Pictures Of Hollis Woods

“Don’t think about it, Steven said in my head. I did that a lot; I pretended Steven was right there next to me when I knew he was miles away in upstate New York. I wondered if he ever said to himself, ‘What is Hollis Woods doing right this minute?’ And did he put my words in his head?”

Here, the author introduces a narrative trope that will continue throughout the novel—Hollis has imaginary conversations with Steven in her head. The italics in these sections are reminiscent of the italics in which the “picture” flashbacks take place and show the extent to which Hollis is always living in both the present and the past. The feeling that Steven is always with her will be literalized later in the book when he accurately guesses Hollis is hiding out at the Branches house and becomes her secret protector.

“I slumped in my seat, feet up on the glove compartment, wearing an A&S baseball hat with the brim yanked low over my forehead. If someone looks right into your eyes, I read in a book one time, he’ll see right into your soul. I didn’t want anyone to see into my soul.”

This is the first physical description of Hollis. Her body language is extremely protective, and words like “slumped” and “yanked” show how others see Hollis—they perceive a disobedient troublemaker rather than a sensitive, artistic child. The idea of keeping her soul obscured is an early reference to the book’s themes of hiding and using art to see oneself clearly.

“‘So what do you think?’ Josie asked. ‘Bigger than a river,’ I said. ‘Rougher.’ I spread out my hands, trying to think of the difference. ‘It’s wonderful, but…’ She waited. ‘You can’t get your arms around it.’ ‘Ah,’ she said, stopping to think. ‘There are saltwater people, and freshwater people.’ She held up her hand. ‘Then there are some who don’t even know enough to fall in love with the water.’ She looked at me with satisfaction. ‘But they’re not us.’”

The poetic dialogue Josie initiates with Hollis marks an important early transformation in the protagonist. Before meeting Josie, Hollis is rude and monosyllabic with adults, but Josie’s unconventionality allows Hollis to show her true self. Josie’s statement that others simply don’t understand water sets the two apart in their artistic approach to the world. The image of putting one’s arms around a river indicates that nature and the desire for family are connected for Hollis—she loves the Delaware River because it is near the Regans, and she wants to hold it in the same way she wants to be held by them.

“What was it about that mountain? Coming from Long Island, I had never gotten within yelling distance of anything more than a hill. So why did this mountain look so familiar?”

Hollis says this as the narrator when she is starting to feel at home in Branches. Throughout the book, the mountain signifies Hollis’s difficult past, the unwanted “mountain of trouble” version of herself that she wants to overcome. The mountain’s mysteriously familiar feeling increases this sense that it is in some way part of her and always will be.

“Josie didn’t answer. She hummed a scrap of an old song I had never heard before. That’s the way she talked sometimes. She’d start with bits of this and that, it could even be poetry. You had to untangle her words in your head like balls of knotted string. And sometimes she’d break off in the middle of a sentence, small frown lines on her forehead.”

The narrator describes the early stages of Josie’s dementia. In some ways, it is an expression of her artistic personality; it is easy to imagine that speaking in songs and poems is something she did as a younger woman. But the image of “balls of knotted string” shows that her memories are becoming fragmented and confused. The language the author uses does not describe dementia as an outright scary experience for Josie or Hollis, however—it can be troubling, but also gentle and creative.

“Behind us a horn blared, a loud, frightening sound. Josie grabbed my hand and we darted out of the street. Strange to feel someone’s hand holding mine. The last time was Izzy’s. ‘I always wanted a daughter,’ she said, hands out. ‘Babies, children. Piles of them.’”

This is a good example of how the novel stylistically handles Hollis’s dual consciousness of the present and past. A small cue in the present, like Hollis’s hand being held, transports her into a memory; the remembered dialogue appears in italics to alert the reader to the change in timelines and also captures the echoing quality of these words in Hollis’s head. Another frequent stylistic trope is the narrator’s hints during the Josie timeline to scenes that have chronologically happened to Hollis already, but which the reader has not yet encountered in the Regan timeline; this memory foreshadows a scene in a later “picture” section where Izzy takes Hollis to the cemetery and explains she cannot get pregnant again.

