The Nature of Fragile Things

“I close my eyes as the heady fragrance of the ocean transports me as if in a dream to Gram’s cottage in Donaghadee above the Irish Sea. I can see the house in my mind’s eye just as it was when I was young, back when life was simple.”

Meissner makes one of many associations between the weather and landscape of Sophie’s native Ireland and San Francisco. The reference to closing one’s eyes and allowing the sense of smell to take over shows Sophie relinquishing her most objective sense: sight. Instead, she immerses herself in the olfactory, which is close to memory in the brain. This indicates a wishful sense of homecoming for Sophie as she alights on this strange shore.

“And then he turns his head in my direction. Our eyes meet. Martin’s closed mouth curves into a relieved, welcoming smile, and it’s almost as if he’d read my thoughts. Yes, that half smile seems to say. You are exactly what I wanted.”

Sophie’s first encounter with Martin reveals his charm and elusiveness. The eye contact and welcoming smile show that Martin can easily win people over, while his uncanny ability to read their thoughts indicates his power over others. Still, his closed, half-smile shows that he is concealing something. Sophie is also gifted at reading people, as she can see the satisfaction on Martin’s face at finding that she fits his specification.

“I don’t have a maid, I don’t have women friends over for tea, I don’t have a husband who comes home every night, I don’t have a courtship to talk about or a wedding dress wrapped in linen in a cedar chest. I have a child but not the memory of bringing that child into the world or the joy of watching her first step or hearing her laugh or cry.”

When her neighbor Libby comes to visit, Sophie is overcome by the lack of foundations in her new life. The list of negatives emphasizes how tenuous Sophie’s new position is. Thus, despite having the accoutrements of middle-class respectability, she is akin to an imposter in her new life.

“I want Martin’s kisses. I want them so badly. But he’s not kissing me. His hands are moving across my body in every hidden place, and I feel a hundred thousand needles of delight, but he doesn’t kiss me. He is on top of me and then inside me and it is wonderful and pleasurable, beyond any pleasures I have ever known […] but there is no passion, either. When we are finished Martin still does not kiss me.”

Sophie and Martin’s lovemaking is framed by his unwillingness to kiss her, highlighting the transactional nature of their relationship. The repetition of the absent kisses shows that Sophie is aware of this at every moment, even as his expert sexual performance gives her pleasure. The cold precision of Martin’s lovemaking highlights the sense of him as a people-pleaser who is ultimately self-serving.

“All of this is enough, I tell myself, over and over. When I compare what I used to have to what I have now, surely it is.”

Sophie repeats the notion that having Kat and a life full of provisions is enough for her, despite Martin’s coldness, like a mantra. She reasons that she has more as a result of Martin’s intervention than she did without him; however, Meissner shows that the cognitive effort required of Sophie indicates her subconscious belief that Martin is letting both her and Kat down emotionally. Sophie’s character growth will arrive when she allows herself to want more.

“Belinda, no longer a statue, shakes her head. ‘It’s him.’ At the sound of her own voice the photograph slips from her hands and she falls back onto the sofa as if pushed. The frame hits the rug, and a corner splits and splinters off. The moment feels made of taffy, like it’s being pulled and stretched and thinned.”

This passage registers the shock of learning that Martin has married both Sophie and Belinda. The fragility of the picture frame holding Martin and Sophie’s wedding photo is a metaphor for the insubstantiality of their marriage. The simile likening the moment to taffy indicates the women’s surreal experience of time as they process the startling news.

“I’ll clobber Martin with an iron skillet if he tries to take Kat from me. I swear it. I don’t love him, I don’t want him, but I want this child. I love this child.”

Sophie’s passionate hold on Kat when she discovers Martin’s polygamy is expressed through short, sharp conjunctions and the repetition of keywords such as “love,” “don’t,” and “want.” Her loyalties are with her adopted daughter and not with the man she married. The image of the iron skillet refers to the instrument she used to dispatch her first husband, Colm McGough after his violence led to their unborn daughter’s death. Through this scene and others, Meissner shows how Sophie relives the past through her present.

“She doesn’t just hear, she pays attention, and I can tell by the look on her face that she fully recognizes the situation Belinda and I are in. Kat knows that her father has another wife.”

This passage reveals the extent of Kat’s precociousness. Meissner’s vagueness about the exact look on the little girl’s face indicates Sophie’s ability to read Kat’s feelings and the strong bond between them, despite not being blood relatives. Kat “fully recognizes” Sophie and Belinda’s situation and knows that her father is a polygamist. This relays to the reader Sophie’s loss of control and the feeling that she has failed to protect Kat.

