August 6, 2014
A) The Walls siblings show loyalty by standing up for each other. On page 146, Jeannette shows a perfect example of this by saying, "Erma, you leave him alone!" when Brian got touched inappropriately by his grandma. Jeannette shows even more loyalty to her brother on the next page by standing up to her father by saying, "I know what I saw." When their dad doesn't believe Brian, she tries as hard as she can to persuade him to protect Brian. Even though she was surrounded by her siblings on page 141, Jeannette was lonely. She talks of thinking about Dinitia and how she had hoped to befriend her. She says, "With a smile like that, she had to have some good in her, but I couldn't figure out how to get her to shine it my way." She's longing for friends that aren't people that she is related to. I think Jeannette was also lonely when her dad was trying to quit drinking for her birthday present. On page 117 she says, "Brian and Maureen played outside, and Lori kept to the far side of the house. Mom painted in her studio." She is literally lonely because no one was anywhere around her, but she was even more lonely because she didn't have even her father to keep her company, as he normally did.
B) The Christmas incident signified a turning point in Jeannette's life because she wanted to get away from her dad, a feeling that she had never really had before. After the mass that the family went to, she says, "I didn't like Dad when he talked like that, and I tried to move away from him, but he just held me tighter." This was her turning point in deciding that she didn't want to live like this anymore. I think the Christmas incident does change Jeannette's perspective of her father. For once, something was actually going to go right for her family. Her mother had announced that they were going to do "Christmas in the Catholic fashion." They would actually celebrate on December 25, as any other family would. This Christmas was supposed to be extraordinary, but instead, her father made it ordinary by doing what he always does: ruining the day.
C) Jeannette's life in Welch did not compare at all with her life in Battle Mountain or Phoenix. In Welch, there was no room for adventure since everything was close together in town. There was no desert for them to lay out in and sleep under the stars. Welch also brought Jeannette into her first encounters of racial unbalance with the way Erma talked about African Americans. Jeannette's life in Welch shaped her late childhood and early adolescence because of all the new things she was exposed to. In this time, she was surrounded by girls talking about how far they each had gotten with their boyfriends. This shaped her because now she wanted a boy to like her like all of the other girls were talking about. Her grandma and Uncle Stanley also helped in shaping her when they were inappropriately touching both her and Brian. This helped her to realize that there are types of people to stay away from, like her perverted uncle and grandma.
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