Zorrie Underwood had been known throughout the county as a hard worker for more than fifty years, so it troubled her when finally the hoe started slipping from her hands, the paring knife from her fingers, the breath in shallow bursts from her lungs, and, smack dab in the middle of the day, she had to lie down.
This is the opening line of the novel and it is more significantly thematically than it might at first seem. The arc of Zorrie’s life is dependent upon her being a hard worker. Everything that happens to her is directly the result of this work ethic and, not to give it all away, but a great portion of that “everything” winds up being tragically ironic. The work ethic is, of course, part of that strain of the myth of the American Dream and that Zorrie is, in her own idiosyncratic way, pursuing the American Dream and ironically suffers the more for doing so is quite thematically elemental. So this opening description of Zorrie as a woman for whom the mere act of lying down—not even necessarily taking a nap, but simply taking a break—will carry great meaning.
People in town called everyone who worked with a brush at the radium plant “ghost girls.” One night Zorrie and Janie painted the bed frame of her littlest sisters with circles and squares so that it would glow while they slept. They told them a story to go with the design about a magical country filled with fairies.
Zorrie’s story is not set in the present day, but back in the days when business regulation was all but unknown. No, not the George W. Bush years, but even further back. Back when a company could make clocks using the element which make radioactivity famous: radium. This part of the story is based entirely on factual history. There were companies making clocks that used radium so that they would glow in the dark. And, like Zorrie, they were known as “ghost girls” because they themselves kind of glowed in the dark. And, also Zorrie, many of the workers went on to have miscarriages and lose either the desire or the ability to try conceiving another child. And, yet again like Zorrie, they would develop symptoms of radium poisoning which foreshortened lives by decades. Stories about these “ghost girls” are easy to find. More difficult is the stories of those who own the clock-making companies who were punished for overlooking evidence that the idea of using radium in this way was not exactly the best idea.
She asked Janie what it was like to have a mother, and Janie leaned over and gave Zorrie a kiss on the top of her head and then turned her around and gave her a quick kick in her seat and told her that having a mother was those two things, and that if sometimes it was more of one than the other, it all balanced out in the end.
Zorrie’s hard life begins early. Orphaned at a young age, she winds up living out much of her childhood with a cold, hard aunt. It is not all bad, of course, since the aunt delivers life lessons in how to deal with adversity that will suit Zorrie well in adulthood. But, still, there really is something to be said for a kind word, a gentle kiss on the forehead and just a little show of genuine affection that really does not do as much damage to a child as some people think. From her answer, Janie would not know this. Maybe Janie can point to a more loving childhood than Zorrie but the mere demonstration of what it is like to have a mother that she displays for Zorrie is proof enough that hard and cold parents used to be the norm. Did this make for better adults? Maybe that is part of that the novel is exploring and perhaps some kind of answer might be supplied to the close reader.