“I’ve never regretted coming to America and I don’t regret answering Martin’s advertisement—not even now—but in this moment, if I could reverse time, I’d back it up an hour or two, and when the doorbell rang at half past four I would not answer it. I’d leave Belinda standing there wondering if she’s got the right house. I’d peer at her from behind the lace curtain at the sitting room window and I’d watch her walk away.”

Sophie’s only regret is her decision to open the door to Belinda, indicating that the loss of motherhood is the worst blow. The painstaking detail with which she imagines watching Belinda walk away from behind the lacy veil of the sitting room curtain gives shape to Sophie’s wish to change the laws of time. She feels as though it would have been within her grasp to make things different.

‘“How could he do that to a little girl?’ Belinda finally says, and her voice cracks with what I recognize as mother-love. She is not exactly a mother, and neither am I, I suppose, but we are both on the edge of being one. She on the inside edge, and me on the outside edge.”

This quote describes the important phenomenon of “mother-love,” which in the novel is less about a mother’s bond with her biological child and more about the feeling of nurture that takes place between women and children. While neither Belinda nor Sophie have firsthand experience of raising their own child, Belinda’s proximity to giving birth and Sophie’s time with Kat over the past year have given them visceral disgust over what Martin has done to “a little girl.” Still, the poignancy of Sophie’s tenure as a mother is expressed in her contrast of being on the outside edge of motherhood, unlike Belinda who is about to give birth.

“The next moment is a cannonball of shouting, of screaming, and of hands and arms outstretched […] I am stunned for a second by the overwhelming remembrance of a moment very much like this one, when arms had been extended, and hands and fingers had been stretched open like sea stars. I am suddenly back in Donaghadee and time seems to stand still for a second. I hear a whack-whack-whacking sound, but at the same time, I smell the tang of sea air and I feel the cold mist of evening fog.”

The conflict on the stairs, where the women and Kat encounter Martin, takes Sophie back to the image of her first husband Colm’s drowning at the water’s edge in Donaghadee. Meissner uses the senses of smell and touch to show how she is psychically transported to the Irish coastline to a similar scene of conflict. The hands stretched open like sea stars is a fragile image that hints at letting go and human vulnerability. The onomatopoeic whacking sound is Martin’s body going down the stairs.

“I do not speak of my secrets. To anyone. Not even to myself.”

Martin’s claim that he knows Sophie’s secrets elicits the internal reassurance that her secrets are closely guarded, even from herself. The declaration, conveyed in short sentences, provides a sense of intrigue. It also reminds the reader that Sophie is unreliable as the narrator of her own tale.

“But then the floor beneath me begins to tremble, and then heave, and then a deafening roar like a gale over the ocean fills my ears. For one lone second I think the earth is going to open up beneath me and swallow Martin whole to save me the trouble of having to do it later, but in the next second I know it is not just for me the world is shaking.”

Sophie initially experiences the earthquake as a form of pathetic fallacy for her fury with Martin and her desire to annihilate him. The term “pathetic fallacy” refers to the attribution of human qualities to inanimate things. The ocean-like roar refers back to the elemental force that destroyed her first husband Colm, and she imagines that the earthquake will perform a similar task with respect to her malign second husband. The realization that the earthquake is not just for her is a metaphor for how the balance of pre-earthquake life will have to be redressed universally.

“The massive city hall, that palatial block-long structure where I married Martin, comes into view and it is as though I am looking at drawings in one of Kat’s books of the ruins of the Roman Empire. All those stately columns massive and thick, are tumbled about like sticks. The dome still stands but has been stripped of its stone. It is skeletal, nearly obscene in its nakedness.”

The destroyed building where Sophie and Martin married is a metaphor for the complete annihilation of their marriage. Beyond that, it symbolizes the destruction of patriarchal civilization. The reference to Ancient Rome, a classical patriarchal civilization, both in the simile and in the powerful columns turned into fragile sticks, shows the vulnerability of all power structures and institutions. The naked obscenity of the dome transposes Sophie’s feelings about her marriage onto the structure.

“This is why I ponder if there was ever a time when Kat remembers feeling loved and cherished. Perhaps with me she did. Perhaps with me she does. Perhaps she does not trust in this love for her, because with everything that has been stolen from her, why should she?”

Kat’s silence leaves Sophie questioning whether she ever felt love. The list of “perhapses” conveys her searching doubt about the adopted daughter she loves. As the legitimacy of Sophie’s guardianship over Kat is thrown into question, she wonders what it means to mother someone, and what it takes to convey a sense of belonging.

