Everything on a Waffle

“Miss Honeycut went on to say how there were many excellent foster homes for children like me and people did, despite what you heard, frequently adopt the older child, and that’s when Uncle Jack put his arm around me and said he had decided to take care of me himself. It was a nice warm hug and the first real human contact I had had since this whole business began. And it was comforting, even though I knew he had only done it to spite Miss Honeycut.”

As the narrator, Primrose continually demonstrates the ability to grasp the motives of those around her without judging them; she understands that Everyone Has an Agenda. Here, she reveals Miss Honeycut’s desire for Uncle Jack to send Primrose to a foster home or put her up for adoption so that he might focus his attention and affection on her. Primrose also understands her uncle’s motives. He will not allow others to manipulate him or interfere with his plans and promotions. He senses that Miss Honeycut desires to possess him and resists her efforts.

“I said I had the feeling that no one was going to forgive me for not falling apart at my parents’ disappearance.

‘Kid, I’ll tell you what no one in this town can forgive and that’s that your mother loved your father enough to follow him out into that storm. Now, that’s true love and it’s rare as rare can be.’”

In the restaurant kitchen with Miss Bowzer, Primrose feels free to pour out her heart. Miss Bowzer, the character Horvath portrays as truthful, self-aware, and candid, captures the unspoken attitude of the residents of Coal Harbour. Later, Primrose wonders why Miss Bowzer and Uncle Jack do not hit it off. Miss Bowzer, who says she will hold out for the kind of love Primrose’s mother felt for her father, senses that Uncle Jack is not interested in the same kind of relationship.

“I’m sure she thought Canadians and especially Canadian children were a bunch of heathens with no idea how to act at the bedside of dying people. And she might have been right because I kept thinking that if I’d been lying around for a while dying, I’d probably already done a lot of reading myself and wouldn’t be so terribly grateful for someone coming in and doing more.”

Primrose describes the haughty attitude of Miss Honeycut toward her and other Coal Harbour natives. While drawn to Miss Honeycut’s worldly travels, Primrose senses from the beginning that this counselor has no empathetic understanding of those she serves. Primrose recognizes that, by sitting and reading to a dying person, Miss Honeycut actually avoids meaningful closeness.

“Before that evening I’d thought business the dullest thing you could go into and the only people who went into it did so because they were so dull and unimaginative themselves. I never thought it was something that could make someone’s eyes sparkle.”

As she gets acquainted with her uncle, Primrose recognizes the passion that drives his work as a developer. She understands that Uncle Jack has the same deep emotional investment in revitalizing Coal Harbour that Miss Bowzer has in cooking. The narrative reveals that she perceives the errors he makes as well. Uncle Jack’s intense pursuit of his work results in a lot of alone time for Primrose.

“Well, I thought to myself as we both continued to stare at the macintosh and the feeling of joy swept through my soul like a fire up a vacuum, this is certainly inappropriate.

‘Haven’t you ever believed in something contrary to the evidence?’ I asked.”

Here, Primrose expresses her mantra of The Power of Intuition. She asks this question of many adults throughout. Primrose refuses to believe that these authorities surrounding her have never had the awareness of knowing something for which there was no evidence. Even as the adults refuse to admit to this awareness, some—like Miss Bowzer, the Sheriff, and Miss Honeycut—give examples of how they had similar experiences.

“[O]ur next door neighbor, Lena. She had moved here six months earlier with her husband and two small children. She had been a lawyer until she had her second baby and decided to stay home with her kids until they were old enough to go to school.

‘She’s kind of restless,’ my mother had said to me.

[…] My mom felt sorry for her but I didn’t see why. You could tell she had the perfect life. She was always telling you so.”

Lena is Horvath’s consummate example of a driven person, consumed by her agenda: creating the perfect boiled potato. Primrose describes Lena as putting her career on hold and attempting to project the air of a perfect wife and mother, even while feeling unfulfilled and emotionally disconnected from her children and husband. When she apparently has an emotional break, her husband responds by swiftly, secretly moving the family away.

“‘Do you remember my timely advice to you about taking me with you to show houses? I know people in town and I know their ways. You’re new here. I know what people are apt to do or not do.’ I was lying. Mostly I kept to myself and I thought people were extremely unpredictable.”

