Wildwood

She is standing in front of the medicine-cabinet mirror, naked from the waist up, her bra slung about her hips like a torn sail, the scar on her back as vast and inconsolable as the sea.

In this scene where Lola is summoned to the bathroom by her mother to feel for a knot in her breast, the similes Diaz uses here compare her mother to a distressed vessel. We learn that her mother has breast cancer that leads to a double mastectomy, years of sickness, and her eventual death. This language helps create a more vivid scene with stronger emotional impact. It also foreshadows the reveal of Belicia’s past trauma, wherein it is revealed she was beaten and burned.

A knot just beneath her skin, tight and secretive as a plot. And at that moment, for reasons you will never quite understand, you are overcome by the feeling, the premonition, that something in your life is about to change.

The theme of change recurs in this passage, and it’s attached to the threat of an ending. Lola’s mother has guided her hand to feel the knot in her breast. She doesn’t understand the feeling she gets and doesn’t understand yet what the knot means. Not only is her life about to change, but also her mother’s life will change soon. This is a foreshadowing of the drastic and tragic events to come.

She was my Old World Dominican mother who had come alone to the United States and I was her only daughter, the one she had raised up herself with the help of nobody, which meant it was her duty to keep me crushed under her heel.

Here, Lola resigns herself to what she thinks it means to be her mother’s daughter. A sarcastic tone underlies acceptance of the circumstance. Instead of pride and resoluteness about raising a daughter alone, there is bitterness and resentment that manifests as anger and violence. It also speaks to a cultural expectation of familial disfunction and abuse, which causes a rift between Lola and what she believe Dominican culture is.

I was fourteen and desperate for my own patch of world that had nothing to do with her. I wanted the life that I used to see when I watched “Big Blue Marble” as a kid, the life that drove me to make pen pals and borrow atlases from school.

Lola longs for life away from her mother and her home in New Jersey. She has wanderlust and feels a constant need to escape. She surrounds herself with the tools of her fantasies such as books about running away, TV programs featuring faraway lands, and maps that show her the world. These desires are subtly represented as undeveloped and childish, while very earnest.

If you didn’t grow up like I did then you don’t know and if you don’t know it’s probably better you don’t judge. You don’t know the hold our mothers have on us, even the ones that are never around – especially the ones that are never around. What it’s like to be the perfect Dominican daughter, which is just a nice way of saying a perfect Dominican slave.

Diaz breaks the fourth wall with this passage to admonish readers who might have less empathy at this point in the story for the protagonist. Lola has nothing positive or loving to say about her mother, who is battling breast cancer and raising two children alone. Their relationship is contentious, and Lola wants nothing more than to get away. Diaz again applies a cultural context that indicates that perhaps this is the way it is with Dominican mothers and daughters, and others shouldn’t quickly question or cast aspersions on Lola’s predicament.

I couldn’t help it. I tried to keep it down, but it just flooded through all my quiet spaces. It was a message more than a feeling, a message that tolled like a bell: Change, change, change.

Allusions to life and death are in these two lines. The first conjures a sense of blood flowing through the veins, life welling up. The tolling bell in the second line warns of death to come. The bell also signifies time. In this case, it’s time for a change and change is coming soon. Lola is waiting for both the life for her and death for her mother.

Her rage filled the house, like flat stale smoke. It got into everything, into our hair and our food, like the fallout they told us about in school that would one day drift down soft as snow.

Belicia’s anger is compared to deadly radioactive ash that kills slowly. Flat stale smoke means at some point, there was a fire. Fire is a frequent symbol in the story, representing both individual and intergenerational anger. They are all living in what remains of the raging fire of her anger, and they cannot escape it.

And finally what we’d all been waiting for happened. My mother announced at dinner, quietly, I want you both to listen to me: the doctor is running more tests on me. Oscar looked like he was going to cry. He put his head down. And my reaction? I looked at her and said, Could you please pass the salt?

Lola is callous and unresponsive to the news that her mother’s cancer is probably back. She says they had been waiting for it, not dreading or fearing it. She includes everyone in her apathy, even though Oscar exhibits sadness. Here is where Lola can dish out her measure of anger toward her mother. Lola exhibits every bit of rebellion and resentment she feels. This shows how Belicia’s abuse has left her spiteful and unsympathetic, feelings that will later be complicated as Lola comes to understand her mother’s situation.