Saint X

“They have seen palm trees bent to kiss the sand. They have seen water as pale as glaciers and walked on sand as soft as cream. They have watched the sun transform, at the end of the day, into a giant orange yolk that breaks and spills itself across the sea. They have seen the night sky overcome with fine blue stars.”

In this description of what the privileged guests of Indigo Bay routinely experience on their vacations, metaphor, similes, and personification come together to paint visceral moments of beauty. This figurative language produces images that are immersive and sensory, leading to a feeling of gentle beauty.

“He notices now that the sand, which was immaculate yesterday, is strewn with mats of brown seaweed. Two men is overalls are raking the seaweed into piles. The tractor follows after them, scooping up the piles. Behind the tractor, a fourth man uses a push broom to smooth away the tread marks.”

In this passage, a contrast is drawn between the immaculate and beautiful beach of Indigo Bay and the work that is required to achieve that beauty. The sentences begin to feel like a list, and as they continue on, there is a feeling of endless work, which is at odds with the guests’ experience of leisure as they spend their days on this beach that has been cleaned for them.

“All the while, though they don’t feel it, sand flies devour their flesh. The next morning at breakfast the guests scratch furiously at their limbs.”

This line, which comes at the end of a joyous scene, is unexpectedly dark in tone. The diction reflects a morbidity, with the use of the words “devour,” “flesh,” and “limbs,” as though the guests are no longer living beings but parts of a body. This foreshadows the death of Alison just a couple of days later.

“Mere days ago, my sister had rubbed aloe on my sunburned skin. If I concentrated on the memory, I could still feel her fingertips. Now I was shedding that skin. Soon there would be nothing left of me that she had touched.”

Here, Claire’s experience of a peeling sunburn represents the experience of gradually understanding that someone will be gone forever. Loss, which can be an abstract idea, becomes concrete, as Claire literally sheds something that is connected to a memory of her sister.

“At first, I went to the photographs when I missed my sister. As time passed, I went to them when I had not missed her in a while and wanted to.”

This line from Claire concisely expresses the complex evolution of her grief, as it transformed from a feeling of loss into a desire to hold on to the past. The repetition of several words between these two sentences also serves to knit them together, forming a rhythm that enhances the meaning.

“In my parents’ version, Alison was buffed like a piece of sea glass, her edges and points worn away over time and yielding to a pleasing smoothness.”

Here, Claire uses a metaphor so illustrate how her parents crafted an image of Alison that was easier for them to think about. By using sea glass as the central image, Claire points out without having to explicitly say it that some aspects of Alison’s personality might have been jagged or dangerous. This image also evokes the beach, and the environment in which Alison spent her last days.

“It is not okay, and I don’t think it ever will be. But I have found that this way, I can turn her from a body into a girl.”

For years, the girlfriend suffers from intrusive images of Alison’s body, and with this line she distinguishes that “body” from Alison herself. This line is a powerful one, drawing on the trope of the “pretty white dead girl” and subverting it. By acknowledging the dead girl as a real person, it becomes manageable for the girlfriend.

“It seems to him that this life is her doing. […] Then he wonders what it says about him that he has made her into such a vindictive, punishing ghost.”

This quote is full of subtle contradictions: Clive both engages with the idea of destiny and recognizes that he is making a choice in thinking about his life in this way. As a “punishing ghost,” Alison has become a powerful figure in Clive’s psyche, but he’s aware that he has created this ghost himself. This is an interesting dichotomy, especially considering Clive’s assertion that his path in life was determined solely by others.

“I think it would be more accurate to say that truth and untruth were present in Alison’s diary as hydrogen and oxygen are present in water. The challenge is not one of separation—for what use are either hydrogen or oxygen in understanding the nature of water? I had to find a way to understand how truth and untruth make each other.”

In this quote, Claire delivers a metaphor that precisely illustrates her experience of understanding Alison’s diary entries. Using the water molecule as the central image, Claire is able to articulate that Alison is more than simply the sum of the stories people tell about her. This image, like the sea glass, also evokes once again the circumstances around Alison’s death.

“He knew he should be past believing, but he couldn’t rid himself of the story. It was what he had of [his mother]; it was the pocket watch, Bible, lock of hair she’d left behind for him.”

This passage illustrates how Clive holds on to his past. In this moment, Clive is trying to hold on to his mother, who he has not seen since he was little, and he does this through the keeping of objects that he associates with her. The story is the only intangible item on this list, and this makes it even more difficult to give up.

“And the girl was already there. As they leapt and roughhoused and plunged into that cool, clean water she was beneath them, at the bottom of the pool, waiting to undo them.”

This line from Clive expresses a kind of magical thinking, in which he imagines Alison existing in moments of his life before he ever met her. The use of anaphora—the repetition of “and” at the beginning of each sentence—creates a feeling of momentum and inevitability within these sentences, as though the events that led to Alison’s death can’t be stopped. The beginning of the second sentence also lacks punctuation, contributing to that feeling of momentum, before the sentence slows down with the clause “at the bottom of the pool,” drawing the reader’s attention to this final image.

“Alison had been with me that night, giving me words I would never have found on my own. The closer I drew to Clive, the more powerful her presence became, as if they were a unified system, the two poles of a closed circuit, amplifying themselves within me.”

Claire uses a simile to express the feeling that Clive was somehow bringing her closer to Alison. The hyperbole of the simile reflects Claire’s heightened or altered state during this period of time, the feeling of amplification perhaps giving a sense that Claire is not in control of this situation.

