Home of the American Circus

Step’s house, which Freya inherits, initially symbolizes for her the painful events of her youth that she left town to forget. Her first view when she returns reflects the sense of displacement and lack of belonging: She sees the house and “the little valley it lives in, sandwiched between granite slopes, surrounded by trees. A Cape Cod-style summer cottage with extra parts built after the fact, so from some angles it’s quaint, and from others it looks like a building that has lost the point of itself” (21). When she draws closer, she sees the signs of neglect, mirroring her own psyche: “Sumac trees have grown through the spaces between the stepping stones, breaking them loose. I feel like I’m trekking through a jungle” (43).

When she shows Lee, the realtor, the house, Freya tries “not to feel like I’m showing him a reflection of myself” (290), so strongly has she come to identify with the place. Her efforts at repairing the house parallel her efforts to come to terms with the emotional wounds of her past. Keeping her great-grandfather’s woodworking tools, Freya uses them to carve her parents’ furniture and, in that way, provides a therapeutic release for her feelings and exerts a sense of control over her memories and emotions. Getting rid of her parents’ belongings, with Bee’s help, is a way for Freya to release herself from her grip on the past.

For all that it provides shelter, however, Freya knows this house isn’t her home, and in the end it becomes an inheritance she wants to leave behind. The house’s destruction at the end symbolizes how Freya is finally free of the wounds of her childhood and has found a sense of solidity, maturity, and control over her own life.

The deer fence Step built around the house begins as one of many symbols of Step’s inefficacy as a person, which extends to his lack of skills as a parent. Thinking he would build a fence to keep deer away from the property, Step instead found, due to the slope of the hill, that what he “actually built was a deep trap. They’d jump in but couldn’t get out” (21). This reflects how Freya felt she was trapped in that house and unable to leave or be free of her mother’s emotional abuse and Step’s emotional neglect. The trapped deer that Freya chases out of the fence during the course of the book represent her own longing for freedom, which she hasn’t yet decided how to attain.

At the end of the book, one of the last things Freya does before she leaves is cut away a section of the fence so deer coming down the hill won’t be trapped around the house anymore. This severance represents how Freya has set herself free of the burdens of the past and has ended the cycles of emotional and sexual abuse to which she, and then Aubrey, were subject.