‘Antique Barn’
Regarding the vintage barn, Oates explains, “The call came unexpectedly Sunday midafternoon. Fortunately Corinne was home to answer, in the antique barn, trying to restore to some semblance of its original sporty glamor a hickory armchair of “natural” tree limbs (Delaware Valley, ca. 1890–1900) she’d bought for thirty-five dollars at an estate auction—the chair was so battered, she could have cried. How people misuse beautiful things! was Corinne’s frequent lament. The antique barn was crowded with such things, most of them awaiting restoration, or some measure of simple attention.” The vintage barn encompasses items whose worth is not calculable. Nonetheless, Corinne fancies retaining them the barn; arguably, she has a hobby for old-fashioned objects notwithstanding their inconsequential pecuniary importance. Corrine perceives splendor in possessions that other entities with an repugnance for antiques would catalogue as inoperative.
The Painting (The Pilgrim)
Oates pronounces, “Marianne drew her fingers across the glass, trailing dust. She squatted beside the painting, staring avidly at it, her eyes misting over in tears. She felt a surge of happiness sharp as pain in her heart. She hadn’t actually seen The Pilgrim in a long time and had more or less forgotten it. Yet, evidently, she’d been thinking of it the previous night, soaking in Trisha LaPorte’s bathtub. Numbed, dazed. Her thoughts flying rapidly and fluidly and without weight or seeming significance. Jesus help me. Jesus help me…The Pilgrim rose, took shape. It hovered suspended until finally it faded into numbness and oblivion, a gouged-out hole in the very space of consciousness.” “The Pilgrim” arouses Marianne’s consciousness for it expresses the mystic grace that she desires to antagonize the veracity of her sexual violation. The synchronized ‘happiness and pain in her heart’ is a pointer of the travail that she would want to discharge. Marianne’s judgments regarding “The Pilgrim” gather that she is persuaded of spiritual revitalization that the transcendent painting personifies.
The Prom Dress
Judd reminisces, “One day Mom removed the soiled, torn prom dress from the back of Marianne’s closet where it was hidden. She hadn’t needed to ask Marianne where the dress was. Found it, unerring, without wishing to examine it; wadded it into a ball and stuffed it in a paper bag with other household trash. Mom’s eyes gleaming with tears but she wasn’t crying nor was Marianne. Not a word uttered.” The dress’ form submits proof of the aggression which underwrote her rape. Corinne rubbishes the dress since it embodies all the memoirs regarding Marianne’s sexual exploitation; the dumping is tantamount with abandoning the remembrances of the rape.
Telephone Game
Telephone dialogues between Marianne and her kin are emotionally grim. Judd expounds, “So strange—talking with Marianne on the phone. I could almost believe it was one of our old games. The “telephone game” when I was very small, three or four years old, and Marianne and I would pick up phone receivers and talk and giggle on different floors of the house, playing at being adults. A game we could only play when Dad and Mom weren’t around. How distant Marianne sounded now, her voice thin and flattened. Because the mountains are in the way I thought. Possibly Marianne had been crying while on the phone with Mom—Mom would resolutely not have been crying: eyes bright, perfectly clear and dry—but she’d make an effort to be cheerful while speaking with me.” Judd’s expose of the telephone communiqué infers that the corporeal separation was wounding for them. Marianne’s blatant snivels designate her emotions which are qualified to being detached from her family. No matter how they suppress the indignant emotions the tears surmise that Marianne’s transfer is injurious to her family. The endeavors to obscure their emotions over the phone are comparable to the ‘Telephone game.'
