The Mall
The mother of the group of siblings at the center of this story is unquestionably suffering from a mental disorder which breaks out into full-scale psychotic episode at the very beginning of the story. She may be mentally unbalanced and emotionally tortured, but something is working somewhere inside that broke mind of hers. There are lots of really bad places to choose as the site where you abandon young children. At least their mother gets some credit for choosing a mall where there is food and possibly people willing to take pity on a hungry kids whose mother just walked away and even, if necessary, shelter and sanctuary, if only temporarily:
“They spent a long time wandering through stores, looking at toys and records and pianos and birthday cards. They were drawn to restaurants that exuded the smell of spaghetti and pizza or fried chicken, bakeries with trays of golden doughnuts lined up behind glass windows, candy stores, where the countertop was crowded with large jars of jelly beans and sourballs and little foil-covered chocolates and peppermints dipped in crunchy white frosting; cheese shops (they each had two free samples), where the rich smell of aged cheeses mingled with fresh-ground coffee, and hot dog stands, where they stood back in a silent row. After this, they sat on a backless bench before the waterfall, tired and hungry.”
The Natural World
Imagery is put to great use throughout the book bringing the natural settings of the story to vivid life. One particularly memorable example is on the surface a description of something so mundane as to seem almost impossible to invest with an immediate tangibility. But doing so is one of the marks a greater writer:
“A pale sun showed behind the clouds. It looked like there were two layers of clouds now, one layer lower, like a gray veil spread before the other. Where the veil broke, you could see silvery islands of clouds on which tall angels might stand. Not cute little Christmas angels, but high, stern angels in white robes, whose faces were sad and serious from being near God all day and hearing His decisions about the world. Dicey was hypnotized by the molten silver of the cloudy islands and not until the veil of fuzzy gray blew across it again did she begin their march of the day.”
Catatonia
How do you effectively convey the completely absence of activity and make it tragic? It is a conundrum like that of the famous observation about Oakland: when there’s no “there” there how do you show people what’s there? Dicey is told that her mother is catatonic and then she is told what that means and then she is given photographic evidence. There is no “there” there in Dicey’s mom, but the author still manages to convey the tragedy of what is actually there:
“Dicey took the photograph. She looked at the vacant-faced woman lying in a bed, her hair cut off short and her hazel eyes staring at the camera without any expression, as if the camera and photographer were not there. Her face looked so flat and empty, so far away, as if it hung miles above the earth and could not be bothered by anything happening on the little planet below."
Destination: Crisfield
To a certain extent, the book is kind of a road trip story. Starting just a little before the halfway point, the destination of Crisfield takes on increasingly significance. For a brief path about three-fourths of the way through, in fact, Crisfield becomes an almost totemic ideal. As such, it becomes pretty much a necessity for the author imprint its reality upon the reader’s mind through expressions of imagery:
“The business section of Crisfield lay next to the water, low buildings with big plate glass windows. The business section crowded as close as it could to the bay and looked out over the docks, as if that was where its real interest lay…They followed the coastline, which was mostly marshes. Dicey saw few houses. Then they came into Crisfield harbor, which was hidden behind a point of land. Shacks, bleached white by sunlight, leaned against one another. Piles of oyster shells made small pointed hills beside the shacks and behind them and in front of them.”
