In a series of craft notes, we’re illustrating Point of View. If you want to see the first step in this process, click here to see Alice Munro’s version, in First Person Informant
Here is third person limited, where we choose the mother to be central to our point of view. We use a direct interior monolog.
After supper my husband says, “Want to go down and see if the lake's still there?” I've heard this phrase a hundred times, and watched him take such pleasure in it – I see his face open up, pink and smiling. My little girl springs to her feet – she's her father's daughter and not her mother's. He and she leave me sewing under the dining-room light, staring down into the hard shadow created by my head between the light and the table, staring into the loneliness that will fill the house until they return. I am making clothes, diminutive dresses, blouses with many buttons, clothes not for the hard scrabble of summer but for the school term coming in the fall. I'm ashamed to deny her store-bought clothes, so I have taken an old suit and my old plaid wool dress, and now I try to match the plaid together in a perfect seam down the back of the dress. She will endure the home-made clothes like she has endured the several fittings, with a lack of grace and perhaps a concealed rage. My two, one tall and one like a willow twig, step out of the house, leaving my son in the little screened porch at the end of the front veranda. He kneels on his bed and presses his face against the screen and begs mournfully, “Bring me an ice-cream cone!” My daughter, hard as a diamond, calls back, “You will be asleep,” and she doesn't even turn her head.
Comments