We are always bald when we are robbed of our illusions.

Photo by Yousef Espanioly on Unsplash

Dear Tara,

Though hard to believe, it may be that our shared confusion in separating the real in Vera’s life from the dreamed part (I couldn’t resist, this phrase being the title of a Rodrigo Fresán novel!), is about to deepen. This certainly seems the case in the first six pages of Chapter 18, where Vera explicitly questions her memories of that long night with the “bald pretender,” whom we suspect is the undisguised Miss MacIntosh.

“Memory is surrounded by the unknown, the void…Memory sometimes provides the one flower more than ever blossomed. Memory sometimes omits the only flower there really was.”

Despite the fallibility of memory, Vera recalls the violence committed against her that night. Miss MacIntosh pinning her to the bed, putting a feather pillow over her head, straddling her like a horse, and afterward saying, “There, that will teach you to remember me. “There, that will teach you—oh, I hope--charity.” The fact that the bald pretender rapes Vera is both implicit and explicit in the text.

Why does Miss MacIntosh do this? Is she enraged because Vera has unmasked her? Was her anger ignited earlier that night as she watched Vera in her fancy party dress dancing with an imaginary lover as she stood to the side, glowering at the girl’s audacity to fantasize about romantic love? Is the rape Miss MacIntosh’s retribution against those past, hoped-for suitors who spurned her?

All of Vera’s ideas and beliefs about Miss MacIntosh are shattered this night, including the conviction that her nursemaid is steadfast, practical, and lives life with her two feet firmly planted on the ground, rather than life as it might be imagined or dreamed like her delusional, opium-wracked mother.

While still pinning her to the bed, Miss MacIntosh ridicules Vera:

“Nothing that you think is true is true. Nothing that you see is real!” She shook my shoulders. Her bare knee bone scraped against my knee. “It is all a dream, a poor man’s dream,” her voice common and flat, “and it was always this, but you were living in a fool’s paradise, and now you know there is no answer.”

In the midst of this horror Vera somehow feels pity for Miss MacIntosh, regretful that she revealed her nursemaid’s “essential baldness,” both literally and metaphorically. In seeing herself through Vera’s eyes, Miss MacIntosh loses any illusions she held about herself: “[W]e are always bald when we are robbed of our illusions…”

Young has thrown Miss MacIntosh’s identity completely into question. This violent scene surely marks a turning point in the novel. And yet.

Vera sits on that perpetually circling bus, mourning the loss of her nursemaid. She has journeyed to the mid-West (albeit not to Miss MacIntosh’s much talked about former home, What Cheer, Iowa, but to rural Indiana) in the quest to find, if not her nursemaid in the flesh, then at least those same sensibilities that she practiced.

How can Vera, years on, still yearn for Miss MacIntosh after this violence, after discovering the fraudulent persona that her nursemaid presented in all of her interactions with Vera prior to that night?

Not bald (yet!),

Lori