Meet Me in the Garden

“I mix the blues and violets and blacks on a sheet of glass, hands trembling. I need to really paint. Like Monet, going blind. Like Frida Kahlo after the bus accident. What else to do with this fire in my chest? But an hour passes and another, and the painting is splotchy and crude, absent of any true feeling, the turpentine bruise hued when I soak the brushes.”

Odette’s allusions to Monet and Kahlo justify her belief that suffering should transmute directly into art. Through the precise adjectives “splotchy and crude,” LaCour uses diction to show the gap Odette sees between her aspiration and ability. The metaphor of the “fire in [her] chest” establishes the theme of Creative Expression as an Emotional Outlet.

“On my way out, I stop in the entry by Papa’s favorite paintings. To the left: a pink sunset over an ocean horizon. To the right: birds in flight against a blue sky. I press my lips to the canvases, one and then the other, like kissing both his cheeks.”

The simile “like kissing both his cheeks” helps to position Papa’s paintings as a motif of The Strength of Family Bonds by showing Odette’s continued love for her late father. These paintings recur later when Maman unexpectedly mails them to Los Angeles, carrying Papa’s artistic legacy into Odette’s adult home.

“‘I do love you,’ Hattie says. ‘Sure, some girls could get away with what you’re describing. Girls without close family. Girls who are on their own. Girls who aren’t watched over, who don’t have as much to lose as you do. You’re an Honoré sister. The third in line to marry any man you choose. Everyone’s waiting to see who you’ll pick. I never dared to imagine that we could last.’”

Hattie’s repeated use of “Girls” builds an anaphoric list that measures Odette’s worth by her family name, revealing how deeply social expectation governs even their most intimate conversation. The declaration of love paired immediately with its renunciation shows how thoroughly Hattie has internalized the idea that queer love must yield to respectability. This capitulation illustrates The Psychological Cost of Hiding One’s True Identity.

“He roars, a tremendous noise, and now I’m opening my mouth, filling the car, matching him. Overpowering him. […] Everything awful inside of me, turning into sound. Delphine leaving me, Hattie giving me away, Cyril, whom I’ll never love. My father, gone forever.”

Lionel and Odette’s wordless scream becomes a shared register for grief that language has failed to hold, and the asyndetic list that follows (“Delphine leaving me, Hattie giving me away, Cyril, whom I’ll never love”) strips each loss down to its bluntest form. The parallel phrasing accumulates without conjunctions, mimicking the overwhelming nature of her trauma.

“‘A girl,’ I say. And the image from a long time ago comes back. Delphine and me, holding separate ends of a long string. Our parallel lives. Singing the same lullabies in different dark rooms.”

The metaphor of “holding separate ends of a long string” captures how Odette and Delphine remain connected across years of estrangement even as distance and secrecy keep them apart. This image speaks to The Strength of Family Bonds and reinforces the key role the characters continue to play in each other’s lives despite their separation.

“‘See those two?’ Lionel’s close to my ear, pointing to a pair of pigeons breaking away from the rest. ‘They’re us.’

‘Are they?’ The birds spin and fall, and I’m not sure whether they’re ecstatic or struggling, if it’s freedom or an affliction. Either way, they’re mesmerizing.”

The Birmingham Roller pigeons’ dangerous, beautiful falls reflect the characters’ precarious lives as Black people navigating systems built to harm them. Odette’s uncertainty over whether the birds display “freedom or an affliction” shows how the pursuit of liberty always comes with risk.

“The house is so still. We’re all three on the sofa, but we’re also on the front porch on Louisiana Avenue, and there’s a car stopped outside and a man in white at the door, and he’s taking our father away. ‘Claire,’ I say. ‘Please. We know how this goes.’”

Odette’s narration collapses two timelines into one image, placing her sisters on Adele’s California sofa while simultaneously reliving the morning her father was institutionalized in New Orleans. The present-tense verbs describing the past (“there’s a car stopped,” “he’s taking”) make the memory feel as immediate as the unfolding crisis over Delphine.

“A question rises. I ask it before I can judge its rightness. ‘How much do you miss your mother? Is it as much as a house? Or the sky? Or the whole world?’ ‘Whole world.’ ‘I miss her as much as the whole world, too.’”

Odette offers Nathalie a scale in order to give an abstract grief a measurable shape. The repetition of the phrase “[w]hole world” allows the characters to bond through their mourning over Delphine, and Odette’s empathy in this passage speaks to The Strength of Family Bonds.

“‘You need to tell her I’m dead.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I mean: Tell her I died.’ Thunder in my ears. Blood rushing. ‘There’s no way I’d ever do that.’ She’s holding perfectly still, so passive I’m certain she hasn’t heard me, until she says, ‘It’s the only way I can survive.’”