“It had grown dark in my apartment, but I didn’t turn on the light. I listened to my sister’s voice in the darkness until I could scarcely remember a time when I’d heard anyone but Alison. I had the feeling then that I was entering my sister. I stretched and filled her, head to toe. I opened my eyes and looked out through hers. Together, in our body that was Alison’s body, we descended though lilac clouds.”

In this passage, Claire loses her grip on reality, and her experience of being consumed by thoughts of her sister becomes literal. Though the sequence here could be seen as frightening, the images create an impression of peacefulness and elation.

“[I]f she is honest with herself, she does not find this arrangement uncomfortable because a person is doing something for her, but because a black person is doing something for a white person. Which doesn’t mean she doesn’t want him to have his job. So what does it mean, exactly?”

In these lines, Alison asks a rhetorical question, expressing a frustration with the social and racial dynamics playing out on her family’s vacation, as well as with her own limitations in understanding how she should feel. The double negative in the second sentence, followed by a question, reflects her confusion and inward focus.

“She arrived at Indigo Bay at that critical moment when the girl cuts herself on the shards of her own reflection and watches, baffled and thrilled, as the blood begins to flow.”

This line uses metaphor to express a period of late adolescence, in which self-awareness becomes a nearly crippling preoccupation. The language used is violent and abrupt, gesturing toward the recklessness felt by Alison at age 18. The alliteration of “baffled,” “blood,” and “begins” makes this sentence all the more engaging, using sounds that evoke a bubbling up of something.

“Is the bar I’ve created a terrible cliché? If so, how much does it matter? What happens if you replace the wood floor coated in sawdust with a proper dance floor? What if you nix the mutt and add a cocktail waitress, sub a sound system for the tinny speakers on the bar? Now what does Alison think, say, do? What quantity of truth resides within a story’s details?”

This series of questions asked by Claire is depicting her not so much second-guessing herself as interrogating the idea that she has to get every detail right in order to understand Alison’s story. While she is commenting on the idea of truth/accuracy, she is also acknowledging that she may be engaging in stereotypes in the way she’s painted this bar. However, these questions seem to insist that she does not care, reflecting the fact that she is not considering the consequences of inaccurately representing a culture.

“She will finally feel like she is in this place without herself, and maybe that is all she ever wanted, for her little life to vanish right out from under her.”

This quote returns to the concept of self-awareness in adolescence, as Claire imagines what Alison might have wanted during the last week of her life. Here, the idea of self-awareness is extended, so that being somewhere “without herself” then turns into “her little life” vanishing—a frightening escalation.

“She materialized each night so that they may speak, then melts back into the city, dissolving into the salt-whitened streets.”

Clive uses metaphor in this quote to describe the particular experience of seeing Claire again and again for these strange chats. Claire is described as something like a substance, rather than a human.

“Sometimes he wonders if it is his fate to be controlled by people with the tug of stars, to let himself be pulled into their trouble again and again and learn nothing from it.”

Clive once again engages with the idea of fate, but he specifically sees the people around him as making that fate, as though they possess a power he couldn’t possibly have. This underscores his feelings of powerlessness—Clive believes he is at the mercy of people like Edwin.

“At the end of the parade, when Clive Richardson stumbled up to me and mumbled his invitation, it was like God or fate or whatever thing I lacked the time or proclivity to wonder about then was handing it to me, just giving it to me for free: a chance to take my life into my own hands and spoil it before it could disappoint me […]”

Sara dwells on fate (or something like it), much like Clive does in other passages. Sara’s voice verges on stream of consciousness here, conjuring a breathlessness, excitement, or even desperation. There is also an unexpected turn at the end of this quote, as she begins in a place that seems empowered and positive, and then lands with “and spoil it before it could disappoint me,” reflecting Sara’s bleak outlook during this time in her life.

“[H]e would spend the next ten hours laboring simply not to lose money, after which, bone-tired on the bus home, he might see a white woman seated next to him clutch her handbag and smile kindly at him; at first he was perplexed by this sequence of behaviors, but he came to understand that these women did not trust him, but they also did not want to appear distrustful.”

This quote seizes on an important moment for Clive, in which he understands a particular kind of racism and/or classism. He observes something that makes no sense on its surface, and understands it by imagining the motives of the person in question. The use of the word “trust” followed by “distrustful” highlights the hypocrisy of the women being described. Similar to the father on the beach, they want to enjoy their privilege but not be judged for it.

“[I]n the end she wants what they all want: to take home the story of how she fucked the man who brought she towels on the beach. But so what? She’s using him, but he’s using she, too. They get their story and he gets them.”

This line concisely illustrates the complex dynamic between Edwin and Alison. Here, Clive highlights Alison’s privilege in his use of harsh and blunt language, reflecting the callousness in Alison’s desire to be with Edwin. In ending with “and he gets them,” though, there is also an inherent depersonalization in what Edwin is doing as well—as though sex is a form of owning or dominating someone.

“I understood then what I did want, what I had wanted for months. There was a version of this story in which two lost souls whose lives had been irrevocably altered by the same long-ago night found each other in New York and, in one of those unexpected turns you hear about with surprising frequency, built a new life together. It was the best version of the story, one with the power to salvage everything that had happened.”

Claire sees her life from the perspective of a storyteller, and she uses this perspective to articulate her desire. She knows that what she wants is not possible, and this is underscored by the phrase “with the power to salvage everything that had happened,” due to its extreme hyperbole. In engaging with the concept of storytelling, she inherently points out how real life does not adhere to such devices as story arcs.