Laura de la Torre Character Analysis

“[…] Sandi got the fine looks, blue eyes, peaches and ice cream skin, everything going for her!” The mother spread her arms in all directions to show how pretty and pale and blue-eyed the girl was.

Fifi drops out of college and goes off on a church trip to Peru, chaperoned, of course, otherwise we wouldn’t have let her go. We don’t believe in all this freedom.

“Ay, Yolanda.” Her mother pronounced her name in Spanish, her pure, mouth-filling, full-blooded name, Yolanda. But then, it was inevitable, like gravity, like night and day, little apple-bites when God’s back is turned, her name fell, bastardized, breaking into a half dozen nicknames.

The pictures all celebrated women and their bodies, so it wasn’t technically about sex as she had understood it up to then. But there were women exploring “what their bodies were all about” and a whole chapter on lesbians. (Things, Mami said, examining the pictures, to be ashamed of.)

But Laura’s inventing days were over just as Yoyo’s were starting up with her school-wide success. Rather than the rolling suitcase everyone else in the family remembers, Yoyo thinks of the speech her mother wrote as her last invention. It was as if, after that, her mother had passed on to Yoyo her pencil and pad and said, “Okay, Cuquita, here’s the buck. You give it a shot.”

The grand manner will usually disarm these poor lackeys from the countryside, who have joined the SIM, most of them, in order to put money in their pockets, food and rum in their stomachs, and guns at their hips. But deep down, they are still boys in rags…

Now everything she sees sharpens as if through the lens of loss—the orchids in their hanging straw baskets, the row of apothecary jars Carlos has found for her in old druggists’ throughout the countryside, the rich light shafts swarming with a golden pollen. She will miss this glorious light warming the inside of her skin and jeweling the tress, the grass, the lily pond beyond the hedge.

[…] nothing quite filled the hole that was opening wide inside Sandi.

There are still times I wake up at three o’clock in the morning and peer into the darkness. At that hour and in that loneliness, I hear her, a black furred thing lurking in the corners of my life…wailing over some violation that lies at the center of my art.

“[…] Sandi got the fine looks, blue eyes, peaches and ice cream skin, everything going for her!” The mother spread her arms in all directions to show how pretty and pale and blue-eyed the girl was.

Fifi drops out of college and goes off on a church trip to Peru, chaperoned, of course, otherwise we wouldn’t have let her go. We don’t believe in all this freedom.

“Ay, Yolanda.” Her mother pronounced her name in Spanish, her pure, mouth-filling, full-blooded name, Yolanda. But then, it was inevitable, like gravity, like night and day, little apple-bites when God’s back is turned, her name fell, bastardized, breaking into a half dozen nicknames.

The pictures all celebrated women and their bodies, so it wasn’t technically about sex as she had understood it up to then. But there were women exploring “what their bodies were all about” and a whole chapter on lesbians. (Things, Mami said, examining the pictures, to be ashamed of.)

But Laura’s inventing days were over just as Yoyo’s were starting up with her school-wide success. Rather than the rolling suitcase everyone else in the family remembers, Yoyo thinks of the speech her mother wrote as her last invention. It was as if, after that, her mother had passed on to Yoyo her pencil and pad and said, “Okay, Cuquita, here’s the buck. You give it a shot.”

The grand manner will usually disarm these poor lackeys from the countryside, who have joined the SIM, most of them, in order to put money in their pockets, food and rum in their stomachs, and guns at their hips. But deep down, they are still boys in rags…

Now everything she sees sharpens as if through the lens of loss—the orchids in their hanging straw baskets, the row of apothecary jars Carlos has found for her in old druggists’ throughout the countryside, the rich light shafts swarming with a golden pollen. She will miss this glorious light warming the inside of her skin and jeweling the tress, the grass, the lily pond beyond the hedge.

[…] nothing quite filled the hole that was opening wide inside Sandi.

There are still times I wake up at three o’clock in the morning and peer into the darkness. At that hour and in that loneliness, I hear her, a black furred thing lurking in the corners of my life…wailing over some violation that lies at the center of my art.