A.M.’s Comments (group member since Jul 09, 2020)

A.M.’s comments from the DUCKS reading support group group.

I'm calling this one “Somebody else’s spitball love note.”

In this section, Narrator starts by worrying about all the mights that might happen, and then goes into a long list of things she thinks definitely will happen: astronomical phenomena, weather, global warming, Jane Fonda, cruelty and brutality, essentials will get bought—then, a shopping list—then back to things that definitely will happen again.

There has been some discussion of whether the stream of consciousness element is realistic, but this section, to me, shows it at its strongest. The list is also a kind of reprise of all the themes Narrator has been thinking about throughout the book. Honestly, she's a walking musical.

In a lion interlude, we see the lion cubs at the zoo, with the mother lion still searching for them, still going too near humans, whom she naturally loathes.

After the interlude, we are back to regular Narrator narration. She’s found a wood pigeon egg, which leads her to think about Leo’s iguana that he had with his first wife, Sally, which laid a bunch of eggs in the bathtub. Apparently you can eat iguana eggs and now I have literally no appetite, thanks Lucy. WE LEARN that Narrator kissed Leo while he was still with Sally, ooooh!

Narrator wishes her family were more cultured, but they can’t afford to go to the opera, which is what she would prefer to do. Having said that, they are doing a great job of reading the foundational classics (and Narrator goes searching for Persuasion to see if she can find the part where Captain Wentworth gives his hazelnut speech, which isn’t something a non-reader would be likely to do).

Narrator and Leo know a couple, Marty and Jan, who have now split, and Narrator is so upset that Marty calls Jan a bitch, when in fact he is a coke addict and she continues to pay his credit card debts, even though she has now left him. Narrator has mentioned before how much men hate getting left in a relationship, and how much of the violence that women face is from their estranged partners (she calls it “estranger danger”). This she compares to Trump—he might get grumpy enough to nuke America. Given how much of this book has been far-seeing, I dread to think!

Amazingly, Narrator has (probably) had a 35-year-old spitball love note in her ear since she was in primary school, and it has just been found in the process of getting her ears syringed. Americans, I had never heard of ear syringing before coming to the UK, and I wonder if this is something you know about or if this is another Britishism.

Anyway, the spitball takes her back to her school days, with heroic tadpole-saving teachers and terrible recorder classes and Sweethearts mottos (there is a similar candy called Love Hearts in the UK, by the way—bigger, less stone-hard, fizzy).

While she’s making her cinnamon rolls we learn that some people they know, a little boy and his mother, have been killed (among others) by a guy with an AR-15 semi-automatic in a random shooting incident in a store. Naturally her children are devastated. The guy, of course, has a history of domestic violence.

Gillian Watch: Gillian helps Narrator bandage up her cut finger/hand.

Stopping at "the fact that maybe I just hate words starting in “ex”, but I don't like that U sound either, extrude, the fact that I don't mind “explain” or “excellent” or “Excalibur” or “excelsior,” so I guess it's the U sound that bugs me,"—which follows a small discussion about Sandy Hook.

Turandot

Only a few this time for most of the section, not much new, and until the end mostly very oblique references rather than overt thoughts.

The Accidental Tourist
It’s Complicated
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
Airplane!
Jim Bludso
Fantastic Voyage
On Golden Pond
The Grapes of Wrath
The Lady Eve
12 Angry Men
Adam’s Rib
Bigger Than Life
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)
The King and I
All that Heaven Allows
On Golden Pond
Two for the Seesaw (?)
The African Queen
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
Desk Set
Bringing Up Baby

Is the black-and-white film where Donald Pleasence is stuck in a lighthouse Cul-de-sac? It’s not actually a lighthouse though.

This one’s called “SHTF TEOTWAWKI WROL”

All the kids need the toilet at exactly the other end of the mall from the toilets. This is a true thing. While they’re in there, a flash flood happens.

