Eggs

“‘My name is David. I’m nine. My mother died too. She hit her head. Her name was Carolyn Sue Limpert. We used to live in Minnesota. That’s a state. I have a memento in my pocket, but nobody’s allowed to see it.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I guess it’s okay to show it to you.’ He took out the memento and held it before the closed, glittery eyes. They did not move. He returned the memento to his pocket.”

When David finds Primrose pretending to be dead in the forest and mistakenly believes her to be a corpse, he spills his life story to her. The short, simple sentences emphasize his youth and inexperience, and it is clear that, despite his straightforward approach to the world, he is burdened by a deep and abiding sadness, for his belief that the girl before him is dead does not trouble him, in and of itself. By this point in his young life, he has already been forced to confront the grim reality of sudden death. The scene also provides crucial context about David’s circumstances and introduces the key symbol of his mysterious memento.

“She would not call after him. She would not do anything to upset him. She would sigh and close her eyes and remind herself that he had already had enough upset for a lifetime. It was all part of what she called ‘The Sadness.’ Nor would she tell his father, for he was already ‘overwhelmed.’

David sauntered down the street. No one, not grandmothers, not anyone could touch him. His mother’s death had made him invincible.”

This quote provides insight into David’s troubled dynamic with his grandmother, who tries to discipline him while remaining sensitive to his grief. Notably, David uses his grandmother’s hesitance to his own advantage, and he does not respect her attempts to mother him. His defiant thought that “[h]is mother’s death had made him invincible” reflects his bitter determination to reassert some form of control over his life despite the misfortune that has befallen him. The scene also establishes the fact that his father, who is “overwhelmed” with work (and likely grief), is largely absent from David’s daily life.

“From that day forward, David had never even bruised a rule, much less broken one. (Except his grandmother’s, of course, and her rules didn’t count.) It was his most secret secret, one that he shared with no one on earth, not even the daylight. For David believed that if he went a long enough time without breaking a rule—a year, five years, twenty—piling up a million obediences, a billion—sooner or later, somehow somewhere, a debt would be paid, a score would be settled, and his mother would come back.”

This quote explains that David uses rule following and superstition to cope with his grief. Faced with the unpalatable reality that he will never see his mother again, David develops irrational rules as a form of “bargaining” with reality; his “if-then” approach serves as an illusory shield that prevents him from fully dealing with his grief, and this mindset greatly hinders his development as time goes on.

“He made one silent vow to himself: if she started reading Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, he would walk up and rip it from her hands. Because that was the story his mother used to read to him at bedtime.”

When David attends a library story time hosted by his grandmother, he preemptively decides to be disruptive if her story choice reminds him of his grief. His avoidance of the special story between him and his mother reflects one of his many superstitions, as David feels that he cannot hear that story again now that his mother is gone.

“Beyond the dark she was humming. Or someone was. His mother used to hum. Carolyn Sue Limpert. He remembered once. He was on the stairs, playing dinosaurs and soldiers. Tyrannosaurus rex was eating soldiers—privates, sergeants—sometimes two at a time, chewing them up, and below him, in the dining room, his mother was setting the dinner table and humming. Folding napkins and placing plates and spoons and forks and humming while Tyrannosaurus rex ate the whole army, generals and all. Her humming had been the night-light of his life.”

When David visits Madam Dufee, her habit of humming in the dark catapults him into a vivid memory of his mother. The sudden barrage of detailed sensory imagery in this passage is designed to convey the idea that this one simple sound forces David to relive a deeply meaningful moment in which he felt safe and protected in the knowledge that his mother was present in his life. By characterizing his mother as his “night-light,” he makes it clear that her love was his shield against all of life’s fearsome unknowns. This detail also helps to explain why he is now so afraid of the dark.

“‘It’s all bullcrap. I’d never want to be my mother.’ She was twisting her hair. ‘She lives in the clouds. In the future. I think all those palms got to her. Not me. I’m living now. Today.’ She laughed.”

When David first meets Primrose, she expresses disdain for her palm-reading mother, Madam Dufee. Her tone of contempt in this quote provides the first glimpse into her problematic dynamic with her mother, illustrating the divide in their relationship and explaining Primrose’s dramatic decision to move out of the house entirely.

“‘What about your grandmother?’

‘She thinks she’s my mother. Nobody’s my mother.’

The wagon wheels hummed softly over the street. ‘Same here,’ she said.”

In this conversation between Primrose and David, David explains his disdain for his grandmother and highlights his refusal to accept any substitutes for his mother. Unlike David’s mother, Madam Dupree is not dead, she commiserates, illustrating Primrose’s feelings about her mother’s role in her life. This quote develops the theme of Friendship as a Substitute for Parental Comfort.

