现代大学英语精读第二版参考用书.doc

Unit 8
Housewifely Arts
Megan Mayhew Bergman

Additional Background Information

What is this story about? One answer is simply that it is about love. Because of the protagonist’s strong maternal love for her son, Ike, she worries about genetic weaknesses she might have passed on to him—“cancer genes, hay fever, high blood pressure, perhaps a fear of math”, plus being undersized for his age making him an easy target for bullies. Being a single parent, she knows that she is all her son has. She takes care to shelter him from bad examples and possible harm. The desire to be a good mother, to help her child grow up happy, healthy, and productive is so intense that she is sometimes haunted by nightmares.

The experience of parenting her child gradually makes the protagonist more aware of her relationship with her mother:

Will you love me forever? I think to myself. Will you love me when I’m old? If I go crazy? Will you be embarrassed by me? Avoid my calls? Wash dishes when you talk to me on the phone, roll your eyes, lay the receiver down next to the cat?

These were exactly the things she did to her mother. Loving her son, she finally realizes how much her parents also loved her. Her father’s love was easier to understand. He tried his best to give her opportunities in life, but when she failed in the year at a private college, which he had funded for her with considerable difficulty, he did not judge or reproach her. She loved her father, but she regarded her mother as cold and harsh and fought constantly with her, reacting like her former self, the rebellious teenager, being neither mature nor compassionate in looking after her mother in old age, understanding her, forgiving her weaknesses, and loving her.

But now that her mother is dead, she begins increasingly to miss her, and the decision to drive nine hours with her son for the sake of hearing her mother’s voice again through the imitations of Carnie, the African parrot, shows how much she needs this connection. “I realize how badly I need a piece of my mother. A scrap, a sound, a smell—something.” She knows she has not been a good daughter, and the parrot her mother loved and which she hated so much, always seemed to come between them. Now, however, Carnie has become her only avenue to the kind of memory she craves. But the bird does not give her that satisfaction, remaining completely silent. Perhaps it could not forgive her unkind treatment of it in the past.

Nonetheless, the journey proves successful. In the tradition of the American “road trip”, another way of thinking about this story, the protagonist does not merely make an actual journey with her son in a car, during which various things happen along the way, she also makes a personal, emotional journey in which she achieves a measure of enlightenment. It is a typical feature of “road trip” journeys that they teach the characters things about themselves that they did not previously know.

Driving toward home, they stop at the house in which the protagonist grew up–- “a deserted, plain house for plain folks…”
…I lead him to the back of the house, down the hallway which still feels more familiar to me than any I know…I remove the valances Mom made in the early eighties, dried bugs falling from the folds of the fabric into the sink below. These are the things with which she made a home. Her contributions to our sense of place were humble and put forth with great intent, crafts which took weeks of stitching and unstitching, measuring, cutting, gathering. I realize how much in the home was done by hand and sweat. My father had laid the carpeting and linoleum. Mom had painted the same dinner chairs twice, sewed all the window treatments…I scan the kitchen and picture Mom paying bills, her perfect script, the way she always listed her occupation with pride: homemaker…
Recalling how her parents had created a home that she describes to Ike by saying, “This was a beautiful house”, she understands that her parents were not demonstrative people, not people who talked about love, but people who had shown it to her in all their actions and these things they had made. And here, also, she finds the clear recollections of her mother that she had been seeking: “… Now I can hear my mother everywhere—in the kitchen, in my bedroom, on the front porch…”

This visit also helps the protagonist to make a major decision around which one part of the plot is constructed: should she and Ike move to Connecticut, a state to which her firm has offered to transfer her? Ike is reluctant.
“…What if we live here forever? He asked. People used to do that, I said. Lived in one house their entire life. My mother, for instance…”

In revisiting the house of her childhood, she has grasped the profound sense of home that growing up in this single place has given her. She concludes:

“Together, we can make a solid grilled cheese, prune shrubs, clean house. Together, maybe we’re the housewife this house needs. Maybe our best life is here.”

And, significantly, she comes, finally, to a true understanding of her mother’s courage and strength, granting her respect and admiration: “Steamrolled by the world, but in the face of defeat, she threatened us all.” And the last three sentences of the story—

My heart, she’d said. I can turn it off.
For years, I’d believed her.
But I know the truth now. What maniacs we are—sick with love, all of us.

