The Great Promise
Unwittingly dooming herself to a shortened and often miserable life by answering a call for hard-working girls, title character Zorrie goes to work for a company making clocks that glow in the dark by using radium. This is based on actual historical fact, believe it or not, as businesses saw in radioactivity opportunities galore:
“Radium was a favorite subject. He said it was more marvelous than gold, more precious than diamonds. He said that someday great tales would be written about radium, that they were already being shaped, perhaps on this very floor. He liked to tell the girls that he put a pinch of radium in everything he drank and everything he ate. He even put radium in the bottles of Coca-Cola he got at the drugstore and drank every day with his lunch. There was dinnerware made with radium and beads made with radium that would allow a neck or wrist ornament to glow and glow.”
Poker Face
Zorrie’s story takes a strange turn when she meets a strange family. If her brush with radium becomes the making of a tragedy, then her brush with the Summers clan becomes the unexpected twist in that tragedy. The imagery here situates a relationship strategizing with a game of poker where bluffing carries high stakes and having the bluff seen through become even higher stakes:
“When Noah sat back down and excused himself for getting agitated again, she felt a little like—though she had said nothing at all—she’d already played her hand and learned it was a bad one, that she should have just folded, and she couldn’t speak at all. Sitting there, she saw herself as a kind of charlatan, a scheming opportunist who had seen an advantage in a situation that a decent person wouldn’t take…Blueberry-eyed Opal had once sat at this table, and she was still out there with her caves and dirt mounds, an hour’s drive away, perhaps spinning records if the player Zorrie herself gave her had held up, or sitting down to a lunch of her own.”
Time Passages
The passage of time is an underlying bit of imagery throughout the entire narrative. Whether in the form of clocks decorated with radium-laced paint or the seasons passing with a numbing certainty on the farm. On occasion, the twain meets as time passed passes into time passing:
“The crisply chiseled tale of time told by the clocks and watches she had once helped paint faces for came to seem complicit in the agonized unfolding of her grief, so that soon the farm and the surrounding fields and the endless ark of change that enclosed them were the only timepiece whose hour strokes she could abide. Small but sure of purpose within the great mechanism of the seasons, she became a pin on a barrel of wind, a screw in a dial of sunlight, a tooth on an escape wheel of rain. The crops went in, the crops were cared for, the crops came out. The earth rested in its right season, and she with it.”
A Tragedy of Life
By the end of the novel, the tragic circumstances of daily dealing with radioactivity have taken their toll. The novel concludes with a visit to the Anne Frank house, implicitly asking whether a short life unlived or a long life unlived is the greater tragedy. In juxtaposition to Anne’s tragedy, Zorrie considers her own:
“The world…felt like it was slipping straight out of her fingers, that its contours and particulars were falling away. She felt like a beach or like the sand dunes she had once gone for a walk on and didn’t know what shape she would be in the next time a wave or some wind decided to saunter by.”