After a lion interlude (more later), they are back home, though they had to leave their car at the mall (with the pies in it) because the whole entrance/exit ramp had collapsed. This has, of course, been extensively foreshadowed by the various discussions of bridges that are invisibly rotting away.

While they had been at the mall figuring out what to do, a HOUSE came floating down the river ON FIRE and then A CAT jumped out and PROBABLY DROWNED (and this is definitely a metaphor for 2020 even if this was written before it happened). So Narrator called Ronny to rescue them—she knew Leo wouldn’t be able to make it. Ronny had also seen all kinds of devastation in the flood. The pies will have to be remade for her clients, but they will at least get eaten at home.

I'm surprised a bit to learn that Cathy (and new husband Art) are doomsday preppers, though I shouldn’t be really all that surprised. This is Ohio we are talking about. I always like reading lists of the kind of stuff people store in their “bug out bags,” and this list is no exception.

There’s a certain amount of privilege and assumption in this kind of prepping; you need the money to spend on things that may not happen, you need the space to store them, you need the assurance that when you go there will be lots of space to get to the place you’re going.

None of this can happen in our house here in north London; even if I had the money to spend on high-tech slingshots and night-vision monocles and fold-out cots just to shove in a closet, I don’t have a closet to put them in—and if something happened here that meant we had to leave, we’d be crushed by the weight of the other 9 million people who would also be trying to evacuate to the midlands or Wales or whatever all at the same time.

What’s really interesting is that we think of Narrator as constantly scared, but she points out that Cathy seems far more scared than she is—she and Art even go for try-outs in a “down-grid scenario” while Narrator here just goes “ah, well, my pies are wrecked, gotta make some more” when things actually go wrong.

In fact, Narrator didn’t even realize she was going through “an ordeal” when she got trapped in the floods in the mall—she wasn’t scared, she just got on with it. Her clients, though, seem genuinely worried for her.

Now she’s got to clean the house because James and Fresia are coming over. While she’s doing so, she muses on the best way to raise kids: they’re not safe at school, or summer school, or summer camps, and homeschooling isn’t great for them, and even if you could protect them throughout their childhoods, they still might grow up and marry someone boring and live miles and miles away.

Apocalypse is now on her mind, even in her dreams. And in her waking life, wherever her kids are, and wherever Leo is, and wherever Narrator is, she feels they are all at risk of getting shot by someone. This seems unrealistic except that it’s so, so realistic. Gun culture is one of the main reasons I don’t want to move back to America (healthcare being the other one).

We learn also that Leo hates travelling too; they hate being away from each other, and when he has to go he gets gloomy and refuses to pack until the last minute. Poor old Leo is a kind of Cassandra figure, travelling around warning people about bridges that are going to collapse, and nobody taking any action.

Even if guns and bridges don’t kill them, their water might: they filter what they drink, but they bathe in their unfiltered water, and their chickens drink it and so on, and she sometimes uses the unfiltered water in her baking, so maybe it’s bad for her customers—and Narrator wonders, too, if the water contributed to her cancer, which was apparently rare at her age.


In lion news, the poor mother lion is devastated at the loss of her babies and looks for them ceaselessly, getting weaker as she goes, and moving more and more into human spaces. This piece now intersects with Narrator’s life, as she reads the news that three cougar cubs have been rescued and sent to the Columbus Zoo. (I wonder if the lioness has intersected with us before: she encountered a man with a doe he had shot, directly after Narrator mentioned that Ronny was specifically going out to shoot a doe.) Anyway, the lions give Narrator something more to worry about, which she definitely needs. (!)

Gillian Watch: All the other kids plus Narrator get to say what their three wishes would be, but Gillian doesn’t decide fast enough so we never get to know.

Jake Watch: Narrator is now making all his food into O shapes and he’s eating it!

In depressing trivia, Narrator notices a bunch of 88 stickers and doesn’t know what they mean. 88 is a neo-Nazi reference, if you also don’t know. H = 8th letter of the alphabet; 88 = HH = Heil Hitler.

Do we really reckon Narrator looks like Dr Oliver of the Bath Olivers?