Primrose attempts to convince Uncle Jack to take her along when he shows a house for sale. Spurring her effort is her aloneness, which is one of The Challenges of Isolation. Until she lands in foster care, Primrose spends the vast majority of her time by herself. While Uncle Jack wants to care for her, he demonstrates no awareness of Primrose’s emotional isolation and, apart from suppertime, resists her attempts to be around him.

“Put the pot back on the burner and shake it a bit so the potatoes dry over the heat. Then they are done. Now what you do with them is a matter of taste. Some people like sour cream, some like butter and parsley. Some people like ketchup or cheese. I like mustard. But Miss Bowzer says it’s nobody’s business but your own what you do with your potatoes.”

These comments appear in Primrose’s recipe for boiled potatoes. Occasionally, Horvath uses the recipe at the end of each chapter to make observations about or provide a subtle moral for the preceding chapter. Her remarks here reflect on Lena’s experiment with making perfect boiled potatoes, symbolically attempting to project the perfect family life. Miss Bowzer, on the other hand, strives for excellence but always on her own terms. For instance, every dish she serves comes with a waffle.

“‘I want to travel like Miss Honeycut first, though,’ I said […]

‘What do you want to do that for?’ asked Miss Bowzer, looking down at me out of squinty eyes.

‘I want to go to places where important things happen to you,’ I said.

[…] ‘Huh,’ snorted Miss Bowzer. ‘Some people see the whole world and don’t know anything.’”

While Miss Bowzer does not mention Miss Honeycut by name, her reference clearly describes her. Miss Bowzer, who tells Primrose she may one day open her own establishment in Coal Harbour and compete with The Girl on The Red Swing restaurant, plants the notion in Primrose’s mind that life’s lessons seek out the individual whether one travels or stays put.

“When Miss Perfidy answered the door, I noticed that she had her dress on backwards. […] As long as I had known her, which was all my life, Miss Perfidy had been old. You couldn’t imagine Miss Perfidy being anything but old. […] From such established oldness there was nowhere to go but dead. This gave me an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach. It also made me a little mad at Miss Perfidy. Like she wasn’t trying.”

Primrose’s relationship with Miss Perfidy remains unfulfilled throughout. Primrose chronicles the continuing physical and mental decline of her former babysitter. In the same way Primrose cannot get Miss Perfidy to stay in the room while she is speaking or to accept the possibility that Primrose’s parents might still be alive, Primrose cannot prevent Miss Perfidy from slowly dying.

“Compared to the comatose silence I had been in, it was an unbelievable racket. This must be hell, I thought, because in heaven surely they try to keep the noise down. […] I could dimly make out some man peering at me over the shoulder of a worried looking woman who was doing things to my wrist. I yanked my wrist away because who knows what someone’s going to take into their head to do to your wrist in hell?”

Waking in the hospital after a truck hits her, Primrose immediately senses she is in unpleasant surroundings and, therefore, did not die and go to heaven. As she describes the reactions of those around her, she expresses the same acceptance of her circumstances that is typically characteristic of her attitude. Even in the hospital, where she discovers she lost a toe and has a serious head injury, Primrose does not fall into despair but takes what has happened in stride.

“‘I didn’t know you had a sister,’ I said […]

‘Yes. Well, half sister really. My father’s daughter from his first marriage and twenty years older than I. But we have the Honeycut genes. We can, when we are together, communicate without even speaking. We often answer each other’s unspoken questions quite specifically. It seems perfectly natural to us, although, of course, it defies rational explanation.’”

Primrose, in one of her conversations with Miss Honeycut, asks her the persistent question about The Power of Intuition. After launching into a series of anecdotes, the counselor finally talks about her uncanny connection to her sister, the first time Primrose sees Miss Honeycut’s face soften. Afterward, Primrose affirms Miss Honeycut’s detachment, though Primrose insists the counselor is a worthy person beneath the veneer of royalty.

