothing directly about this unusual relationship, but through objective details and descriptions, we sense a harmony between them and a serenity in the atmosphere. Clark’s sitting “in the twilight . . . moving up and back in a padded glider, pushed by the ball of his slippered foot.” Comfortable and at peace. Allison and Clark “looked something alike in their facial features” and “were both quite tall,” making them seem more like each other than the 43 years would indicate. When Allison opens the “extremely unkind” letter from Clark’s family, she considers it the “funniest,” apparently un-threatened by his relative’s disapproval. They work on the pumpkins together until 1 in the morning, in the “warm,” still, Virginia night, “Most leaves had been blown away already, and the trees stood unbothered. The moon was round above them.”
The vivid motif, the pumpkins, are images of both the pleasure and the foreboding in their lives now. They are enjoying an annual tradition, having fun, teasing each other. Clark’s pumpkins are skillfully, thoughtfully carved, “expressive and artful.” Allison’s pumpkins, in contrast, are ordinary: ” triangles for noses and eyes,” mouth, ” just wedges–two turned up and two turned down.” Yet Clark insists , “Yours are far better.” Why? It’s not clear. Possibly, Clark’s were objects of art, but created more for his own satisfaction than for their original purpose. In ancient folklore, pumpkins were weapons of defense against the ghosts and evil spirits that roamed the land on the Hallowed Eve, the night before All Soul’s Day, scaring them off with their fiery devil-like grins and glaring eyes, keeping them from destroying crops and infiltrating the houses. It could be that Allison’s were better because they were primitive, carved in the way that expressed the fear they were designed for. True to their meaning. Symbolically, the pumpkins themselves were there to frighten away the inevitable death that Allison and Clark were to face in the future. Allison’s wish, ” Don’t blow out the candles,” felt like a wish to stay alive, like the flames.
In the second-to-last paragraph, when Allison, unexpectedly, “began to die,” Clark is regretting something he wanted to tell her: “that to own a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little. He wanted to assure her that she had missed nothing.” Why would he talk about that? His own special frustration. And why would he tell a dying woman that “she had missed nothing”? His distress seems out-of-place, insensitive to the event. But, at this moment, already feeling the loss, a thought springs to him –the private, discovered truth he’d wanted to share with the person closest to him, a truth of interest only to the two of them.
In the end, the pumpkins come alive again, with another purpose. Lined up earlier on the porch railing, they are vigils now, guarding Allison as she lies between life and death. Clark watches them and ” The Jack-O-Lanterns watched him,” their flames steady, as if in waiting.
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Commentary
The narrator of this story is a young woman, an art teacher, who’s lived all her life in a small coal- mining town named “Jewel, . . .where all the kids end up in the mine.” What follows are her thoughts, as she ponders what it would mean to marry her prospective husband: “I’d be leaving Jewel if I got married,” and as she considers her life and the people around her, without much enthusiasm for either.
When she speaks of her two somewhat talented art students, “both at third period,” we feel her right away as teacher, identifying students by the time they fit into her schedule. She respects one student’s works, “Dirty Thoughts, ” though she doesn’t understand them: ” ‘Here’s D. T #189’, she’ll say to me, holding up some contraption.”
She does have a “gifted student. . .for art and homeroom.” who “might get out of Jewel someday.” She’s sympathetic with him and listens to the trouble he’s in for refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag in assembly. She wisely counsels him to be careful, “stay alert,” and thinks to herself, “Why would anyone balk at the pledge.”
Her husband-to-be, Jack, is a “sharp lawyer . . . who looks like someone’s poor relation.” Juries, however, “go his way as if he were a cousin they’re trying to help along.” But she’s proud of Jack. At the Ballpark lounge, when she beats Jack at a computer game, he encourages her, “You ought to have your own machine. ” She tells us: “That’s how Jack thinks: big.”
On a trip to Charleston, where Jack has found a house (actually, an upstairs apt.), for them to rent, he suggests she could work at a crisis center, located on the first floor. The narrator spends an afternoon observing the “Hot Line”: “They listen to these calls, I found out, and then they repeat back more or less what the caller’s just said . . . Then they add something like “You sound angry,” unknowingly revealing the automatic responses of the counselors.
When the narrator speaks of leaving her family, a feeling of endearment shows up in her otherwise detached tone: “It would be tough leaving my family. Mom’s all right here and so is Russell, my big brother,” who’s “recently got Mom a new clothes washer. He does things like that.” And she gets “sad” for Russell: ” The biggest achievement of his life is being respectable. He’d cheat and lie before he’d do anything that’s frowned upon.” Innocently again, she exposes an irony of “respectability,” often judged by the appearance of proper behavior, regardless of the immorality within.
As for her father, she says plainly, without guilt, “I couldn’t like Dad, but I often pleased him.”
Her lukewarm feelings for Jack are revealed in a short paragraph: “One thing that bothers me about leaving Jewel is that I just wall-papered my bedroom at Mom’s.” It’s a ” poppy pattern that’s like Matisse.” This, as part of the marriage equation, is a consideration many would keep to themselves. But our narrator just speaks her thoughts.
We learn two new facts about her in the next section. First, that she has graduated from the highly selective Rhode Island School of Design, known elsewhere as “RISD,” establishing that she was indeed quite talented as an artist, and second, that she had no apparent awareness of her distinction. She describes her experience there, negative as it was, with almost the same practical acceptance that she shows throughout, “I got mangled or something. . . some version of me graduated. I really wasn’t present.” Away from Jewel, she found an image of herself when she spotted her reflection in shop windows.
Going deeper, she comments, “Those who say you can’t go home again haven’t been to Jewel,” then, “Back in Jewel again—surprise—I was fine.” She follows with a recap of her family’s long history in Jewel and then a series of all the people that she knows, their names, activities, habits, and recognizes her feelings of belonging there. But her choice isn’t that easy. The section ends with an insightful paradox: “I like feeling at home, but I wish I didn’t feel it here.”
The charm of the story, for me, the essence, is the narrator, ostensibly average, provincial, unambitious, probing her thoughts, and seeing, without illusions, the complicated truth of her situation. By the end, she hasn’t made up her mind. She keeps the note that Little Brad Foley sent her, hoping she’ll “be moving.” And she tells us, “I don’t put anything away,” sounding as if a choice is still in the air and, one gets the sense, may always be.
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Poems that Shine 