The metaphorical “[t]hunder in [Odette’s] ears” expresses her shock and horror at Delphine’s demand to tell Nathalie that she’s dead. Delphine’s stillness afterward, described as “so passive,” contrasts sharply with the violence of her request, suggesting a woman who has already begun to dissociate from the decision she is making.

“‘Tell her I’m dead,’ Delphine says. ‘If you don’t, I’ll tell everyone about you.’ I stop hearing. The room blurs. When my words come, they’re very faint. ‘You wouldn’t do that.’ ‘I would.’ She looks at me. […] ‘We aren’t that different,’ the stranger says. ‘They don’t let girls like you keep their babies either.’”

Odette’s narration shifts from calling her cousin “Delphine” to calling her “the stranger,” a change in diction that registers the rupture in their relationship. The passage crystallizes The Psychological Cost of Hiding One’s True Identity, since the secret Odette has kept to survive becomes the blackmail Delphine uses to trap her in a damaging secret.

“‘Ready?’ I ask when my voice returns to me, and we fling the petals as hard as we can. It rains pinks and yellows and reds and blues. ‘I love you, Delphine,’ I say. ‘Goodbye.’ ‘Goodbye, Mommy,’ Nathalie shouts. Our hands are empty. I lift her up. Pressure of her arms and her legs tight around me. I’m afraid we’ll be swept away by the waves.”

The polysyndeton and visual imagery in the list “pinks and yellows and reds and blues” helps to capture the vivid scene of Odette and Nathalie’s improvised funeral for Delphine. The parallel farewells performed in the same breath underline the asymmetry between what each of them believes they are relinquishing.

“‘We could combine our incomes, get a small house,’ I say. ‘My decisions would be my own. Your decisions would be your own. I don’t want another husband. Not in that same way. I already did it once and I don’t want to do it again. To be a wife—in that way—again. When I think of it, when I imagine it, I feel like I’m suffocating.’ […] ‘Odette,’ he says, eyes glistening. ‘I’ve been so lonely.’”

Odette proposes marriage to Felix on terms that invert traditional expectations, insisting twice that their “decisions would be” separate and autonomous, a repetition that underscores how central independence has become to her sense of self after her disastrous first marriage. Felix’s quiet reply, “I’ve been so lonely,” reframes the arrangement as mutual rescue. Their partnership becomes one of the novel’s clearest illustrations of The Strength of Family Bonds, a chosen family built on honesty about its own limits.

“‘Let’s listen from the beginning.’ She draws the curtain shut. Dimmer now, my pulse racing. […] I’ve listened to the record dozens of times, but still—when Doris Day’s voice fills the booth, the lyrics are torture. A secret love, impatient to be free.”

Doris Day’s “Secret Love” is about a hidden romance “impatient to be free,” mirroring Odette and Ginny’s situation. The scene stages The Psychological Cost of Hiding One’s True Identity through music, letting a borrowed lyric express what neither woman will say aloud.

“‘You don’t need to live this way,’ she says. ‘With so much fear. You’re starving yourself, and you don’t have to.’ A flame, burning against my eyelids. ‘Go back inside,’ I say, and this time she does.”

Exposing The Psychological Cost of Hiding One’s True Identity, Ginny’s metaphor of starvation reframes Odette’s self-denial as a form of self-harm. The image of “[a] flame, burning against [her] eyelids” illustrates the protagonist’s pain as she forces herself to reject Ginny’s invitation to a more authentic life.

“With each pound of the hammer and each load they carry down, each step through my front gate and bottle of beer drunk on my patio, I feel their love for me. But I recognize, even more, that there’s something unknowable about me, a part of me that I can’t let them know. And it eats the love away, feeds at it from the inside of my stomach, and I am a husk as I hug them goodbye.”

The anaphoric list of small domestic gestures, “each pound of the hammer,” “each load they carry down,” accumulates evidence of The Strength of Family Bonds as her relatives build her painting studio. However, the extended metaphor of something that “eats the love away, feeds at it from the inside” casts her secret as a parasite consuming the very affection meant to sustain her.

“I found myself outside in the dark, eyes adjusting, making my way past the studio and to the forest part—so long since anyone’s called it that—and pictured the chair out there. Clean lines, smooth oak. Behind it: the palm, leaning in the way that it does, and the jasmine vine. I imagined an early evening sky, tall grass, clusters of poppies, dandelion weeds. The feeling that follows a scream: raw, bereft, relieved.”

The careful inventory of plant life mirrors the compositional eye of a painter scouting a subject. Her closing description, “raw, bereft, relieved,” echoes the emotional aftermath of the earlier car scene with Lionel, linking two separate cathartic releases years apart. The garden here functions as it does throughout the novel, a space where grief, memory, and artistic vision converge.

