Deirdre's family life

Life as an appendage:  The dysfunctional childhood of the narrator in Deirdre, the Wanderer, by Jonnie Comet

 

with Colin Bunge, for Surf City Source

 

  As a factor which may have the most important bearing on her young life, Deirdre’s birth family are hardly ever mentioned.  The profound lack of expository description about her parents, extended family, schoolmates and childhood history is highly conspicuous.  Though all of what little we do receive comes from Deirdre herself– no other sources are ever consulted or even mentioned– so much of the scant detail is negative that we may draw one or both of only two conclusions.  One is that she bears too much resentment to ever dwell upon her family again, a rather severe and somewhat tragic attitude.  The other is that nothing that happened before the starting date of her narrative (13 January 2000) is important enough to merit her telling.

  Any exposition into her past occurs almost exclusively in the first chapter, appropriately entitled Farewell, and a little at the very end of the book.  All of this is given in the dispassionate coldness typical of a teenager moved so far past anger as to have become detached, emotionally and geographically, from the childhood home.

  This resolute negativity is revealed in the second sentence of the book, in which the narrator refers to her parents, who may well be worried sick over her, as merely They.  By the next paragraph she is criticising her often-absent father and morally-ambiguous mother, justifying her decision to separate herself from them, leaving the reader to conclude that only a case of emotional abandonment, of which we hear only from the child’s side, has fomented the running-away.

  Clearly Deirdre has not enjoyed a happy teenager’s healthy relationship with a doting father.  But her criticism of her mother is more detailed and more telling.  From the first she compares herself, acknowledging all her own teenaged imperfection and immaturity, to a mother whom she believes ought to have known better:

  I think a girl always wants to look up to her mother; and when she finds the mother doesn’t have much more moral backbone than an immature teenager without a curfew, it’s pretty disappointing.  (I, 1, p.2)

  But she is humbled and disappointed when her efforts to impress her fail:

  I thought by appearing and acting polite, modest, a little humble, even a little prudish, my mother would see I’d become what she’d wanted me to be and that she’d recognise and take the example.  So much for that idea.  (I, 1, p.2)

  Deirdre laments having been left alone, both without siblings and without the attention and advice of her her parents, but she is quick to derive some strength from her situation and indicates that she has attempted to use it to her advantage in the past.  Her statement early in the book forms part of what may be termed, on a literary level, her apology or explanation for leaving:

  I’d never been one to insist on a lot of attention– growing up as an only child of two professional parents I’d always been able to entertain or occupy myself.  There were times when I hadn’t wanted to feel so alone; but I got used to it and I can say with no unfair pride that I’d done okay in spite of it all.  It was just that life in that house, with those two lying, cheating, faking, making fools of themselves as well as of me, had got to me.  By the time of my fifteenth birthday I’d had it.  (I, 1, p.2)

  By degrees she arrives at the idea of blaming her parents’ jobs for keeping them so preoccupied as to remove them from their daughter’s life.  She reports that rarely were they both home at the same time and condemns them for using their careers as an excuse to stay out of the house (I, 1, p.2).  Through her parents’ examples she formulates her own philosophy about the balance between professional and personal life, so sagaciously stated:

  I’d come to hate the idea of work like that, an ‘occupation’, you know, the kind of thing you do every day because it’s your life.  To me the idea is exactly the opposite– you use the job to support what you want to do; and for adults that’s supposed to mean taking care of your family.   (I, 1, p.2)

  She will carry this lookout on life with her throughout the book (and throughout the series).

  Deirdre schedules her departure for as soon as practical after the new year and cites an example of her parents’ near-perfect neglect of her; apparently they both have plans which take them away from the house leaving her no way to attend a New Year’s Eve party herself (I, 1, p.4).  But in what is to become characteristic of her aplomb and resiliency, she steels herself, acknowledging the challenge before her, and is able to cull together her own skills and assets, prime amongst which is having cash:

  I’d saved $400 from last summer at the ice-cream stand and with all my birthday money and savings bonds and stuff that guilty family members liked to give me I had over $1300 in the bank as it was.  (I, 1, p.4)

  We do not have any indication that Deirdre has ever been deceitful of duplicitous with her parents before; indeed she frequently depicts herself as having been a model child.  But buoyed by her new resolve she will play on their disinterest in making her departure, specifically by deliberately providing only vague information about her weekend plans, which they do not investigate (I, 1, p.4).  She already knows both parents will be concerned more about their own freedoms than about the welfare of their child (I, 1, p.5); and so she is able to effect an escape and survive four days of liberty– for so we must conclude– without being suspected in the least.