Homework: read more about the lady with the self-cleaning house.

Today we're ending at “the fact that Jane Fonda is not shy, and neither is Joyce Carol Oates, the fact that I’m shy, but Rosa Parks was shy too,” which is just after a fairy distressing little section about school/church shootings (but also Cosmopolitan).

Shadow of a Doubt
The Best Years of Our Lives
Mrs Miniver
All the President’s Men
Midnight Cowboy
Vertigo
It’s a Wonderful Life
Mr Smith Goes to Washington
Rear Window
Casablanca
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
Two Women
It’s Complicated
Captain Phillips
Sleepless in Seattle
Hope Springs
The Accidental Tourist
Autumn Leaves
Mildred Pierce
All that Heaven Allows

Narrator has it right when she remembers that the typing movie is Autumn Leaves, but she suggests “oh maybe it was Laura, or Mona” too. Laura is a classic film (1944), not too sure about “Mona” (there is an adult movie with that title from 1970—possibly not to Narrator’s taste!).

Mommy Dearest
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

This one is called “jerkosaurus.”

Speaking of jerkosaurus, we hear a LOT more in here about Frank than we have before: he has been totally missing for 6 years, he has never paid child support, he used to come around but nobody enjoyed the visit.

Interesting to learn that Frank’s mother lives (lived) on a reservation—so Stacy is part Native American. Narrator is well-versed in Native American history, where Frank wasn’t—but she is, after all, a historian. (I read a review that asserted that she taught English literature. Did that reviewer . . . read this book?)

Oh god, as well has her sit-me-down-upon cancer and her HOIF (hands out in front--I can't remember what the other term was) injury, she fell from a horse too? Oh honey, get some bubble wrap clothes.

I’m starting to warm to Leo after an initial frosty feeling toward him from the way Narrator kept trying to excuse certain things he had done or said. He doesn’t seem a bad guy after all, really, and she clearly does enjoy having him in her life. He takes care of everyone when they’re sick, and he told Narrator she’s his heaven.

It sounds like Narrator might be thawing out too (obviously for the same reasons). Buuuuut . . . out of nowhere, she does have a fleeting thought about Chuck, and a brief fantasy about going back into the past to get together with him again.

More discussion of animals, how we deal with animals as commodities, how milk is manufactured, and so on. If Narrator isn’t vegan by the end of this book I’ll be mildly surprised.

Narrator’s still down on herself as a wife and mother, but she likes her kids so much she sort of wishes she had even more, and considers what it would be like to adopt five little girls under the age of 6. Right here, just over halfway through the book, is where she’s lost me!

After a reverie about school shootings, we get another lion bit. The lioness has killed a boar for dinner, and HER BABIES HAVE BEEN KIDNAPPED OMG!!!!

The lion cubs’ kidnapping is so shocking that it seems hardly right that Narrator is still tootling along calmly inside her own head, but she is. She’s been to the gynecologist for her pap smear and her itch, and now she’s just musing on starfish and jigsaw puzzles and bridges as usual.

The bit where she’s trying to get the kids out of the house to go to the mall is very real. For some reason I had the idea that Ellmann doesn’t have children, but because she is so exactly on point with some of the specifics around child-rearing, I had to re-google—and in fact it looks like she does have a daughter. What’s especially interesting is that her daughter was a teenager when Ellmann met her current husband (according to this article in The Age, anyway), and she had to get used to having a stepfather, much like Stacy (though Stacy was a fair bit younger). That article also mentions how Ellmann’s father was surprisingly supportive of her pregnancy, much like Narrator’s.

When they finally get to the mall, it’s all action, with Stacy meeting her friends, and the younger kids wanting to play on the escalators, and everyone wanting hot dogs, and strangers talking way too loudly about their goiters. After some light body-shaming, Narrator starts thinking about the oldies who are there for exercise . . . and we are finished for today.

We learn in this part that Narrator missed Abby’s funeral because Ben had the measles, and now her cousin Barry won’t speak to her. Yes, I know this kind of family drama very well indeed.