“A horrifying thought occurred to him. What if he stayed awake all night long, until the first glimmer of morning? Again and again he heard his mother’s voice: ‘We’ll see the sun rise tomorrow.’ He had promised himself he would never see the sun rise without her. Along with obeying rules, he believed that this promise would help bring her back.”

When David accidentally stays up too late, he worries about the prospect of accidentally seeing the sun rise. This quote explains how David’s superstitions about his mother’s death extend to the sunrise, preventing him from viewing it in her absence. His preoccupation with these illusory “rules” shows the depths of his denial about his mother’s death.

“They were throwing stones—yes—but they were skipping them across the surface of each other’s water. Flat and sharp-edged, the stones stung for only a moment, then sailed off. But as summer droned on he began to notice that some stones became heavier, became rocks, were dropped rather than skipped, were allowed to sink. One day in late July, a rock hit bottom.”

This quote presents Refrigerator John’s perspective on the constant bickering and barbs that David and Primrose exchange. The extended metaphor of “throwing stones” illustrates that although their bickering is usually fairly harmless, the two children are gradually escalating their behavior into something more serious and spiteful. The final image of a rock that “hit[s] bottom” also foreshadows the explosion of a significant conflict in the events to come.

“So why wasn’t he racing to her and shouting, ‘Primrose, look, your father’s picture! It’s all over that table over there!’? Because something didn’t feel right. Something so wispy it would not fill the hollow of a thought. Something that made him want to drape a sheet over the table of gold and silver frames.”

After David discovers a table full of photos of Primrose’s ‘father’ at the flea market, he does not immediately understand what this means. However, even in his innocence, he realizes that he must not reveal what he’s seen. In this moment, he takes on the protective role of an adult when he decides to shield Primrose from the unpleasant truths that the table holds. This scene shows his character development as he actively seeks to protect Primrose’s feelings.

“‘Why can’t I just have a nice, normal mother like everybody else?’ She stared at David, yet seemed unaware of the irony of her question. ‘A mother that cooks dinner. That takes me places. That buys me stuff. Hah!’ Her laugh was cold.”

In this quote, Primrose loses sight of David’s loss as she complains about her lack of a traditional mother figure. Her tone conveys bitterness and wistful hope, and it is clear that despite—or perhaps because of—her own eccentricities, she longs for a more conventional homelife than she has ever had. However, her contempt for her mother prevents her from appreciating the fact that Madam Dupree, unlike David’s mother, is still alive and present. Rather than seeking to build new connections with her mother, Primrose relies upon Friendship as a Substitute for Parental Comfort.

“I try it a couple times every summer. I go to Summer Story Time. I close my eyes. I try to pretend the voice is my mother’s. But it never works. I just keep hearing the story and hearing the story and I never get to sleep.”

Primrose makes this admission to David when she explains why she was trying to sleep during Summer Story Time. This unusual habit reveals her need to seek out replacements for the absence of a traditional mother. As she begins to confide in David, her words indicate that despite her tough exterior, she too harbors secret vulnerabilities around the less functional aspects of her family dynamics.

“The daily carrot became her last stand—one small, pitiful, final attempt to bond with her grandson. He never took a bite.”

This simple quote encapsulates both the hopes and love of David’s grandmother and the bitter rejection and aloofness of her angry, grief-stricken grandson. As she provides a carrot with his lunch each day, this gesture comes to represent her hope that he will accept the extra nutrition (and with it, her love), but he never does. The carrot, therefore, becomes a symbol of the cold and strained relationship between David and his grandmother.

“Primrose would have swallowed spiders before admitting it, but there was at least one way in which she was like her mother: she enjoyed pretending. Specifically, she enjoyed pretending to be somebody she really wasn’t.”

This quote explains Primrose’s tendency to pretend in order to shield herself from aspects of reality that she does not like. This habit is already illustrated in her grand fantasies about where her father is now. In this chapter, she decides to dress up and pretend that David is her son, even though she knows how sensitive David is about his mother. She therefore prioritizes her own emotional needs over those of her vulnerable friend.

“David became more careful than ever about obeying rules. It was easier to do now that Primrose wasn’t around. Sometimes he even made up his own rules—the more to obey, the better.”

In his time away from Primrose, David adheres even more closely to his rule-following superstitions, creating additional rules just to give himself more ground to cover. This quote relates to the theme of Using Superstition to Cope with Grief and highlights The Tension between Rule-Following and Risk-Taking.