  Deirdre seems to take a maudlin sense of pride in the knowledge that she will eventually be missed and, as a teenaged runaway, assumed to be lost in some sad or sinister lifestyle (I, 1, p.5).  Readily she blames her both parents, apportioning the blame for the loss of their only child to only them:

  And that would rightfully be so.  The fault was theirs.  In doing what I’d do I’d only be acting in my own interests– self-preservation, self-actualisation, anything with ‘self’ in front of it.  It was just time for myself.  (I, 1, p.5)

  We see little of her own school life in the beginning, receiving more of Deirdre’s observations about it over the course of the book.  The scene in which she sits down in the cafeteria is exquisitely poignant, as Deirdre complains of a stomachache and watches her classmates prattle on ‘like the happy children they really were.’ (I, 1, p.5)  She is already alone, as she knows that she cannot give even a hint about what is to happen to her, and sadly acknowledges that she will never see her friends again.  Though she will not admit to missing them over the course of the book, we must conclude she feels something about having to confront an early end of her secondary-school experience.

  As to corroborating witnesses to Deirdre’s family and school life we have only one, of whom is given almost nothing.  On Deirdre’s last day at school her classmate Sharon Hill, whom Deirdre refers to as a ‘little chatterbox’ (I, 1, p.5) leans over during prep and enquires about a book Deirdre is reading.  Deirdre at once proffers a lie and then comments that ‘Lies can come in handy sometimes’ (I, 1, p.7) with the offhanded air of a seasoned confidence artiste.  Sharon has the same teacher for her own literature course and ought to have known that what Deirdre reads was not an assigned text; but true to Deirdre’s assessment of her Sharon apparently never suspects: ‘Sharon Hill was a twit and would believe anything you told her.’ (I, 1, p.8)  It is a judgement brought about by Deirdre’s need to have done with the association rather than by a sincere assessment of her friend’s character.

  Perhaps her first twinge of regret, albeit without any hint of a change of heart, occurs within an hour or so of her imminent departure, as she begins to come to terms with what she must leave behind:

  School was never very difficult for me and I truly wonder why so many people think it’s so awful.  Most of them should instead count their blessings that they even have a home life that lets them attend it.  (I, 1, p.7)

  We get the idea that she has never truly disliked school; indeed it has probably been the one facet of her life that she has accepted as a constant, positive influence upon her life.  At school she has been only a normal student, easily making friends, fitting cheerfully into a society, earning respectable grades and meriting her teachers’ respect.  We imagine her offering constructive debate in classroom discussion, displaying competitive assertiveness in PE exercises, and laughing merrily with her peers’ antics and jokes.  Deirdre may be above-average intellectually or academically, not only because of her precocious thought processes but down to her ability to see the relative values of staying in a safe though loveless home situation for the promise of something more for the future and of embarking on an independent life to realise self-fulfilment in spite of inevitable risks, the likes of which she has not yet even imagined.  Indeed this conflict, and her reasons for her decision, are the core theme of the whole story.

  From the time she gets on the bus as Falls Road through the end of the book there are few mentions of her family at all.  Her undoubtedly worried parents are occasionally referred to as ‘they’ but conspicuously Deirdre never refers to her parents’ household as ‘home’ at all.  One very telling comment occurs when she meets Rick at the gift shop on Grand Bahama and he asks her where she lives:

  ‘Where are you staying?’ he asked me.

