A bundle of joy
Baby Lotto was “exigent.” Antoinette’s body was “blasted, breasts chewed up.” Even nursing was “not a success.” But as soon as Lotto began to smile and Antoinette saw “he was her tiny image with her dimples and charm,” she forgave him. It was “a relief” to find “her own beauty there.” It was Lotto’s luck that he inherited his mother’s looks, because his father’s family “were not a lovely people.” “Mostly” they bore the look of “overcooked cracker.” This imagery is supposed to show how much pride Antoinette takes in the fact that her son is as beautiful as she is.
Isolation
Lotto’s new school made him miserable. For the first time in his life, he was bullied. The boy was “too tall, too skinny.” “A Southerner, inferior”. He called “every Sunday at six PM,” but Sallie “was not much for small talk,” and Antoinette “went nowhere these days” and “had little to report beyond her television programs,” and Rachel was “too tiny to put together sentences.” His call was “over in five minutes.” “A dark sea to swim until the next call.” The worst thing was that “nothing in New Hampshire was warm.” He missed his family, his friends and his old father’s house. This imagery evokes a feeling of loneliness and despair.
Desire for life
Lotto learned that the world was “precarious.” People “could be subtracted from it with swift bad math.” If one “might die at any moment,” one “must live.” Thus began “the era of women.” There were “trips to the city, sweating through polo shirts at the nightclubs,” “threeway with two girls in someone’s bathroom,” “headmaster’s daughter on the lacrosse field,” “forty-one-year-old cousin at a seedy motel,” “neighbor girl in a hammock,” “tourist girl swimming out to the sailboat at night.” Samuel was “rolling his eyes with envy.” This imagery evokes a feeling of despair. Lotto is so afraid of death that he tries to enjoy his life to the fullest.