“He pulled the memento from his pocket. It was a little purple plastic turtle. His mother loved turtles. He had bought it for her birthday with his own money. She had made it into a pin. She wore it every day. She was about to be buried with it but he had reached into the casket and pulled it from her dress so they wouldn’t bury all of her. No one had tried to stop him.”

This quote features the reveal of David’s memento, an item previously hidden from everyone but him. This is an important moment, as David shows the memento to the uncomprehending Madam Dufee in a final, forlorn effort to make some sort of supernatural connection with his mother. David’s memento is a symbol of his grief, so when he openly displays it, the item symbolizes his desire to finally seek help for the grief that plagues him—even if he is currently looking in the wrong place.

“‘Found out a couple years ago. I guess my mother made up all that stuff about my father. Anyway, I figured, who cares? Whoever he was, he’s sure as heck not here. Is he?’ She made a mock show of looking around. ‘So ever since then I’ve just been […] pretending.’”

Primrose makes this admission when she reveals to David that she has known that the man in her treasured photograph is not really her father. With a matter-of-fact tone, she now explains that she uses her “pretending” to cope with the harsh reality that she does not know her father and never will. In her mind, it is far better to persist in believing the story her mother spun. As Primrose opens up to David about her father, the two lean more heavily upon Friendship as a Substitute for Parental Comfort.

“‘Or what if I’m just not good enough? What if my mother’s waiting someplace, just waiting for me to be good enough so she can come back, but she can’t because I keep messing up.’ He punched his leg with each word. ‘Messing up…messing up…’”

Here, David reveals the deepest fears that are associated with his superstitions about his mother. However, when he confronts the idea that he may never be good enough to bring her back from the dead, he harms himself emotionally by internalizing his anger and blaming himself for her continuing absence. His irrational outburst shows that he is still Using Superstition to Cope with Grief.

“Then he told the story of Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel named Mary Anne. He remembered every word as his mother had read it to him night after night.”

When David and Primrose are alone in the wilderness at night, Primrose requests that David read to her, and this request carries a great deal of weight because David knows that no one has ever read her to sleep. When David runs out of material to read, he tells Primrose his favorite bedtime story—the same story that he has been studiously avoiding in the wake of his mother’s death. This moment marks a significant breakthrough for both children.

“But she loves her daughter, David can tell, loves her the way David’s mother loved him, and sometimes David feels that same love he used to, except now it’s coming from other places, other people, and it’s a good thing the love is coming because he’s beginning to think there aren’t enough rules in the universe to bring his mother back.”

The final story that David tells Primrose before falling asleep beside her is his own, and he includes Primrose in his story as well. David emphasizes that when he met Primrose’s mother, he understood that even though Madam Dupree is different than most mothers, she still deeply loves Primrose. In this scene, David recognizes that the love he used to receive from his mother is still around him; he just receives it from different people now. This marks a significant moment in his emotional journey, for the burden of his grief begins to feel lighter.

“It was crisp and sharp and beautiful and smooth as a painted egg. And changing by the moment. Orange at first, then butterscotch, then yellow, a plump breakfast yellow of egg yolk; and then, as if poked with a fork, it suddenly broke, spilling, flooding the river and the city and the trees and the sky and every dark corner of the world.”

This quote occurs during the climax of the novel, when David finally allows himself to see the sunrise for the first time since his mother’s death. This quote solidifies the sunrise as a motif for the theme of Using Superstition to Cope with Grief, as David grieves in the light of a new day and breaks a harmful superstition in the process. This quote also features distinct egg imagery that suggests the breaking of David’s hard but fragile exterior, once and for all.

“Running toward them were Davd’s grandmother and Refrigerator John and a man Primrose assumed was David’s father. All wore faces wild with joy, celebrating faces, crying and laughing faces. Primrose had expected no less. What she had not expected was her mother, out in front of them all, lunging clumsily toward them, her eyes every bit as wild as the others’, her zany blond wig falling over her ear.”

As David and Primrose return home after their adventure on the train tracks, Primrose is surprised to see her mother among the crowd of anxious parental figures. This is a significant moment for Primrose, as her perspective on her mother shifts in a positive way, allowing the girl to develop a new appreciation for her mother’s love.

“They were at the kitchen table, David and his grandmother. David’s birthday was coming up in fourteen days, and there was going to be a party. Between munches on a carrot, David was saying who should be invited. His grandmother was writing down names.”

This quote features the first entirely positive interaction between David and his grandmother, as symbolized by David’s acceptance of the carrot that she provides. This scene shows that David is more receptive to his grandmother’s love, as evidenced by their collaboration on a party guestlist. Their easy companionship is a stark contrast to the first few chapters, in which David rejected his grandmother’s attempts to show her love and support.