“Later, as I lay in the dark, looking at the one star that shone through my window, with my foot throbbing, slightly sick to my stomach from too many chocolates, and worried about how I would be taunted at school if the rumor was that I was suicidal, I felt a little rush of joy. I didn’t know where this joy came from. It didn’t seem to need parents or ten toes or the things you think you need. It seemed to have a life of its own.”

Each of Horvath’s characters has a primary, outward-facing emotion. For Miss Honeycut, it is cynicism; for Uncle Jack, eagerness; for Miss Perfidy, disgust; and for Primrose, joy. Her foster mother, Evie, will later expand on the mystery of this joyous emotional state, which even Primrose perceives as illogical given what she has experienced. Primrose seems delighted to feel joy despite all that befalls her.

“Uncle Jack told her that I was going to live with him no matter what. I knew he had just said this to let her down gently but it seemed to me it only gave her a greater motivation to get rid of me.

And indeed, no sooner had I returned to school than she called me into her office and said, ‘Primrose, I’m afraid you’re becoming a danger to yourself. Children have emotional upset sometimes act out and need special care. Uncles are nice, but some children need more supervision than a single working person can provide.’

I just sat quietly and tried to look normal.”

Primrose is fully aware of Miss Honeycut’s determination to ship her a foster home and also that, as an 11-year-old, she has virtually no ability to prevent the decisions adults are making on her behalf. Primrose realizes that simply trying to “look normal” will have no impact on Miss Honeycut’s actions. The one person unaware of the counselor’s actual rationale is Miss Honeycut herself, who is convinced she is working in Primrose’s best interest despite never listening to what she says.

“Miss Perfidy and Miss Honeycut reached me on the end of the pier. There were two lines of seals now, moving through the water in parallel rows as if they’d choreographed it. Look! I said, pointing again.

[…] Both of them had turned their backs on the seals.

[…] I continued watching the seals. I wondered if Miss Honeycut ever looked out the window as she played bridge all the way across China.”

While taking her dog to the beach to run and watching columns of seals glide through the water, Primrose encounters Miss Honeycut. Along with her is Miss Perfidy, who justifies the counselor’s assumptions with fantasy stories about Primrose’s mother and grandmother. Primrose is the one person who learns from this encounter: An authority can ignore reality and even majestic beauty to focus on a narrow personal Agenda.

“I watched the game in disgust for a while and then took Mallomar and went down to the beach to give her a run. She started out after the birds with all her characteristic vim and vigor but toward the end she would look up at the birds and kind of fade out. Puppydom was passing too quickly, I thought sadly, and before we knew it she would be one of those old dogs who just wants to lie in the sun all day.”

Horvath uses the changes experienced by the puppy Mallomar as a symbol of the transition that takes place in children as they surrender to the cynicism of adulthood. As with dogs who give up the notion of running down gulls on the beach and resign themselves instead to lying motionlessly in the sun, many of the adults in the narrative have settled for a life of comfort and security rather than adventure and novelty.

“Miss Honeycut stood there like a stone. She looked at me as if she was trying to figure out what in the world anyone saw in me. Her tongue worked around in her mouth. Uncle Jack was very still, hardly breathing, but smiling at her, willing her to take the bait. All three of us knew that if she tried to take me away from Uncle Jack she was going to miss the deal of a century.”

Uncle Jack offers Miss Honeycut a bargain on a new home that she cannot refuse. His intent, beyond the real estate commission, is to back Miss Honeycut off of her insistence that Primrose’s uncle give her up for foster care or adoption. Observing the negotiations between the two, Primrose watches silently as the two greatest authorities in her life wrangle over a deal whose ulterior motive is her ability to remain in Coal Harbour with her uncle.

“[S]he claimed to have nothing but my welfare at heart and maybe she does because, after all, she is bred to the nobility, so she has to do the right thing no matter what. I told Uncle Jack that I thought since she was raised in boarding schools she probably didn’t think anything of sending a child away from her home because she thought it was in the best interest of the child. Uncle Jack said she was a cold, cold fish but I get glimpses of a good heart sometimes, like when she talks about her sister or all those deathbed visits she makes.”

