How the Light Gets In by Joyce Maynard

Author:Joyce Maynard [Maynard, Joyce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

Part 3

When the Light Goes Out

78

78.

Rats on the loose

December comes, and the world turns bitterly cold in ways that have nothing to do with weather. Marty has called many times, reminding Toby that the guys at the fire station are looking forward to seeing him back, but even though all the charges against him have been dropped, he hasn’t wanted to go there anymore. When Eleanor brings up returning to the farmers’ market, once the season begins again, he tells her, “I think I’ll pass.” Ralph can handle the sales.

From what Eleanor can gather, the movie based on her book, whose main character now goes by a different name, is coming out sometime the following year, but nobody’s been in touch to say when, and Eleanor no longer cares. Guy has mentioned the studio’s plan to make a short promotional video tie-in for the film’s release. They want to shoot him with a flock of penguins, talking about climate change. The threat to the planet has never been greater, once the new president takes office.

He hasn’t even been inaugurated yet, and already she feels a change in their world. When she goes to the store or the library—where her books are back on the shelf—or on her weekly trip with Toby to bring their trash to the dump, it seems to Eleanor that she can see the effects of the election on everyone’s face. Not just the ones whose candidate was defeated, but in another way, on the faces of those who voted for the winner. Eleanor has never felt this before but it seems to her now that the election has brought out a mean-spiritedness in people she had not known to exist—even her neighbors, people she’d known since they were all young, as if the behavior of the man they elected has suddenly provided them license to look out for no one but themselves and to sneer at those foolish or weak enough to think differently. Maybe it has been there all the time—this dark side she’s been noticing—but the triumphant expression of the man who now presides over the country seems to have revealed, in her fellow human beings, a form of ugliness Eleanor never knew to have existed until now.

She remembers, from her time in Brookline, a project known as the Big Dig, in which vast expanses of the city’s underground were uncovered in an effort to upgrade Boston’s subterranean transit system. One consequence the engineers and contractors who’d overseen the project had failed to anticipate were the teeming hordes of rats, previously hidden away underground, suddenly let loose on the city, scurrying along Boston’s beautiful streets, the Public Garden, past the golden dome of the State House even, and the mansions in Back Bay.

These days they’re living through now offer a similar picture. The rats must have been around forever, Eleanor thinks. It’s just that they’ve emerged from the darkness. Now you can see their glowing little eyes, not simply in the person of Donald

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