The Roaring Girl

“She nodded. The boy’s father placed his palms on the table and raised his elbows, tipping the weight of his torso forward onto his palms. He pushed, and his body rose. His chair scraped back. The boy watched with care as his father came towards him. When the man lifted his arm the boy turned his attention solely to the huge hand, eclipsing the light. It came down slowly, and then it was pressing the boy’s shoulder. The father turned the boy the way he would turn a spigot, and they walked together into the TV room.” 

The boy renders his world in meticulous detail, showing how he carefully observes everything. This is seen from the opening of the story with the detailed description of the father standing up, rendered as if time slows down to show the motion as a series of separate, powerful movements. When the boy is finally pulled into this description, the narrator uses the mechanical metaphor of a spigot, suggesting that the relationship between the boy and father, although they love each other, is not a physically affectionate one. The father’s hand eclipses the light, symbolizing the boy’s sense of his father’s massive yet distant presence. 

“His mother on this same chesterfield under soaking blankets, her knees pulled up, her face grey and shining. Gritting her teeth. Dr. Mackey had assured her there was nothing wrong, but there was. ‘When I get something the matter I don’t fool around,’ his mother had said bitterly. And then the ambulance.” 

The author renders the flashback to the mother’s illness when she had a burst appendix in a series of sentence fragments, emphasizing the boy’s shock in seeing his mother’s weak, grey state. The memory is powerful for the boy and triggers his heightened sense of anxiety over the vulnerability of his parents. It also causes him to be vigilant in watching his parents as he searches for anything that might be wrong.

“Machinery where the father worked had mangled it before the boy was born. The enormousness of his father’s hands with the marvelous deformed nail, like his father’s misshapen stinking feet, were terrible for the boy. He always wanted to touch his father’s hands, their size and strength on a whole other scale from his own, but he could never have borne touching his father’s feet.”

The boy is awed by his father’s size, as well as the scarring of the father’s fingernail caused by work machinery. He sees the father’s hands as “terrible” but they still draw him inexorably because he wants to understand his father’s world—both its mysterious beauty and terror. He senses that he will soon grow into the role of the father and he wants to understand how to navigate this world, perhaps more successfully than his father has.

“‘So what do you say?’

‘About what?’

‘About having a little brother or sister. What the hell do you think we’re talking about here?’” 

The father’s impatience with the son’s lack of understanding is ironic because it’s clear that the boy does his best to understand the family’s dynamics and communication. This is made difficult because the father’s way of talking is often unclear and misleading. Understandably, an eight-year-old would have trouble following these conversations, especially when the parents use a mysterious set of nonverbal gestures that can be baffling for the boy.

“When the boy got out of the car he thought at first his legs would collapse under him, but they turned out strong, as if they could take him anywhere.” 

When the father and the boy discover there is an intruder in the garage, the boy feels weak and scared. Then he discovers his legs are strong, and he is capable of dealing with the emergency, no matter where it leads him. This strength is surprising, given that the boy often feels small and unable to deal with the outside world until he meets the girl. 

“Somebody was climbing out of the pit. The boy went back to his chair. He knew this was not Jim, who was dead, but still he felt responsible, as if this might be his own adversary or shadow or what must happen when his father got in over his head and his son was no use to him.”

When the girl first appears in the story, she seems to be resurrected from the dead as she crawls out. The boy immediately thinks of his dead brother, even though he knows it can’t be him. But he senses that the person coming out of the pit somehow addresses the boy’s failures in helping his helpless father. He has no idea that the girl rising from the pit will help transform his life so that he focuses less on his failures and more on his desires.

“At that moment the boy needed to know how to understand the girl in some larger way than his own.” 

The girl fascinates the whole family, and they want to help her get back on her feet. But the boy can see that it is the girl who can help him understand the larger world. He recognizes that this stranger is a portal to the unknown world beyond his boundaries, and he knows that to survive he must understand what she knows.