—make clear her final realization that her mother loves and has always loved her, and that she, too, loves and has always loved her mother.

Structure of the Text
Part I (Paras. 1-11)
The protagonist introduces herself and tells us that she is driving nine hours with her 7-year-old son so that she can hear her mother’s voice again.

Part II (Paras. 12-22)
The protagonist describes how she had to sell her mother’s house and how the house brought back memories of her dead mother with her African parrot.

Part III (Paras. 23-34)
On their way to the Zoo, the protagonist and her son come to a rest stop and what she sees makes her think about her responsibilities as a mother.

Part IV (Paras. 35-51)
The protagonist reminisces about how she first saw the parrot at her mother’s home and how they developed a hostile relationship from the very beginning.

Part V (Paras. 52-58)
The protagonist tells her son where they are going and for what purpose. We learn from this section what kind of person her son’s father is and how she became a single parent.

Part VI (Paras. 59-65)
The protagonist’s son, Ike, tells her a story about his classmate Louis’ crazy mother and this once again makes her keenly aware of her desire to protect her son against even the knowledge that such people exist.

Part VII (Paras. 66-97)
This is a most revealing and touching part of the story in which we learn the reasons for the intense disagreements between the protagonist and her mother. She does not understand why her mother often appears harsh and cold, unlike her father, who was kind and did not judge her, nor can she understand why her mother gave so much of her care and attention to a bird so soon after her father’s death.

Part VIII (Paras. 98-110)
The protagonist and her son check into an inn and there she remembers how her mother cried over her grandmother’s death. She also hears in the news about a python strangling a toddler, which reminds her of a video of a similar event Ike’s father showed her. The fear that this could really happen to her son keeps her awake that night.

Part IX (Paras. 111-123)
In this section, the protagonist recalls how cruelly she hurt her mother’s feelings over the parrot when it was time to send her mother to a nursing home.

Part X (Paras. 124-143)
These memories show why the protagonist misses her mother so much and wants so much to hear her dead mother’s voice once again through the imitations of the parrot, but the bird refuses to talk, as though her mother still will not forgive her for the way she treated the bird.

Part XI (Paras. 144-150)
The protagonist now remembers the day her mother finally had to part with her beloved bird and go to the nursing home. It was a heart-breaking day for her.

Part XII (Paras.151-177)
As the protagonist revisits her home, happy memories come to her and she recalls her deceased parents. Her son feels sorry that his mother has been brought up in this place; in its rundown state, he sees it as miserable, but his mother tells him that it was “a beautiful house”.
（提醒：因编辑旳疏忽，教材(184页)1-4行漏标了段落序号，导致176-179序号缺失，并非文字缺失，特此阐明。编者为此疏忽表达歉意，并将在教材重印时修正。）

Part XIII (Paras. 178-192)
A realtor comes for a preview, then a couple come for an inspection. As they check the house, they jot down critical observations. The protagonist thinks that perhaps this is just the right place for her and her son.

Part XIV (Paras. 193-211)
The protagonist again remembers the day she was to send her mother to the nursing home. She kept asking her mother whether she would like to keep a few things as souvenirs, but her mother’s answer was always no, saying that she “could turn her heart off”. Looking back, the protagonist realizes that this was not true, and that they were all “sick with love”.
Detailed Analysis of the Text
1. I am my own housewife, my own breadwinner. (Para. 1)
The protagonist is a single parent and has to take care of everything because there is no one else around to help her. In Chinese “single parent” is translated as 单亲，It is very close, also, to the expression “又当爹，又当娘” or “里里外外就靠她一种人”

2. I can make a pie crust and exterminate humpback crickets with a homemade glue board, though not at the same time. (Para. 1)
The protagonist is being humorous: it would be awkward if she were to exterminate crickets and cook at the same time.

3. I’d like to compliment myself on these things… (Para. 1)
to compliment sb on something: to praise sb for (doing) something
Notice the subtle differences between these two and the following expressions:
to pride oneself on something
to take pride in something
to be proud of something

4. Turn left, Ike says. (Para. 2)
Ike is pretending to be the GPS (global positioning system 全球定位系统) lady, giving directions to his mother. (This is made clear in the original, unedited story, which includes more of Ike’s conversation with his mother during the trip.)