Finally, I laughed when Narrator almost forgot Gillian’s name; I was thinking about this book just the other day and how Gillian really is a kind of lost middle child; I know a lot about Stacey and Ben and Jake, but Gillian is just filling in space in the background (and I don’t mean that Ellmann hasn’t done a good job there—in fact, quite the opposite. I think Gillian is doing exactly what she is supposed to be doing).

And yes of course I am behind--on Ducks. I'm ahead in my work and personal life, though. As ever, please feel free to chip in ahead of me if you want! I'll be here tomorrow.

Sandra wrote: "Well, and that's one complaint. The other main problem I have is wondering if this is really "stream of consciousness". I've been more mindful of how my mind works (how meta) and when I go about my..."

I also wondered about not staying in the car, but I think eventually I came down to the idea that if she stayed in the car people might not realize she was in there and required help--it might just look like an abandoned car.

I agree about the stream of consciousness to an extent; I'm not sure any average person's real stream of consciousness would make a good novel--in my opinion, though, it's a good novelized representation of a thoughtful consciousness.

I think I do repeat words to myself and sometimes play with them and rhyme them, but I do totally agree that I think it would have benefitted from more overt cooking thoughts, since she is actually cooking. I have actually been hearing my own internal monologue a little differently since beginning reading this and I do think about the task at hand, in words, quite a lot (whereas before I might have argued that routine tasks happen silently in my head--it turns out they don't).

Lee wrote: "You didn't mention what raised my eyebrows the most in this section"

OH YEAH! I totally meant to mention that but it got cut out of my notes somehow. Yes--she has mentioned that she wishes it happened more often but they're both terrible at initiating. So, good work Narrator and Leo.

Lee wrote: "I had a pet white rat at Hendrix, adopted from the psychology lab. We named her Svetlana."

Did I know Svetlana? She sounds like a sweetie. Mind you, the one experience I remember involving white rats at Hendrix involved a snake. Possibly not a story to tell at this moment!

Ending at "the fact that Lawrence Weiler's ninety-eight-year-old mom drives from Queens to Manhattan once a week to have her hair done, the fact that she wasn't much of a driver even when she could see and hear," which follows a short bit about oldsters getting their daily exercise at a mall (this is really a thing, by the way, if you didn't know that because you are not American).

Madama Butterfly

Shane
White House Down
Miracle on 34th Street
Witness
The Fugitive
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
The Lady Vanishes
It’s Complicated
Casablanca
All the President’s Men
Deception
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
North by Northwest
The Apartment
The Odd Couple
All That Heaven Allows
The Stepford Wives
The Graduate
Broadcast News
Hannah and her Sisters
Die Hard I
Die Hard II
The Fugitive
The Bourne Identity
Some Like It Hot
Shadow of a Doubt
The Third Man

She's VERY into It's Complicated, isn't she?

This section can only really be called “halfhearted pickler.”

Before we go any further: YES I figured out Jake only likes O-shaped food before Narrator did! WOOOO!!

Just quickly: The things Ronny asks (can you get to London by car, are Paris and London the same city, etc.) are completely real and believable things that someone like Ronny would ask. My own cousin (whom I adore, god love her), when I first moved to the UK, said that I was really brave to go somewhere where they don’t speak English—then asked what language they did speak in England.

This section talks a lot about motherhood, how you lose your identity when you have small kids, then spend a lot of time trying to claw it back without their noticing; how she loved her mother so much and didn’t necessarily get the same in return, and how she feels she might be doing the same to her kids (though to me she seems very warm and caring).

Lion interlude: the lioness is teaching her kids about the danger of humans especially. It seems she herself nearly got shot by some after they killed her deer.

After the lions, it seems we have moved on to a different day (because the kids aren’t up yet), but the theme has continued: Narrator is crying. She feels that she is a criminally neglectful person, and she continues the theme of feeling guilty for her mother’s death, as if she had the capacity to prevent it or even to be her caregiver while she also was the single parent of a small child.

