Orphaned
The title character is orphaned midway through childhood after both parents are felled by diphtheria. Like many such kids—especially back then before the invention of the birth control pill—she is sent to live with the sibling of a parent. And, like many characters in novels, the aunt is not really prepared for the job:
“This aunt, whom her dying father had only called on reluctantly, for she had drunk too deeply from the cup of bitterness after a badly failed marriage, shook and scolded Zorrie vigorously when, as happened frequently during the first months, she woke up crying.”
The Work Ethic
The aunt may not have been exactly what you would call a loving individual. She may have been hard and even perhaps a little cold. But in those days—during the Great Depression—something else besides a gentle touch may have been considered a better legacy and the aunt, at least, extends the legacy of learning the value of being a hard work to Zorrie:
“Though her ruined marriage had left her at best ambivalent about the faith of her former husband, her aunt never set aside a Lutheran’s belief in the redemptive power of work, and something like a gleam, a little bit of breath on a little bit of near-burned-out coal, would enter the old woman’s eye whenever Zorrie would finish a job quickly and start another one.”
“Ghost Girls”
Zorrie is one of the young women working for a company that produces clocks made with radium. This circumstances is based on historical fact. And, like Zorrie, these young women came to be known by the metaphorical nickname “ghost girl.” Why? “Because after work we would glow in dark places like movie theaters.”
Love and Radium
Zorrie’s story manages to withstand the ravages of radium, though the effects will continue to poison her for the rest of her life. It is love, however, that becomes the real poison in her life because, after all, you can’t get paid for being in love. Well, not unless you are really good at faking it:
“She had made whole speeches in her head about how love had come to her in a late-night vision as a blanket made of whispered words that would keep you warm forever, like radium had been supposed to. The promise of love and whispered words was true, while radium was false, she had said to herself, and she had felt it deeply, but there at Noah’s table the idea of saying such things aloud left her feeling aghast, like she would either burst out laughing hysterically or start to cry.”
Anne Frank
The novel draws to a conclusion by implicitly proposing a question. Which is the greater tragedy? A life cut short before it could be fully lived or a long life which was never as fully lived as it might have been?
“She had often thought of Anne Frank, who had stuffed her short life with so much wonder, while here she was, having been granted many more years, just going through the motions like she was a ten-penny wind-up doll.”
