The Cup of Soup
The amazing thing about imagery is that it is not always about what it ostensibly seems to be about. The story titled “One Can of Soup at a Time” is essentially a very short story that is nothing but imagery. Not literally, of course; most of the story is a conversation between a husband and wife in bed. A significant part of that conversation, however, is centered on the cup of soup which the husband offers to get his wife mere seconds after she has just very casually informed him she doesn’t like being married. The cup of soup is not really a cup of soup, but the vessel which containing the reasons why their marriage is in trouble.
Jack O’Lanterns
Somewhat like the cup of soup, but not nearly as much, the Jack O’Lanterns in the story “You Cannot Judge a Pumpkin’s Happiness by the Smile Upon His Face” are another example of imagery driving the narrative. It is a story about father excited by the prospect of his kids enjoying the kind Halloween he himself never enjoyed as a kids. But nothing goes right and while not exactly bad enough to qualify as a disaster, it is a disappointment all around. By the end of the story, the father has transformed into the image of a smiling Jack O’Lantern who glowing grin is merely façade for disguising the emptiness inside.
Wilson C. Wilson
The first-person narrator of the collection’s open story, “Dulce” bears a more than passing resemblance to the author herself. The story begins with the kind of imagery that belongs in a story rather than real life; the kind of over-romanticized encounter which many young girls (and more than a few boys) fantasize about. But the imagery is as out of sync with reality—both real reality and the fictional reality—as the unlikely name of the Heathcliff next door:
“Wilson C. Wilson, a boy several years older than I, lived down the block with his aunt and uncle...because he had been orphaned as a baby. That fact, accompanied by his dark good looks, had made him a romantic figure for me, but I had never expected him to climb up into our steep north slope of a garden where I made a habit of brooding on a favorite rock and often spying on him through the fringe of laurel, dog- wood, mountain ash, and alder which grew, and still does grow, down at the street. No handsome boy of my own age had ever paid the slightest attention to me.”
Life is a Puzzle
The story titled simple “Puzzle” opens on a note of imagery that becomes the metaphor not just for the life of the main character of that story, but for the collection itself. The stories are for the most part unrelated, featuring different characters at different points in life facing different situations. (With the notable exception of the collection-within-the-collection of the Harry and Anna domestic drama.) And yet, the stories do seem to exist individually like the pieces of a puzzle that, when put together, create a coherent larger canvas. The fact that the collection ends with a story about yet another writer, much more aged than Dulce, also contributes to idea:
“Even in her late seventies Ella Carr was still trying to put her life together like a puzzle which, when she’d finally managed it, she could live in terms of, a character out of Mary Poppins walking into the completed picture. Some of the pieces of it were not difficult. The largest part had always been her work, and it was central— husband, children, lovers all at the hard edges.”
