The Truth According to Us

“I dearly loved to walk down the street with my aunt Jottie. When I went alone, I was a child, and grown-ups ignored me accordingly. Sometimes, of course, they’d stop and offer me improving advice like tie your shoelaces before you trip and knock out those teeth of yours, but for the most part, I was a worm in mud. Beneath notice, as they say in books. When I walked with Jottie, it was a different matter. Grown-ups greeted me politely, and that was nice. That was real pleasant. But the best thing, the very best thing about walking through town with my arm through Jottie’s was listening to her recount the secret history of every man, woman, dog and flowerbed we passed, sideways out of the corner of her mouth so that only I could hear. Those were moments of purest satisfaction to me. Why? Because when she told me those secrets, Jottie made me something better than just a temporary grown-up. She made me her confidante.”

This passage provides a first glimpse of the intimate, mutually respectful relationship between Willa and Jottie, which will be very important throughout the novel as a whole. It also illustrates Willa’s sense of her lesser, marginalized social status as a child and her longing to penetrate the secret world of adults. Here as elsewhere, Willa associates adulthood with knowledge—and with shared secrets.

“Same as ever, same as ever, Jottie thought, sinking into her shredding seat. She watched her nieces commence their nightly rite of selecting chairs. They were young and they didn’t understand. They believed that one chair was better than another. They believed that it was important to make distinctions, to choose, to discern particulars. Like crows, they picked out bits from each evening and lugged them around, thinking that they were hoarding treasure. They remembered the jokes, or the games, or the stories, not knowing that it was all one, that each tiny vibration of difference would be sanded, over the course of years, into sameness. It doesn’t matter, Jottie assured herself. They’ll get to it. Later, they’ll know that sameness is the important part.”

As Jottie watches her nieces squabble over chairs, she reflects on the differences between their youthful passion and curiosity and her own placid dependency on habit and routine. At this early point in the novel, Jottie is deliberately numbing her own grief for Vause and suppressing her doubts about Felix’s conduct. As events unfold and she returns to her memories of her own childhood, she will restore some of the childlike qualities that she observes here within herself.

“‘I wish we could be like everybody else. I get real tired of lying.’ It was a special distillation of shame, to have to lie about your family, and a special distillation of agony to learn of it. Jottie’s mind flickered over her own heedless childhood, recalling the protection and authority she hadn’t even known she enjoyed. How light and lordly she’d been, how free, how certain that her happiness was the product of her own virtues and powers. How wrong she’d been. How foolish. And how very, very lucky.

If only Willa could have what I had, Jottie mourned. If only she could be so certain and proud. It was an illusion every child should have. And Willa was losing it, right before her eyes.”

Jottie recalls childhood as a period of wrong-headed but blissful and blessed self-assuredness. She is heartbroken to see the teenage Willa prematurely losing this innocence as a consequence of the family’s precarious situation.