  I decided to be honest.  ‘Right now?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Right here.’  (V, 1, p.156)

  But she has already concluded that this is the bed she has made for herself when, just before, she reconciles her profound sense of both freedom and need in her own mind:

  What did it matter how long it’d be? –this was my life now.  Wherever I was was where I lived.  (V, 1, p.156)

  One of Deirdre’s more poignant realisations about her sense of home appears in the section about the small deserted island in the Bahama Bank, when she lies down completely naked like an innocent child on the wide-open beach of the island’s west end:

  It was still spooky; but I’d grown used to the sound and feel of the place and wasn’t going to worry about it.  I actually dozed off for a while, curled up on my side on the sand with my head on my arm as though happily at home in a soft, cosy bed.  (VI, 3, p.226)

  This is sad because a safe, cosy bed of her own is precisely what she lacks.  Only later, at the Pyfrom Road apartment in Nassau, does she achieve anything like a true semblance of ‘home’ in her own mind, where physical security, emotional and intellectual peace of mind, and a soft cosy bed are all hers at the same time and with no finite deadline looming after which she must change lodgings.  At all other times she is keenly aware that in leaving her parents’ house for ever she has given over the most fundamental comforts of home.

  Of course Deirdre is certainly guilty of a certain conceit about her own abilities and even a right to live her own life.  But though she stubbornly refuses to acknowledge anything but her own efforts in making her own way in the world, she is not devoid of conscience.  Even after becoming happily ensconced in a remarkably safe, productive and respectable career as a nanny to little Jennifer Clark, she is unable to completely escape her past.

  I wondered about being a real role model for little Jennifer.  Deep inside I sensed that I’d done the worst thing any child could do, leaving my parents and letting them imagine my horrible fate.  And I paid for it; I’d begun to have nightmares.  They were always about being caught, sometimes by the Bahamians and sometimes by the Americans and sometimes even by pirates or drug dealers, and always I was badly treated in some kind of prison and then sent home to face my parents and Dearborn High School and all the people there all over again.  No– that’s what made it worst.  I’d been carving a new life for myself, and I was proud of it; and it was too far past the point of no return now.  (III, 3, p.109)

  This is a pure first-person narrative and so we never see Deirdre’s parents’ responses to her decision and are never given any idea of what they thought of her or how they treated her before she left home.   Having no alternate points of view we must accept Deirdre’s point of view about her parents and align our attitudes about them with hers.  The story works only if we agree that her parents were unfit, self-centred, irresponsible and morally (and religiously) hypocritical; and indeed we have no other information about them to pose in argument to that so it is just as well that we take her at her word.

  The paragraph immediately following the above excerpt gives us some insight.  If Deirdre provides the only point of view we have about her parents, she is also the one who should know them best.  Her condemnations of them, if tinged with a disillusioned teenager’s ire, are at least colourful enough for us to accept that she really has legitimate differences with them and has seen no other way to salvage her own self-worth and self-determination than to do as she has done.  But she cannot deny that in escaping her own distress she may have caused distress for others.

  Sometimes I imagined my parents might’ve been going crazy back there– I hadn’t even left a note– and I was sure the police had been rung and there were APBs out and my face was showing up on milk cartons and ‘missing child’ reports on Channel 26.  But the truth was probably the opposite.  They’d probably filed for divorce immediately and were breathing sighs of relief that they wouldn’t have to carry on the charade of being good parents.  My mother would make the house an afternoon oasis for sex-starved married men and my father would take a cosy bachelor flat with some young ‘administrative assistant’ in satin underwear; and it’d be rollicking good fun for them both.  In time I’d be a distant memory to them, a face in a photo on the buffet–

  ‘Who is that?’ some visitor might say. 

  ‘A daughter I once had; but I haven’t seen her in a long time.’   (III, 3, pp.109-110)

  Early on, she explores the idea to write to her cousin Maura, who is of the same age and obviously a bit of a sister figure for her.  Maura is the only family member she thinks about; indeed she will maintain a relationship with her, albeit only one-sided, through the writing of letters.  The effort is probably taken out of a sense of guilt, though with Deirdre the element of pride, in the form of gloating about her new-founded freedom and not-inconsequential degree of success, can never be discounted.  But the venture is not without risk, which she determines to take into account.