Another accident—this one causing Primrose to lose a digit of a finger—places her at Miss Honeycut’s mercy and allows the counselor to place Primrose in foster care in the community of Nanaimo. Though Miss Honeycut succeeds in removing Primrose from Uncle Jack’s home, she so alienates him in the process that he wants nothing more to do with her. Achieving her goal of clearing Primrose from her uncle’s life ironically prevents Miss Honeycut from achieving her main goal: snaring the affection and attention of Uncle Jack. In this passage, Primrose still concludes that, despite everything, there is a “good heart” in Miss Honeycut.

“‘I’m not miserable all the time […] Sometimes I get these bursts of joy.’

‘Me too!’ sobbed Evie. ‘You can be sunk as low as a skunk and still have joy in your heart. Joy just lives like one of those spinning things, what are they called Bert?’

‘Gyroscope?’ said Bert.

‘He always knows what I mean. Gyroscope in your chest. It doesn’t seem to have any connection to circumstance, good or bad.’”

Evie, Primrose’s foster mother, expounds on the strange experience of feeling joy despite the prevalence of negative experiences. Horvath uses the concept of an inner compass—or gyroscope—that reorients one to joy regardless of one’s circumstances to express hope to the reader: Grim events do not preclude happiness and peace of mind. Primrose, who remains mostly tranquil throughout the narrative, embodies this principle.

“Evie and Bert were so excited about moving for the first time in 25 years that I caught a little buzz from them and got all excited about our new town too, even though, technically speaking, it was my old town. […] Finally Evie and Bert pulled a rented trailer full of personal items up to Coal Harbour and we moved in. To celebrate, we went to The Girl on the Red Swing with Uncle Jack for pork chops. […] We were just digging into our waffles when somebody came running into the restaurant and yelled, ‘Fire!’”

The fire at Uncle Jack’s housing development is the final disaster in the cascade of misfortunes that touch the life of Primrose and those close to her. Beginning with the loss of her parents, through her persecution by fellow students, losing a toe and part of a finger, catching the class guinea pig on fire, moving into a foster home, and finally, the house fire, the reader may view the narrative as a series of losses. The author reveals, however, that Primrose makes gains with every loss.

“Instead of declaring that Uncle Jack had saved her life, Miss Honeycut turned around and tried to sue the pants off of him because her valuables had burned up. And that’s when I realized that my mother had been right all along about Miss Honeycut and I had been wrong. Miss Honeycut didn’t tell anecdotes because she was interesting; she told them because she wasn’t.”

This passage denotes another culmination for Primrose. Noting that Miss Honeycut expressed blame rather than gratitude to Uncle Jack when he saved her from her house fire, putting himself into the hospital, Primrose acknowledges her counselor’s venal nature. She extends what is for Primrose a grave insult, saying that Miss Honeycut is uninteresting.

“I stopped right there because suddenly a little alarm went off and nurses and doctors came in at a run with equipment, but what it turned out to be was that as I was standing there, Miss Perfidy left the room in the middle of my sentence. Permanently.

‘Oh, Miss Perfidy,’ I whispered to her […]. ‘You knew things too. You just wouldn’t believe that you knew them.’”

In addition to resolving many of the main questions, the narrative also contains several unfinished threads. Whether Uncle Jack restarts his housing development, if he enters a romantic relationship with Miss Bowzer—as Primrose would like—and who ended up with Primrose’s hand-knitted sweaters are matters that remain unsettled. The death of Miss Perfidy leaves Primrose without a sense of resolution. Miss Perfidy’s lifetime habit of leaving the room while Primrose talks continues in her death as well, when the older woman’s heart stops during Primrose’s visit. Primrose accepts this as characteristic of the person she could never quite befriend.

“It wasn’t a fishing boat and we couldn’t imagine what kind of fool would take a pleasure boat out on such wild waters, but the people on the deck were standing against the rail looking excitedly to shore as if for all the world they were on a cruise. And I saw that it was my parents and at the same time saw everyone’s reaction as if I were filming it all in slow motion.”

Horvath uses this description of the sudden reappearance of Primrose’s parents as a symbol of the life Primrose and her family live: They venture upon turbulent waters in an uncertain craft, thrilling at the adventure of cruising and observing all the world offers. The author makes a point of describing the reactions of all the characters, which reveal the assumptions each made about the life or death of Primrose’s parents.