It turns out Narrator and Leo had an argument the night before and she might be a little hungover. On top of it all, it’s raining outside. She needs some antidepressants and a few grief counselling sessions—but, hey, don’t we all. She’s also on the verge of going vegan. Stacy will be delighted!

Speaking of Stacy, Narrator goes into Stacy’s room to look for glasses to collect, and she finds a wide-ranging and hyper-educational sex education pamphlet. I wish I could see this particular pamphlet for myself; it sounds like I have a lot to learn!

Back to lioness: the cubs and their mother accidentally stalked a female jogger. The lioness decided she didn’t actually want to eat her, but try telling the jogger that. In what would have been an incredible and terrifying moment for the woman, the lioness came close enough for their faces to touch before leaving.

Last, in terms of story, we learn that Narrator has been ill and taken a cold remedy that has unfortunately made her far worse than she was without it.

There are a couple of parts about teachers who are cruel to students: Narrator’s Mommy got shaken by a nun, and her own mother went to the school and told that nun off. Contrast with Narrator, who heard a gym teacher verbally abusing a kid once but didn’t tell that teacher off or even mention it to the principal. She seems so frightened of what might happen if she stands up for someone or something in real life, though I thinks she really desperately wants to (as does sometimes happen in her dreams).

Last but not least: in this section we got the titular story: Narrator’s mother nearly drowned while chasing ducks in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where she was raised. She was saved by Abby, her bigger (but not very big) sister.

Speaking of Mommy, I’m very interested in Mommy’s backstory, with her money-grubbing exes and gay fiances!

Oh, also, really last this time, here’s an article about those people who literally worship guns and Trump.

Homework: watch "It's Complicated." You've probably seen it before, but I think you have to watch it again and again and again . . .

Once you've read this, you'll be halfway through! More than halfway, actually because maybe I should have mentioned that about half the final section is a glossary expanding the abbreviations from the text. So maybe you could have been referring to those all along, oops. Better late than never, I suppose.

Today we are going to finish at "the fact that diabetics with no insurance dilute their insulin to make it go farther," which follows a discussion about a really bad cold Narrator once had, and a horrible medicine she took to treat it.

Fanny Cradock’s Humble Emergency Aspic

INGREDIENTS
one 10 1/2 oz tin of consommé
14 1/2 fl oz and 1 fl oz of cold water
4 tablespoons of sherry
strained juice of 1/2 lemon
1 generous oz powdered gelatine.

METHOD
Soften gelatine in 1 fl oz water. Mix all remaining ingredients together. Stir in gelatine and stir over ice until syrupy when using as a coating or masking agent or for locking in tops or top and sides of special savoury decorative mixtures.

Individual Vegetable Aspics Set in Dariole Moulds
Oil moulds lightly. Pour in sufficient syrupy aspic to cover base thoroughly. Leave until set. Arrange cooked peas and/or tiny fancy shapes in cooked carrot over set aspic. Spoon sufficiently syrupy aspic over to lock in vegetable pattern without disarranging it. Leave until set. Fill up with syrupy aspic. Unmould when set. Neatly cut scraps of cooked French beans, overlapping unskinned slices of cucumber, and sections of tomato etc. may also be used.

So many for this section, lots of repeats, but here we go:

It’s a Wonderful Life
Tess
Annie Get Your Gun
Oklahoma
Fiddler on the Roof
High Society
White Christmas
Singin’ in the Rain
An American in Paris
State Fair
My Fair Lady
The Sound of Music
Grease
Dirty Dancing
Mary Poppins
The Music Man
The King and I
Marnie
Brokeback Mountain
Roger & Me
Casablanca
Deception
Double Indemnity
There’s Always Tomorrow
Some Like It Hot
The Wizard of Oz
Bigger Than Life
The Philadelphia Story
The Quiet Man
Airplane!
Holiday (1938)
Desk Set
Adam’s Rib
On Golden Pond
Bringing Up Baby
Air Force One
The Contender
White House Down
Niagara
Rebel Without a Cause
It’s Complicated
The Accidental Tourist
Song of Love

Cats
Oliver!
Hamilton
Avenue Q

I’m calling this section “afternoon dainties for Republicans.”

