Friend of My Youth

“The house was divided in an unexpected way.”

This is a literal description of the Grieves family farmhouse, but it also works as a metaphor. The Grieves family is divided, while trying to present a united front. Moreover, the real divisions are unexpected. Flora remains Ellie’s loyal caretaker, even though Ellie has married Flora’s former fiancé. It is Robert Deal—the former fiancé—who seems shut out from the intimate life of the house.

“He must have been there, he must have been sitting there in the room.”

The narrator is evoking Robert Deal, whom the narrator’s mother barely mentions, in telling the story of the Grieves sisters. The mother’s silence around this character is a prim and embarrassed one, having to do with Robert Deal’s disruptive sexuality. Yet the narrator intuits Robert Deal’s own silence and passivity as his masculine detachment from the proceedings around him. 

“The torturing, defeating, but for some minds irresistible pileup of interlocking and contradictory notions. My mother could resist it […] Ideas were not what she was curious about, ever.”

The narrator is describing the religious texts that Flora reads out loud at night to Ellie. These texts hold no interest for the narrator’s mother; she only finds them to be inappropriate bedtime stories. They interest the narrator more, as she looks for clues about both Flora and her mother. Even if the narrator is not religious herself, she is a writer and knows what it is to live by words and ideas.

“The lilacs came out, the evenings lengthened, the birds were back and nesting, my mother bloomed in everybody’s attention, about to embark on the deliciously solemn adventure of marriage.”

The narrator’s mother comes from a generation that romanticizes courtship and marriage but is silent on the topic of sex. This description of the mother’s wedding preparations, with its evocation of birds and flowers, has a dreamy eroticism about it. Because the mother is getting married under respectful circumstances—unlike other characters in this story—she can afford to indulge this eroticism.

“This strange open statement was greeted at first with pity and disapproval, then with less sympathy, as a sign of Flora’s stubbornness and eccentricity.”

Flora refuses to modernize her side of the house after Robert marries Audrey. Her refusal is very public, and her neighbors interpret it is as a form of revenge. Yet all that Flora has done is remain the same; it is Audrey Atkinson who has moved in and changed the house. The townspeople’s lack of sympathy for Flora shows the tension between Flora’s ideals and the forces of modernization. 

“The Maiden Lady. She said these words in a solemn and sentimental tone of voice I had no use for.”

The narrator is irritated by her mother’s reverent attitude towards Flora, and by reverence and sentimentality in general. She sees these emotions as feminine traps and associates them with a smothering domesticity and a prim aversion to sex. She might also be irritated by her mother’s infringing on her territory—that of a fiction writer—in stating that she could have written a novel about Flora.

“My mother did become busy with her own life and finally a prisoner in it.”

The narrator refers to her mother’s long illness, which left her trapped in her own house. This phrase also suggests that her mother’s early domesticity somehow caused her illness, as Ellie’s miscarriages seem to be related to her own illness. The phrase shows the narrator’s aversion to traditional domesticity, developed in the years she spent tending to her sick mother.

“He did it to Ellie.”

Robert Deal is an intriguing figure to the narrator for the same reason that he is an almost unmentionable figure to the narrator’s mother: because of his sexual appetite. Both the narrator and her mother, however, have a view of women as passive and helpless during the act of sex. To the narrator, this passivity is exciting, while to her mother it is simply frightening.

“What made Flora evil in my story was just what made her admirable in my mother’s—her turning away from sex.”

The narrator cannot understand Flora’s apparent lack of bitterness, and her choice to live both alone and with her family. She believes that Flora must have harbored a secret vengefulness and taken a perverse satisfaction in her sacrifice. The use of the word “evil” here shows the younger narrator’s own righteousness, which springs from her belief in honesty and independence. These are the values that she has absorbed just as much as Flora has absorbed her religious faith.

“It’s as if tendencies that seem most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, have come in as spores on the prevailing wind, looking for any likely place to land, any welcome.”

The narrator is referring to her and her mother’s different attitudes about love and sex, differences that she understands to be generational. She has realized over time that as different as she and her mother were, they were alike in their susceptibility to popular notions. The image of tendencies as floating spores has a randomness about it, one that is the opposite of the Grieves sisters’ ordered piety. It makes beliefs seem like a disease that can be caught.

“She is not surprised that I am telling her this, but she is weary of it, of me and my idea of her, my information, my notion that I can know anything about her.”

The narrator imagines an encounter with Flora in her new independent life. Even in her imagination, the narrator grants Flora mystery and acknowledges that there are limits to what she can know about her. As a younger woman, the narrator had more faith in ideas and information than she does now. She is both wiser and less certain at the moment when she is telling us this story.

“I might go into a store and find her. No, no. She would be dead a long time now.”

The narrator is referring to Flora here but might also be referring to her mother. Her momentary confusion over whether or not Flora is alive speaks to her unresolved feelings about her mother, and to her ongoing grief over her death. There are many of these temporal shifts throughout the story, creating a feeling of disorientation akin to grief.

“She changes the bitter lump of love I have carried all of this time into a phantom—something useless and uncalled for, like a phantom pregnancy.”

This quote refers to the narrator’s recurrent dream about her mother. Her mother’s sudden return in the dream to life and health, and her casual friendliness towards the narrator, strike the narrator as somehow flippant. The weight of her grief and her complex feelings towards her mother, are unacknowledged in the dream. The “bitter lump of love,” as well as the “phantom pregnancy,” refers obliquely to Ellie Grieves and to her multiple miscarriages.”