“When people are thrown into an abyss and together they find their way out of it, they are not the same people. They are bound to one another ever after, linked together at the core of who they are because it was together that they escaped a terrible fate. It doesn’t seem like Kat and I met Belinda only last Tuesday. It seems we have always known her.”

The metaphor of the abyss refers to both Martin’s actions and the earthquake that caused Belinda to bond with Kat and Sophie. In the space of a week, they have become close as family, navigating childbirth and survival. Here, Sophie departs from her close, first-person narrative and adopts an omniscient tone, as though she is delivering a universal truth. This conveys the profundity of what she has learned.

“I don’t think love is something you can start and stop by choosing. Our hearts tell us who we will love, not the other way.”

Elliot’s pronouncement that he has no choice but to love Belinda, even though she preferred Martin, shows that he is the opposite of Martin—more emotional and less calculating. His understanding of the weakness and susceptibility of the human heart makes him more empathetic toward Belinda, who at the time had no choice but to give hers to Martin. Through Elliot, Meissner presents a more redemptive male presence in the wake of Martin’s destruction.

“I didn’t care that I was marrying a man I didn’t love. I had made the mistake of giving my heart to someone before and had been crushed, and I was none too keen to do it again. I wanted a warm home and food to eat and a child to love. I wanted more than what I had. I wanted more than what I had been left with.”

After being crushed by a man, Sophie’s hopes of romantic love have been entirely erased. Romance seems like a luxury to her, when the staples of survival and the priority of mother-love are more important. The repetition of the phrase “I wanted” at the beginning of three sentences shows the relentlessness of her basic wishes.

“I think she was too young to lose you the way she did, and she found a way to live with that loss by holding in all her words. But I think Martin was glad of her silence. I think he used his coldness and his lies to keep her too despondent and heartbroken to speak.”

Sophie’s theory reveals the punishing extent of Martin’s sadism. He has encouraged the silence that arose from a little girl’s bereavement for a mother she believes dead to keep his secrets. The phrase “holding in all her words” indicates that Sophie believes Kat had plenty to say but was too afraid to say it.

“The earth did not build the city here, nor pipe it with gas, nor construct its bowels with water mains that couldn’t withstand the natural movement of the planet. People did that. It is the nature of the earth to shift. It is the nature of fragile things to break. It is the nature of fire to burn. And just as it is the nature of men and women to build, it is also in our nature to begin again after disaster.”

Sophie’s proclamation about a sophisticated settlement built on a quake-prone fault puts the onus of destruction on human error rather than on the earth itself. In shifting, the earth is merely following its nature and causing more fragile human civilization to rupture accordingly. The repetition of the word “nature” characterizes everything that happened as inevitable. Sophie, who has already been forced to rebuild several times, experiences this phenomenon as natural.

“I start to bend down to encourage Kat to say farewell, but Candace interrupts my movement with three words to the nurse sitting across from her that stop me. ‘Close the door.’ The nurse leans forward and pulls on the handle, and the carriage door clicks shut. Candace doesn’t say good-bye and I know ‘tis so our dear Kat won’t ever regret not saying it, either.”

For much of the novel, Candace has been erratic in her maternal duties. Yet she sensitively intuits that Kat will regret not saying goodbye, if Candace says goodbye herself. Sophie’s appreciation of Candace’s gesture is conveyed in her silence and the use of the epithet “our Kat” to show how both women are mothers to the same daughter.

“But, no, he says. I’ve not been telling him the truth. I tell him I have. And he says I have been lying to him since the moment I sat down and told him my name.”

While the reader senses that Sophie has been cagey with Logan, the news that she has been lying since she told him her name has come as a shock. The conflicted back-and-forth between Sophie and the marshal is conveyed here, with the marshal making an emphatic statement and Sophie returning it in abbreviated form. The last sentence of this quote shows Sophie’s surprise that the close-guarded secret of her identity is about to be revealed.

“My tiny blossom of a girl was born that night as blue as a summer moon. I held her dead body as my vision went cloudy and as the blood continued to pour from inside me, and then I knew no more.”

The image of Sophie’s stillborn child as a “tiny blossom,” as opposed to a mature fruit, indicates the baby’s premature nature. Meanwhile, the image of a blue summer moon has a nostalgic appeal and symbolizes the impossibility of this child living. Sophie’s extreme vulnerability at this moment is shown in the loss of consciousness and the blood that pours out of her in protest at the violence that has been done.