A personal note right here at the beginning: It’s a Wonderful Life is one of my favorite films of all time. I’ve seen it countless times and can quote it extensively. I feel that Christmas isn’t really Christmas without a viewing of it at least once—but my husband and children will not watch it. Last year I had good luck getting the kids into Home Alone (which they loved) and we went to visit the A Christmas Story house in Ohio, so I think maybe we will try that one again this year. Maybe next year I can get them into It’s A Wonderful Life, ahead of an eventual introduction to George C Scott as Scrooge (though the Muppets can do for now).

In this part, Narrator seems to start off reading a recipe book trying to figure out what to do for dinner. I can’t work out which cookbook Leo gave her, but I do know Fanny Cradock has a recipe for emergency aspic, which I have shared in the Recipes thread.

(Quick lion update: the baby lions are getting porcupine for dinner.)

It’s funny how Narrator says they fast-forward through all the “nun stuff” in The Sound of Music. I do love The Sound of Music, but I have a blu-ray that specifically lets you play JUST the music bits, which is how I introduced the children to the film when they were too small to be interested in the story.

SO MUCH thinking about musicals and actors and actresses and storylines and then yet another assertion that “I don’t really like these musicals” YES YOU DOOOO

It seems that Narrator has a bit of a personal itch, which nags her throughout this, and she reckons she can discuss it with her gynecologist on Tuesday when she has her Pap smear. This later leads her to think about a particularly horrible bit of police brutality.

She’s also just been intimidated by two teenage boys on bikes while she was walking alone. She has the totally misguided idea that she would be been like a total mother bear (mother lion?) if they had tried that when Jake was there. I really don’t think she would have kicked the boys over, but she seems to think so.

Looking through the freezer (presumably still trying to figure out what to make for dinner) we get a picture of what’s already there. Holy macaroni, they’ve got food for months!—as well as Ben’s water samples and things that need the wax cleared off them, etc.

Making four cakes, 80 cinnamon rolls, and six pies, she thinks how it’s (unfair? interesting?) that making food for people and motherhood are both highly pressured, skilled, responsible work, but nobody seems to notice, they just take it for granted that food will be safe and kids will too. This is an interesting point in the current environment, and Esther Walker (Coren) wrote a blog post about this very issue just a few days ago, the gist of which is: mothers specifically are taking on far too much thanks to COVID-19, and nobody has noticed, and nobody is advocating for them.

Despite all this work, which she recognizes as work, she still feels like a failure, and feels that Leo is going to tell her off for being idle, which she obviously isn’t. It’s all down to Narrator’s daddy issues, of course—and she comes close to recognizing that too.

In the second lion interlude, the cubs are getting bigger, hunting for meat, exploring, but still too little to survive without their mother—and we learn that she is now never alone. I feel you, lion lady.

There’s also a lot about Stacy, and how hard it is having an adolescent girl in the house, and how that relates to violent action movies and horror films. I like Leo’s theory that there always has to be a teenage girl in an action film, the modern version of a helpless woman tied to the railroad tracks.

Toward the end of the section: RONNY IS HERE! Oh man, Narrator is so annoyed; she’s not in the mood to see anyone because she’s in the middle of her pie baking and she’s sweaty and covered in flour. She’s absolutely NOT inviting him in, yet he keeps yakking on. Saved by the bell, though: her pie timer goes off. He’s a real pest, Ronny, laughing at her floury face and talking too much and never taking the hint.

She feels guilty for not wanting to spend time with him, but 1. She doesn’t like him 2. She is busy 3. He says stupid shit. I hope she never gives him a cup of coffee. She needs one of those doorbells where you can see who is at the door before deciding whether to let on that you’re at home.

Homework: Make an emergency aspic, but only if you have an actual emergency. Let us know how it helped.