“I had that strange feeling again. Everyone was home doing homework for school tomorrow, and I was watching an old lady dance in the street. I comforted myself with the thought of sitting in Josie’s living room after supper every night, sweet chocolate melting on our tongues, wood shavings around our feet. It’s enough, I told Steven in my head, more than enough. I tried not to think of my W picture with the mother, the father, the brother, and the sister.”

Hollis is trying to reconcile herself to a life with Josie, but she knows in her heart that she needs more structure. The images of dancing in the street and eating chocolate may be carefree and fun, but this passage makes Hollis seem somewhat outside the experience. She herself is not dancing in the street or eating chocolate in that moment but watching or imagining those things. Steven and the image of family continue to be right at the edge of her consciousness.

“But I was a new person with the Old Man, with Izzy, with Steven. It was as if the angry Hollis were seeping right out of my bones, leaving chocolate as soft as that sticky Hershey bar.”

In many ways this image from the Regan timeline is the reverse of the previous one. Just before this passage, Hollis remembers her previous misbehavior, but instead of haunting her as memories do in the Josie timeline, the thought “seeps” away. The chocolate in the previous passage is imaginary, but here, she is fully present with it. The chocolate is also a gift from Steven, who has snuck her the larger half of his candy bar, so the image represents the healing influence of familial love.

“‘It’s your world, it belongs to you. […] Drawing is what you see of the world, truly see.’ ‘Yes, maybe,’ I said, not sure what she meant. ‘And sometimes what you see is so deep in your head you’re not even sure of what you’re seeing. But when it’s down there on paper, and you look at it really look, you’ll see the way things are.’”

Beatrice speaks this line just after she has looked at all of Hollis’s drawings, and these pearls of wisdom are the key to the novel. Beatrice argues that drawing is not just about the surfaces of things, but about “truly seeing.” Hollis’s artistic talent is so great she is able to express truths she isn’t consciously aware of. These words will come back to Hollis at the climax of the Josie timeline and allow her to resolve the major conflicts her character has faced.

“I looked up at him, really looked at him, not a quick glance that darted away so he couldn’t see my eyes. ‘My name…,’ I began as he folded himself down on the step next to me. ‘Hollis Woods is a real place.’ I shrugged a little. […] ‘An hour old,’ I said in an I-don’t-care voice. ‘No blanket. On a corner. Somewhere.’ Didn’t a baby deserve a blanket? ‘And just a scrap of paper: CALL HER HOLLIS WOODS.’ […] I never did find the woods, though. I tried to picture it in the spring when I had been born, with birds chirping and the sun shining.”

Here, the reader learns Hollis’s origin story for the first time. Hollis does not share this information lightly, because she “really looked” at the Old Man, which is a reversal of the earlier scene where Hollis hides her eyes to protect her soul. The author hints at how primally Hollis feels abandoned with the aside “Didn’t a baby deserve a blanket?” which is the closest Hollis comes to mentioning her birth family. The note that Hollis could never find the woods emphasizes the depth of her out-of-placeness—she could never find the place her parents named her for, let alone a family to adopt her.

“Strange, how much I wanted to stay. Maybe it was because Josie needed me. I’d never been needed before. Or wanted? asked a voice in my head. The Old Man had wanted me, I told myself. So had Izzy, so had Steven. Then why?”

When Hollis realizes she may soon have to leave Josie, she begins to distinguish between the two types of real love she has experienced. Josie loves her, but not as a mother. Josie needs Hollis to take care of her, when it should be the other way around. The Regans, by contrast, make her feel wanted and taken care of. The passage introduces the conflict Hollis will need to resolve at the novel’s end about which kind of love she trusts most.

