My Life with the Walter Boys
62 pages • 2-hour read
Ali NovakMy Life with the Walter Boys
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Symbols & Motifs
Romeo and Juliet
The Shakespearean tragedy Romeo and Juliet is a motif within My Life With the Walter Boys that explores the complex nature of love and relationships. The Prologue opens with Jackie criticizing the play’s doomed lovers for their impulsive and emotional decision-making: “I’ll admit that Romeo and Juliet were passionate. But, their passion was so intense, so destructive, it got them killed” (1). Jackie juxtaposes herself with Romeo and Juliet: Jackie is deliberate, a planner, someone who does not let her emotions direct her actions. Jackie looks down on their passionate, if ill-fated, romance as a failure to plan and think ahead: “There was no preparation—or even thinking, for that matter. They just did, regardless of the consequences. When you don’t plan ahead, things get messy. […] a messy love life was the last thing I needed” (2). By closing the prologue with this declaration, she foreshadows that a messy love life is exactly what awaits her.
Jackie uses Romeo and Juliet as a framework for her understanding of love and relationships because, as she comes to find, love is often far more difficult to plan for than she thought. Though she judges Romeo and Juliet for their impulsivity, Jackie eventually discovers that love is an uncontrollable force and that she can’t plan or prepare for it. Upon meeting Cole Walter, Jackie learns that it is difficult to control one’s innate attraction to someone: “My skin blazed like a bad sunburn where his eyes touched my body” (16). From their first meeting, Cole’s presence inspires a visceral reaction in Jackie.
Seeking to avoid the uncontrolled passion that doomed Romeo and Juliet, Jackie opts to date Alex, whom she views as the less-risky option, the one she can plan on: “Alex was caring and dependable. I felt like he was someone I had known for my entire life, like I was home” (243). Only much later does she realize that she cannot will away her passion for Cole.
At the end of the text, Jackie lands on the idea that “[y]ou couldn’t control everything, because it wasn’t all meant to be perfect. Sometimes things just needed to be messy” (286). The Jackie who first arrived in Colorado would have found this open-ended conclusion far too uncertain. Romeo and Juliet teach Jackie to let go of control and that following her emotions may not always lead her down the cleanest path, but it will be the one that feels most right and true.
The Walter House
The big, chaotic Walter house serves as a symbol of Jackie’s search for home as defined by both place and people. At the beginning of the text, Jackie has lost both: She has left the place she grew up in to move to Colorado to live with the Walters, and has also lost her entire family. Jackie is completely unmoored: “The Walters’ house was like nothing I’d ever experienced before: disorganized, rowdy, and unpredictable. Without a proper foothold, some type of steadiness, I was losing myself in the chaos” (107). The Walter household threatens Jackie’s sense of self not only because of its chaotic, crowded nature, but because it is so unlike the home she knows.
At first, Jackie resists making a new “home” in Colorado: “This might be where I had to live, and I would try to make the best of it, but it would never be my home” (21). She views Colorado as “a bookmark between the pages of my life” (94) until she is ready to resume her life back in New York. In doing so, Jackie closes herself off emotionally to those around her as a way to protect herself from further loss. This becomes difficult as she forms connections with new friends in Colorado, especially Cole, who seeks to invite Jackie into his world.
When Cole shows Jackie around the ranch, he marks her height against a beam in their barn. This is an intimate act that symbolically attaches Jackie to the Walters and this place: “I realized the little black mark wasn’t just a testament to how short I was compared to most of the Walters, but a memory” (109). Cole creates an indelible mark, signifying that Jackie is part of the house and the family for good, not just passing through.
Her search for home is not without its trials as Jackie struggles to allow herself to feel at home with the Walters. Some of the Walter boys attempt to hold Jackie at an arm’s length, exacerbating her reluctance to call Colorado home, even as she tries to settle in: “Could I really call the Walters’ house home? Over the course of the last few weeks, the ranch had started to feel something like that, but after what happened at the party and with Lee, I knew it wasn’t” (237). Jackie questions the sense of home she begins to find at the Walter ranch, refusing to believe that she could belong somewhere again.
Ultimately, the people Jackie meets help her to once again find the sense of stability she longs for. Jackie’s relationship with Alex, in particular, serves to cultivate a sense of belonging and home: “Alex was caring and dependable. I felt like he was someone I had known for my entire life, like I was home” (243). While she remains separated from her familiar spaces in New York, her friendship with Alex acts as a safe landing place for Jackie’s emotions, creating a sense of home and comfort for her and showing her that home can be found in the people she loves, not just in a location.
Jackie elaborates on this idea further when she learns that she will be able to spend the entire summer in New York, but instead of joy and relief, she finds herself experiencing mixed emotions: “More than anything, I wanted to go home, but what about the people I’d come to love here in Colorado?” (340). Here, Jackie illustrates how her place with the Walters has become home to her. While she still considers New York home, her definition has expanded to include the people she loves in Colorado. The search for home is an ongoing journey for Jackie, but at the end of the text she no longer feels like she lacks the home and support structure that she did at the beginning. The Walters become her chosen family, and in turn, her home.
Katherine’s Murals
Katherine’s murals throughout the Walter ranch are a symbol of family and belonging. Katherine’s murals give the spaces around the ranch a personal touch unique to the Walter household. They make even Jackie, still reeling from the loss of her family, feel a sense of home. Jackie describes the kitchen mural: “All of the walls were painted to be one huge mural of a vineyard […] It was the opposite of my mother’s clean-tiled, stainless-steel kitchen […] This room looked lived in, and, for some strange reason, I liked it” (27). Katherine’s artwork gives the Walter home a lived-in quality that Jackie’s family’s New York City apartment lacked. The place is warm and welcoming in large part due to Katherine’s artistic flourishes that mark nearly every surface.
When Jackie moves into Katherine’s studio, it hampers Katherine’s ability to create art, which stirs feelings of anger and resentment in certain members of the family, especially Lee, whose own parents disowned him and his brother. Lee lashes out at Jackie at various points in the text, trying to instill in her a sense that “You will never be a part of our family” (231). Jackie internalizes this, believing that her position in the family is precarious. As Lee gets to know Jackie and her situation, however, he sees her position in a new light: “[I]t’s hard enough for [Katherine] to pay attention to all twelve of us. And then you showed up, and my aunt felt so responsible for you that she gave up her studio” (263). Here, Lee admits his jealousy over Katherine’s divided attention, but comes to realize that Katherine’s action of giving up her studio is an act of sacrifice that one does for those they love. Lee, also a beneficiary of Katherine’s generosity and ability to cultivate a sense of home and family, comes to understand Jackie as in need of a sense of family and belonging as well.
The culmination of this symbol occurs near the end of the text when Katherine reveals the mural she has completed even without access to her studio space:
[O]ne wall of the barn was covered in a spectacular mural. In the middle were Katherine and George, surrounded by their children […] But then I noticed the girl with two arms wrapped around her shoulder. I was in the painting, and Cole and Alex were smiling on either side of me. On top of the entire mural in Katherine’s cursive font were the words: ‘My Family’ (348).
Katherine’s mural is the symbol of family and belonging that Jackie has been craving since losing her family. By creating a piece of art that includes Jackie as part of the family, Katherine has given Jackie the gift of belonging. Katherine’s ability to complete the mural without access to her studio space signals that Jackie belongs and is not just an interloper set on disrupting the Walter family equilibrium.
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