A hometown
Fort Michel had a population of “thirty thousand people” and was of “an awkward, middling size, large enough that you waited in a line with strangers at the grocery store.” It was the place “small enough to count each business: the one butcher, the one Chinese restaurant, the old theater and the new theater, the good bar and the bad bar.” It was “not a small town,” but “if every man, woman, and child came out of their home at the same time,” they couldn’t have filled “a football stadium.” This imagery evokes a feeling of melancholy.
Escape
She starts “walking faster.” She feels the house is “chasing her, accusing her; its shabbiness and empty rooms are an indictment of her character.” Three bedrooms “crammed onto one floor, growing off the combined kitchen – living room like tumors.” “Gravel in the front,” “woods beginning quickly in the back.” This imagery is suffocating. Peter’s mother can’t forget her old life and get used to a new strange country. She is a stranger in her own house. There is no escape from there, for she has nowhere to go.
That fantasy
One of the memories that Peter has from school is an assignment to draw a picture “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up.” The teacher had written “several suggestions on the board: doctor, astronaut, policeman, scientist, businessman, and Mommy.” He drew himself “as a Mommy.” He thought of “the mommies in the magazine ads and picture books, always bending at the waist over their tied aprons with their breasts on display.” Those mommies were “serving pancakes, wrapping presents, patting the heads of puppies, vacuuming sparkling-clean floors.” He wanted to be “a Mommy.” This imagery evokes a feeling of loneliness, for there is no one near him for the boy to confide in.