5. If I were a better mother, I would say no, there would be bread, carrot, and seedless grapes. If I were a better daughter, Ike would have known his grandmother, spent more time in her arms. (Para. 6)
Ike is obviously particularly fond of chicken nuggets, but his mother knows that they are junk food and not good for him. If she were a better mother she would stand firm and make her son eat more healthy food, but she doesn’t have the heart to say no to him. The protagonist also regrets not having been a better daughter, which has resulted in her deceased mother having remained an almost total stranger to her son.

6. I’ll come over for a walk-through before the inspection. (Para.16)
The realtor said he would walk through the house prior to the inspection, to make sure it would make a good impression on the potential buyers.

7. … Ike and I covered scrap siding in glue and flypaper and scattered our torture devices throughout the basement… (Para. 17)
siding：板壁，挡板； scrap siding: 边角料做旳挡板

8. I pictured her house, a two-bedroom white ranch with window boxes, … (Para. 21)
to picture: to imagine; to see in one’s mind’s eye
ranch: This refers to a ranch house, that is, a house which consists of a single storey 牧场式旳房子
window boxes: long narrow containers for growing plants outside windows

9. Mom had tended her azaleas and boxwoods with halfhearted practicality, in case the chickens or sheep broke loose. (Para. 21)
The protagonist’s mother grew azaleas and boxwoods to make the yard look beautiful. It was practical for her efforts to be half-hearted because if the chickens or sheep got loose, they would damage her shrubbery.

10. I pull into a rest stop, one of those suspicious gas station and fast-food combos. (Para. 23)
gas station and fast-food combos: 配有速食店旳加油站
Question: Why does the protagonist use the word “suspicious” here?
We can’t be sure, but we might guess that it is because “gas station and fast-food combos” are notorious for having food that is bad as well as unhealthy. Also, the washrooms are not very clean. She would prefer to have taken her son somewhere better.

11. He is sweet and unassuming. He does not yet know he will be picked on for being undersized. (Para. 25)
unassuming: behaving in a quiet and pleasant way; modest 谦逊低调旳，不爱招摇旳

12. I want to wrap him in plastic and preserve him so that he can always be this way, this content. (Para. 26)
I want to wrap him in plastic and preserve him as I do with food so that he can always be content like this, happy and satisfied with life.
The protagonist is worried about how her pale undersized son will fare in the adult world.

13. A burly man with black hair curling across his shoulders hustles into the rest room. He breathes hard, scratches his ear, and checks his phone. Next, a sickly-looking man whose pants are too big shuffles inside. He pauses to wipe his forehead with an elbow. I think, these people are someone’s children. (Para. 27)
These men do not look nicely dressed, properly educated, or well brought up. But they were once someone’s small children too, the protagonist reminds herself; she wants to do everything possible to avoid her son growing up to be like them.

14. I could see a whorl of hair on the crown of his head like a small, stagnant hurricane. (Para. 31)
When Ike was born, the protagonist could see a coil of hair at the top of his head; this is a cowlick, hair that tends to stand up when it should lie flat.

15. Cancer genes, hay fever, high blood pressure, perhaps a fear of math—these are my gifts. (Para. 32)
The protagonist ponders what she may have passed on to her son genetically.

16. I… let him skip into the fluorescent, germ-infested cave, a room slick with mistakes and full of the type of men I hope he’ll never become. (Para. 34)
a room slick with mistakes: a room slick with spilled urine

17. I was still grieving Dad, and it was strange to watch Mom find so much joy in this ebony-beaked wiseass.（Para.40）
much joy in this silly bird.
The protagonist appears not to have understood that it was precisely because her father’s death had created such an absence in her mother’s life that she found it necessary to fill that void with a creature she could love.

18. You can’t take anything personally, Mom warned. (Para. 42)
Don’t be upset or offended by what the bird says. (You must not think anything the bird says refers to any particular person. The bird is only mimicking. So don’t be angry with it.)

19. the man of the house (Para. 43)
the bread winner; the pr