“‘You’re terrified of love,’ she says. ‘I understand why. But it makes you small. You hide and you lie. You’re better than that.’ ‘I’ve never known love without hiding. I don’t even know what it would feel like.’ ‘Let me show you.’ She’s flushed, jaw set, eyes fierce and shining. Fighting for me. And still, I tell her no.”

Ginny’s diagnosis, that fear “makes you small,” compresses years of Odette’s self-protective behavior into a single physical image, suggesting that hiding has diminished rather than preserved her. Odette’s reply, admitting she has “never known love without hiding,” reveals how thoroughly The Psychological Cost of Hiding One’s True Identity has shaped her understanding of intimacy itself, making openness feel like an unfamiliar state.

“I say, ‘Nathalie, I was wrong when I told you to play by their rules. I was wrong and you knew it.’ I take her hand and Clément’s, hold them together. ‘What I want you both to know,’ I say, ‘deep in your bones, is that you are beholden only to yourselves.’”

Odette’s repetition of “I was wrong” reverses the advice she once gave Nathalie to endure the sisters’ discipline by playing by their rules. The phrase “beholden only to yourselves” rejects the inherited logic of respectability and conformity that shaped her own upbringing under Maman, replacing it with an ethic of self-determination.

“‘I keep thinking about that part in Cléo from 5 to 7, that long moment on the bus when you see their faces in the frame—Cléo’s and the soldier’s—and they’re so close to each other, and all you can do is wonder if that’s it for them, that one afternoon, or if it’s only the beginning.’ Our faces are close together, exactly that same way. ‘I remember.’ ‘That’s how my whole life feels, with you,’ she says.”

Ginny’s reference to Agnès Varda’s 1962 film Cléo from 5 to 7 gives her a vocabulary for the suspended, unresolved nature of her relationship with Odette. The film’s ambiguity, whether the encounter is “one afternoon” or “the beginning,” mirrors Ginny’s own uncertainty about whether their renewed closeness will lead anywhere lasting.

“‘I don’t want you to feel like you have to keep secrets,’ I say. ‘I don’t want that for you, ever, with anyone.’ […] ‘I want you to have the most true and beautiful lives. I want you to have the kind of lives where you never have to hide and you never have to pretend and you know that the people you love can handle the truth, even when it’s hard or uncomfortable. You don’t need to protect me.’”

Odette’s anaphoric repetition of “I want you to” builds a direct counterargument to the entire pattern of concealment that has structured her own adult life, from her marriages of convenience to decades of hiding her relationship with Ginny. This speech encapsulates the novel’s treatment of The Psychological Cost of Hiding One’s True Identity.

“We’re in the parking lot and people are staring and I am dazzled by my own fury. ‘You have no idea what I gave up,’ I say. ‘No idea.’ Desperation across her face, and fear. ‘I hate you,’ she says. […] ‘You have no idea what I gave up,’ I tell her again. ‘But I’d do it all over. I’d give all of it up—all over again—for you.’”

The repeated phrase “You have no idea what I gave up,” delivered first in anger and then in tenderness, charts Odette’s shift from self-justification to a declaration of unconditional love. The word “idea,” italicized the first time, emphasizes how incommensurable Odette’s sacrifice feels to her compared to Nathalie’s accusation of theft. This key passage tests The Strength of Family Bonds.

“I say, ‘Claire, I’m thirty-six years old. I know myself. Plenty of people, here and back home, live openly. Men with men and women with women. I’m going to do the same.’ ‘With who?’ Claire asks. ‘With Ginny,’ I say. ‘It’s been going on for a long time. I did everything I could to let it go, but I can’t. I don’t want to. I want to live with the person I love.’”

Odette’s declaration of her age, “thirty-six years old,” asserts an adult authority over her own life that counters any stereotypical assumption that her sexuality is a passing phase. The short, declarative sentences (“I did everything I could to let it go, but I can’t. I don’t want to”) strip away euphemism, replacing the evasions she has relied on for most of the novel with plain statement. This scene marks the culmination of Odette’s arc toward openness, directly answering the fear that has governed her relationships with Hattie, Cyril, and Felix.

“I scour my art books and magazines for shapes and references, stumble upon the old interview with Jean Dubuffet. I am convinced art has much to do with madness. Still not right. The same swarm in my head from long ago. And then I grasp it, that third place: Not sanity, not madness, but dreaming.”

Odette’s reference to the French painter Jean Dubuffet, a founder of Art Brut who sought creative material outside institutional norms, situates her artistic crisis within a real debate about the relationship between mental illness and creativity. Her rejection of his formulation shows her refusing a framework that would reduce Delphine’s suffering to raw material for art, insisting instead on language that honors both pain and imagination. The phrase “that third place” reflects Odette’s growing capacity to hold complexity rather than resolve it into simple opposites. This epiphany directly enables the painting that follows, grounding the theme of Creative Expression as an Emotional Outlet in a hard-won, non-judgmental understanding of Delphine’s illness.