“On Saturdays the boy would lie at the edge of the grease pit and watch the girl reach up into the iron undersides of cars, a lightbulb in mesh on a cord hooked up there, her heavy blackened hands sunk to the elbows to perform unknown functions.” 

The boy hovers on the periphery of the girl’s work in the service station, and he enjoys watching her ease in fixing cars, a skill that seems to elude the other men in the station. The boy always felt like he doesn’t belong at all in the station. He struggles with the need for deferential customer service, as well as the need to interact and “hit the right note” (58) with Ed Walsh. He prefers to hide out back in the abandoned, broken-down Rambler. It is a revelation to see the girl work in such complete absorption as she does “unknown functions,” suggesting her ability to be at home in a place despite being homeless. The boy wants to find a way to live and work with that confidence in oneself.

“He could hardly believe that as she reached for her toothbrush she witnessed the flying fish decal on the wall under the bathroom mirror, a scene that was part of himself—he had been riding those fish over that decal sea for as long as he could remember—and he wanted to know exactly how she saw them, because he wanted to know in what way it would be possible for himself to be known by her, known completely, like a car she would work on: he wanted to be fixed by her by being known, by being thoroughly and utterly known.” 

The girl's presence made the familiar and mundane basement bathroom both unfamiliar and wondrous. The boy seeks a connection with this strange fearless girl who is so different from him, hoping that she will have the same desire to know him. This desire for reciprocation is new for the boy, who was previously content to be an observer for most of his young life, asking little of anyone.

“As soon as the boy had been put to bed, being baby-sat by the girl became a terrible experience for him, because she would turn on the TV and watch it with the sound turned up so loud he couldn’t sleep.” 

The boy looks forward to when the girl babysits him because he enjoys the intimacy he feels when he sits near her. But when he is in bed trying to sleep and no longer in proximity to her, her “roaring” is difficult to accept. She has little concern for his desire to sleep and the boy must summon all his courage to walk over to the television and turn down the volume, knowing he will have to face her anger. Still, he does it, reflecting enormous personal growth in terms of his ability to assert himself.

“‘So what’s wrong with her?’

‘Nothing. I just don’t like her all that much.’” 

Given that in reality the boy possesses great affection for the girl, this captures the boy’s struggles to communicate with his parents. He can’t admit his admiration for the girl and her expertise because the parents wouldn’t understand. It’s much easier for him to pretend to dislike her vulgar “roaring.” He knows the parents will believe this excuse because it reflects their own discomfort with the girl. He prefers to lie rather than admit the truth of how he feels.

“Sometimes she would stare out across the rippling fields and sometimes close her eyes. Either way she would not say anything and when the boy spoke—‘Is it ever hot, eh?’—jolt like a person falling.” 

While the entire story is told from the boy’s point of view, this suggests how different the story would be if told from the girl’s point of view. The boy, so dominant a filter of this story, rarely enters the girl’s consciousness. She is focused on many other things other than the boy. But the boy has no idea what she thinks about, no matter how hard he tries to figure it out.

“The boy was so shocked by the women’s hairiness and the raw pink redness like a mutilation, by the worn soles of their high heels, but mostly by the way one of them twisted around to look straight out at him, as if to defy him to expect her to be ashamed, that almost as soon as he looked at those pictures his stomach hurt. He put the magazine back in the drawer and crept from the room like an animal that has received a physical blow.” 

The sexuality depicted in the pornography magazines shocks the boy—not just because the depiction of naked bodies in sexual positions seems like a “mutilation,” but because of the facial expressions. The men sneer and snarl, but the woman who gazes right at the camera most rivets the boy, as she seems to challenge the viewer directly. Despite being shocked by the raw sexuality on display, the boy notices small details, like the “worn soles of their high heels,” suggesting a shabbiness to the women’s lives that is at odds with the picture’s attempt to arouse. Still, the boy cannot reject the images completely. He returns to them, drawn by their magnetic power until the girl catches him looking.