How Far She Went

From the opening lines of the concluding story of the collection, the third-person omniscient narrator makes references to the protagonist’s impending suicide attempt. The protagonist, Angelina, is compared to a dying tree in winter—by the time one realizes it is not simply winter-barren but actually dying, it is too late.

The story opens as Angelina attends Sunday service. Her mind races through the minute details of her misery—the lost passion between her and her husband, Chick; the stillborn baby; the nightmares about her dead mother’s casketed corpse making its “inexorable progress toward the dark, the sealing, the lowering, the losing sight” (104); and the self-inflicted, irritating pressure to provide her daughter, Bonnie, with “Santa, and the Easter Bunny [...] and happily ever after all [her] life” (110).

She recalls the lump in her breast and the disappointment when Chick told her it was benign. As she proceeds through the daily details of a comfortable life, she becomes exceedingly uncomfortable. She hints to her friend, “I bet I could tell you I was going home and pipe a bottle of Valium” (112). However, as the narrator tells the reader, “But Angelina didn’t have her mind made up; she was still trying” (113).