Tilt

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child death, and cursing.

“Your father, Dom, is thirty-eight, still trying to get that big role. Still standing in line to audition. Still sending his headshots to casting agents. Still picking up shifts at the café that he’s worked at since we first met. Your mother—Annie, speaking—thought she was destined to be the next Tennessee Williams, the millennial Beckett, wasted hours practicing that big, sweeping bow she’d do under those big Broadway lights, and is now thirty-five and spends her days staring at spreadsheets on a computer screen on the twenty-second floor of a glass building, pressing buttons with her fingers.”

This passage employs anaphora with the repeated “still” to emphasize the stagnation in Dom’s artistic career. The second-person narration addressing “Bean” creates intimacy while paradoxically highlighting Annie’s emotional distance from her unborn child, as she is introducing herself to Bean only now. The passage introduces the theme of The Crushing Weight of Dreams Deferred through the stark contrast between Dom’s and Annie’s artistic aspirations (“the next Tennessee Williams”) and mundane reality (“pressing buttons with her fingers”).

“On opening night, my mom takes me out to dinner at the restaurant on the top floor of Big Pink and we order oysters. ‘This is just the beginning,’ I tell her. If I had stayed in New York, I wouldn’t even have graduated yet. ‘Oh, honey, I have no doubt in my mind,’ she says. And, Bean, I can still see her face exactly as it was in the candlelight of that fancy restaurant. But it’s not the beginning; it’s the end. It’s just coming towards me in slow motion, so I can’t make out the shape of it.”

Pattee employs dramatic irony and temporal dissonance as Annie’s past self declares, “This is just the beginning,” while her present narration reveals the painful truth that “it’s the end.” The metaphor of an ending “coming towards [her] in slow motion” creates a visual image of inexorable fate that Annie cannot yet recognize. The sensory detail of her mother’s face “in the candlelight” creates a memory imbued with warmth that contrasts with the harsh reality that follows.