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Chapter 2
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Tom Lake, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Time
Family
Sex and Love
Destiny and Choice
Acting and Performance
Summary
Analysis
It’s time for bed. Maisie and Nell go upstairs, and Emily starts walking to the little house on the edge of one of the family’s apple orchards where she lives. Lara watches her go until she can’t see her anymore, and then she goes upstairs herself. Joe is dead asleep. As she looks at him in rest, Lara thinks about how heavy the weight of his responsibilities is. She pictures a dance floor balancing on top of his head, and on it their family, the farm, and all the workers who depend on them. Lara gets in bed and puts her hand on top of Joe’s.
A mother through and through, Lara spends a lot of time thinking about her family and trying to make sure they’re as safe and happy as possible. This snapshot of Lara and Joe’s relationship emphasizes the importance of duty and responsibility in their marriage. They love each other, but that love is also part of a larger ecosystem of relationships that they must manage.
Active
Themes
As she lies in bed, Lara recalls her junior year of high school with greater detail in the privacy of her own mind. Veronica dated Jimmy-George. He used to come to her house at night to have sex while her little brothers were asleep and leave before first light. Because of her responsibility to look after her brothers, Veronica was unable to attend college. While the play was in rehearsals and he and Veronica were dating, Jimmy-George convinced Lara to spend time with him one-on-one to build their “chemistry.” Eventually, they had sex in Lara’s grandmother’s shop. Lara was 16 at the time, while Jimmy-George was 22. Lara wonders if she should have told her daughters this part of the story but supposes that it wouldn’t have been helpful for them to hear at this point in their lives.
There are some things that Lara doesn’t want to tell her daughters and husband. It’s not necessarily that she wants to keep them “secret”—rather, as she reflects at the end of this section, they’re private, and she’s not sure what the point would be in telling her family about them. The knowledge of how she hurt Veronica, as well as of how she was hurt by Jimmy-George, stays with Lara. The uneven relationship between Lara and an older man is a motif that recurs throughout Lara’s acting years.
Active
Themes
In the morning, Emily and Lara both get up early. Emily was a grumpy, mercurial teenager, but since her senior year of high school, she has planned to one day take over the family’s farm. She loves working in the fields and learning about agriculture, while her sisters’ passions lie elsewhere. At first, Lara and Joe were worried Emily wasn’t serious, but now that she’s 26, they’re just relieved. Lara remembers when Emily was 14 and started to insist that Peter Duke was her real father. Furious with her mother, she accused her of keeping everything secret and threatened to run away to find Duke.
Active
Themes
Lara recalls the day that must have eventually led to Emily’s obsession with Peter Duke. When Emily was 12, the girls were watching a Christmas movie in which Duke starred in a charismatic, comic role. Joe came in from the yard and watched the movie with the girls for a few minutes before idly commenting that Lara once knew Duke. The girls start yelling all at once, shocked by this information. Thinking of the wild summer nights she and Duke shared, Lara explains simply that she and Duke once acted in the same play and dated for a summer. In bed that night, Joe apologizes for bringing up Duke, saying that he wasn’t thinking. But the damage is done, and the girls fixate on Duke for years to come.
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