SUMMARY
In 1989, Louisa and Hugh had been married for five years. The couple went to Rhode Island when Louisa's mother wanted her to come and clear out the barn that had housed a lot of her stuff. While Louisa is cleaning out her stuff, there's a a family motto "You never know when it will come in handy!", Hugh stays in the guest room, her old room, and s sleeping the day away. One afternoon, Louisa, Hugh and her mother had lunch on the beach where her mom hounded her about having kids stating it was "about time they had some" and "not to wait until they were ready because they would never be ready,". Louisa tried to change the subject by adding that the two of them will be going to England for a year but her mother responded by saying "the health care system is free in England." While Louisa was cleaning she found a box that contained letters over ten years old when her and her friend, Eliza, wrote to each back and forth. She held these letters near and dear to her heart. They describe Eliza's summer romance, her first love, her everything at the time, a man named Jeremy. She looked at her mother and father and remember that Clem said they had an arrangement, then looked at her marriage with Hugh and thought to herself, on multiple occasions, that they were in "trouble". Finally, when Louisa cleaned out as much as she could, or wanted to, she went to the bedroom to find Hugh asleep and realized why she wanted to keep these letters so badly.
In 1990, Clem wakes up from an on again off again coma but cannot remember about the last five weeks of her life. She remembers Jerry, her latest beau, and them two talking about people that let their lives past them by and how he wants children because having children is life. Family, doctors and nurses are coming in and out of the room but not once, that she can remember has she seen Jerry. She began thinking and she was counting all the times she has been in the hospital. Age 1: she bit through her tongue after rolling off the changing table. Age 2: she cracked her middle metatarsal, Age 4: she obtained rabbis through a barn rat. Age 7: she had an allergic reaction to blue cheese dip, Age 10: she was stung and had her eyes and ears swollen shut. Age 15: she broke into a pool, did a dive and broke her nose, Age 22: she was racing Luke on a bike when station wagon sideswiped her and left a foot long gash, later that year she had an ectopic pregnancy. Age 23: she became pregnant again then at age 30: she has head trauma, a fractured collarbone, 2 cracked ribs, 3 days being in and out of a coma, bruises and amnesia. The day the hospital releases Clem from the hospital, Louisa calls, after leaving Boston from staying with Clem to go back to her home in New York, to say she's fallen in love with another man and is going to leave Hugh.
QUOTE:
"As I read them, I realize why it thrilled me so much that summer to get them. They are love letters: letters all about love, at least how it begins," (Glass, 133)
REACTION:
Louisa thought this as she sees Hugh sleeping, not an unusual sight for her, and is wondering, for the hundredth time, what is keeping them together, why they are still together. Although this quote was thought for this scenario, it suits these two sections very well. The first section was Louisa trying to figure out her marriage in her head, comparing it to her parents and Eliza's first romance the summer of '74. The second section was Clem trying to figure out what happened to her, how she got into the hospital and why Jerry has not come to visit her. The sister have this idea of what love is in their head and are setting themselves up for disappointment and seem like they are never going to be happy.
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