“I pressed my foot down on the gas pedal a little harder. ‘Yahoo!’ I yelled. ‘It’s me, driving a pickup truck!’”

It is rare for Hollis to let loose, so this image from the scene where she and Steven illegally drive the truck shows how much she is opening up with the Regans. She has developed from deeply self-protective body language to opening up with the Old Man to smiling and yelling “Yahoo!” The self-referentiality of the last sentence when she says “It’s me” indicates that she is even seeing herself in a new light and mirrors the happy declarations she will make when she climbs the mountain later on.

“I didn’t mean to listen or be sneaky. Ordinarily I did that a lot. I’d stand still in the hall to hear what the stucco woman had to say to her telephone friend. I’d flip pages on the teacher’s desk to see what disaster of a mark I’d gotten in social studies or social attitude. I’d pass by classmates in the schoolyard to find out what they had to say about that kid Hollis Woods.”

The bulk of the book takes place outdoors or in the homes of adults Hollis trusts, but this passage briefly describes Hollis in the unsafe institutional settings where she’s spent most of her life. The descriptions show her sneaking in the margins of these spaces, never fully participating. They also show how much Hollis has always worried about what other people think of her, and how she looks for confirmation that she is bad and unwanted.

“From where I stood I could see the mountain towering over me. The stucco woman’s voice was in my head: ‘She’s a mountain of trouble, that Hollis Woods.’  Before the end of the summer, I decided, I was going to climb that mountain, get to the top, raise my arms, and shout to the whole world, ‘I have a family. I belong.’”

Hollis resolves to overcome her old self by symbolically climbing the mountain that represents her past. The book describes the mountain as “towering” because even though she has decided to surmount it, the size of her previous trauma and negative self-perception is still looming over everything. The intrusive memory of the stucco woman adds to that sense of overshadowing, but the passage ends on a hopeful note, featuring Hollis’s plan for the future rather than her worries about the past.

“‘How was school?’

‘Burned down.’

‘What did you have for lunch?’

‘Horse meat.’

‘How’s Mrs. Cahill?’

‘Who?’

‘What are you drawing?’

‘Nudies.’”

This rapid-fire phone dialogue with the mustard woman shows the reader how Hollis usually presents herself to the world, since she never speaks sarcastically to Josie or the Regans. Each of Hollis’s responses show her cleverly twisting an innocuous question, and though she is being obnoxious, the dialogue shows how smart and creative Hollis is—these are not garden-variety rude responses, but are genuinely funny. The dialogue emphasizes that Hollis is not mean at her core, but brilliant and misunderstood.

“Something from years ago popped into my head. It wasn’t winter, it was summer, and so humid everything I touched was sticky. All afternoon I’d thought about the pillow on the bed, and how cool it would be against my head. I was surprised when it was as hot as the rest of the room. I reached under the pillow to find something I had hidden there, a doll with pale painted eyes. I whispered to her, asking if she was cooling off. And then someone came and pulled her away, tossing her on the night table. I waited until the woman walked out the door, and then I whispered a little more loudly so that the doll could hear me. ‘Don’t worry,’ I’d said. ‘I’ll save you in the morning.’”

Hollis does not share many memories of her early childhood, making this passage unique. The humidity she describes makes the scene feel stifling, a feeling underscored by the vague and threatening description of the woman. The doll represents Josie, as Hollis realizes shortly after this passage. The image of the hidden doll shows how deeply protective Hollis has come to feel of her companion and also how delicate and almost unreal Josie is.

“And we never stopped laughing. Anything so we wouldn’t think about my leaving. Anyting.”

The word “anyting” appears throughout the novel. Hollis’s previous foster mother, the stucco woman, mispronounced the word this way, and the memory of this reoccurs to Hollis on many occasions when she thinks or says the word “anything.” The mispronunciation highlights the stucco woman’s deficiencies, and its incompleteness often signifies a cutting-off of the infinite possibilities the word “anything” should signify. This quotation comes a moment when the Regans are trying to stave off Hollis’s departure by staying in motion, so the word’s appearance here has an ominous effect.

