The Turning: Damaged Goods Summary & Analysis

This chapter is largely an extended flashback, as a new narrator (Vic’s wife) tells the story of her husband Vic Lang’s adolescent love for a girl with a birthmark covering half of her face. This past love still holds great meaning for Vic, many years later. In her quest to understand the story, the narrator has traveled to Angelus from the city, where they live together, with some frequency; Vic himself refuses to visit. The narrator’s desire to comprehend Vic’s obsession stems from her sister’s similar childhood experience: her sister once won a doll at a school raffle, but their strict, Christian fundamentalist father, who considered games of chance the work of the devil, forbid her to play with it, engendering lifelong resentment.

In the flashback, Vic sees Strawberry Alison, the girl with the birthmark, for the first time. At first thinking she was burnt in an accident, Vic soon realizes his mistake; he is also in love at first sight. Alison, however, is a year older than Vic, and so he can only watch her from a distance. She soon has a tight-knit group of friends, too, further limiting his interaction with her. According to the narrator, Vic’s love for Alison is connected to his need to defend those he sees as victims; this same impulse has driven Vic to become a labor lawyer. Vic’s wife also connects Vic’s love for Alison to another story he has told her, of his first kiss with Melanie, the girl missing a finger.

Vic continues to watch Alison from a distance, unable to talk to her. While Vic wants to “rescue” her, Alison is pretty and popular despite her birthmark. The narrator expresses her frustration at Vic’s love of “damaged goods,” which causes her great insecurity; while staying in Angelus, she has been drinking alone, whale watching, and reflecting on her marriage. Vic’s wife wonders why Vic is like this: is it the background of the Vietnam war, or Vic’s father’s work as a small-town cop and descent into alcoholism? Vic’s infant sister, too, died of meningitis, a trauma that drove Vic’s father, Bob, to run away, and that Vic tried to erase from his own memory. According to his mother, Carol, Vic was an anxious child; his father saw the world as a dangerous place and transmitted that worry to Vic.

During Alison’s last year of school, she publishes a poem about two girls in flames in the school magazine. While others criticize it, Vic is emboldened and confesses to her that he loves her poem, and her. Alison bursts into tears, and soon leaves town for university. Vic, meanwhile, finishes school: he takes care of Vic’s mother, studies to be a lawyer, and parties on the beach, like the other country boys. Back in the present day, Vic’s wife wonders why Vic’s repressed memories of Alison have returned. She also explains that Vic’s mother died of cancer, and Vic’s father shortly thereafter fell down an abandoned mineshaft. The narrator considers leaving Vic; while she can relate to his inability to reckon with the past, she is greatly frustrated by his unwillingness to try.

At the end of Vic’s last year of school, rumors spread that Alison has come out as a lesbian in university. While Vic struggles to believe it, he now understands her poem, about two girls in flames, in a very different light. At a party celebrating the end of exams, Alison attends with her girlfriend. Vic talks to the girlfriend, surprisingly without envy, and to Alison: he tells her he still loves her poem, and she tells him “I still love you for loving it.” Vic then leaves the party early, and in the morning Vic’s mother tells him that two girls crashed their car that night, which exploded on impact and burnt them to death. Vic visits the site of the crash, wondering if Alison foresaw her own death in her poem. The narrator (Vic’s wife), too, visits the site. She finds both Alison and her poem unremarkable but cannot stop trying to grasp the meaning they hold to her husband.