“He broke off a piece of holly and handed it to me. ‘Peace, Hollis. It’s just like you. Prickly, but not bad to look at.’”

Hollis is associated with the holly tree throughout the novel, and “Holly” is also Steven’s nickname for her. Here, he encapsulates why holly symbolizes her—its leaves are spiky, but it is nonetheless a beautiful plant. Handing her the holly as a peace offering foreshadows the fact that he will leave a holly branch on the back porch of the Branches house when he secretly takes care of her there.

“I drew it using all the pencils—yellows and oranges, pinks and blues. I drew purple shoes on my feet and wings on my shoulders. My eyes were closed, the way you see pictures of angels sometimes with their eyelashes down on their cheeks. So does it make sense that I wasn’t thinking? That all that floating and all those bubbles made me think I could do anything?”

The self-portrait Hollis creates of herself just after the Regans ask to adopt her contains contrasting imagery. On the one hand, she sees herself as angelic, with downcast eyes and wings; on the other hand, the nature of the drawing is slightly manic, using “all the pencils” in ways that are beautiful but unrealistic. The picture after this one describes Hollis’s disastrous trip up the mountain, and as the questions she asks the reader show, Hollis sees this self-portrait as an explanation for why she made that regrettable choice.

“Steven was a sure and careful driver, but it was so steep, and the truck kept going, kept sliding, even with the brake pressed down as hard as he could manage. He pressed and pressed, but the truck gained speed, and just before the end when we would have been all right, when we would have been fine, the truck tipped, and I could see we were going to go over. And Steven yelled at me. ‘Jump, Holly!’”

The moment before the pickup truck crashes on the mountain captures how close Hollis came to a happy ending before disaster struck. The line “just before the end when we would have been all right” has double meaning—it refers both to the car accident itself and to the planned adoption. Though Steven is the driver and technically responsible for the accident, this passage shows his good intentions and his motivation to care for Hollis by noting that he was a careful driver and that he was thinking mostly of her as the car began to fall.

“I thought about the stucco woman. She wouldn’t have been surprised at the trouble I had caused. She would have seen it coming. Would Steven have driven the truck to the top of the mountain if I hadn’t been there? And the arguing between Steven and the Old Man—what had Izzy said? ‘Worse this summer.’ I’d messed up the whole family.”

This pivotal moment takes place shortly after the accident, just before Hollis decides to run away from the Regans. Whenever the stucco woman’s voice is in her head, Hollis is thinking of herself as a bad person. She also has the recurring intrusive memory of Izzy saying Steven and the Old Man are fighting more this summer. This collection of memories shows how hard it is for Hollis to trust she is wanted and sets up the conditions for the Josie timeline.

“‘We’re young,’ she smiled up at me. ‘And look at that popcorn machine.’ Head tilted, she spotted Henry batting a piece of popcorn across the floor. ‘You have to keep looking to see everything,’ she said.”

Looking at the portrait Hollis has drawn of Josie and Beatrice for Christmas, Josie notices the small detail featuring Henry and echoes the same piece of wisdom Beatrice and the Old Man had impressed upon Hollis: that drawings always contain more than you think they do at first glance. These words foreshadow the realization about her own drawings Hollis will have in two chapters. The drawing also shows the level of loving detail Hollis has included, reminding the reader how much she cares for Josie.

“What do you know about a family? Steven said in my mind. You’ve never had one.”

Immediately after Hollis sees that she was wrong about Steven and the Old Man, these words come into her head. He says a version of this to her in an earlier chapter when she worried that she was a bad influence, and he tries to convince her conflict and love can coexist. The sentiment behind the words is the reverse of their expected meaning; out of context, this could sound like an insult to an orphan, but Steven means them as an invitation to learn how to love.