  Maura wasn’t that bright and I couldn’t jeopardise my current situation in case she was not as discreet as I hoped.  There would never be, after all, any opportunity for her or anyone else to contact me.  I could only inform her, never use her for true two-way communication.  (III, 3, p.104)

  The ruse is less to apprise a childhood friend of the details of her exciting journey as it is to use her as a conduit to her parents; for Deirdre must suspect that any contact she might make to any member of her family will be made known to her parents and, almost certainly, to whatever agencies may be searching for her as a runaway teenager.  So she will remain guarded, providing only vague information about places and dates and posting the sealed envelopes inside those to trusted friends who then post them from home towns in other locations, leaving only the least reliable of traces as to Deirdre’s true whereabouts.

  Still, she never takes her continued freedom for granted and ascribes to her parents all the overbearing authority and power to conclude her escapade and to condemn her to misery, a fate from which she is helpless to extricate herself:

  I had a dream that night that the FBI had found me and were about to deport me.  Mrs Clark and little Jennifer, and Tumblebunch, and I think Noah from the boat, all stood in the rain and waved good-bye to me as I was put into a taxi to be taken back to Connecticut.  I remember calling out to them, ‘All I have is what I have.’  (IV, 1, p.120)

  When Deirdre takes the job as an exotic dancer she must surely be aware that, to her parents who, though selfishly and unacceptably neglectful of a child they have been, are hardly entirely evil people, it would seem like a deliberate slap in the face that defies all they may have expected of her.  But we are never assured that her parents ever expected anything of her at all.  In any event Deirdre is able to meet the requirements of such a job with an admirable sense of dignity, upholding a firm sense of what she will and will not do in order to cut her own way through the world.  Her moral compass, then, whatever the profession in which it is applied, is essentially virtuous, even to parents such as her own.  If a daughter is required by circumstances to accept such a job, this one will perform it only by her own standards, holding herself somewhat above the seedier side of the society she must keep and never forgetting that the considerable income is her principal reason for taking it; and surely, in that, her parents cannot be too disappointed.

  If Deirdre the runaway is the product of her parents’ influence, she must have learnt something; for despite the costs she has developed into a brave, resourceful, intelligent, self-reliant, and essentially ethical young woman of whom any decent parent would be proud.  But Deirdre herself feels the influence as a kind of inescapable oppression that still haunts her.  She chastises her mother for having inspired her to a degree of self-centred independence at odds with her own long-held expectations of herself.  She would prefer a sense of emotional interdependence and shared vulnerability with those she holds dear.  But when she hears of her friend Iris’ detainment for having been an underaged dancer like herself, Deirdre feels helpless to help, fearful for compromising her own self-interests:

  I had more than enough money to bail her out, if I’d had to– but what if they asked me one or two simple questions?  I felt painfully inadequate as a friend. 

  Chalk up another point to being scared and self-serving.  See how I have learnt, Mother?  (VIII, 1, p.319)

  This is the first time we see her address her mother, even appositively, as though her mother is the audience for the narration.

  Only at the end of the book do we arrive at the true gist of Deirdre’s differences with her parents.  In facing Sandy’s parents’ disapproval of whom their daughter has taken for a friend, Deirdre recognises the same sort of wilful detachment her own parents had towards her.

  My parents had never looked deeply at me….  They went about their own ways completely oblivious to anything I felt or did or said.  I was an appendage to them, like the baby in a game of dolls or on a television programme, set dressing for their lives as though it would give their own characters depth.  (X, 5, p.438)

  It is a harsh condemnation; but from Deirdre’s point of view it must have been unspeakably difficult to have spent her formative years essentially overlooked and underappreciated.  No-one can survive as her own person by conducting her life as a mere appendage to someone else’s life.  A child is not a pet or a toy; and Deirdre’s twofold purpose in running away has been to free herself from this emotional oppression and to demonstrate, to herself and to anyone else who cares, that she is intellectually as well as logistically capable of determining her own fate.

  The sense of emptiness Deirdre has felt– indeed, has taken upon herself– is not going to go away soon; but of what Sandy calls ‘noblesse oblige’ (X, 5, p.436), and as an older, wiser woman of the world, she can impart some wisdom to fill the voids in others.  In her condemnation of her parents’ view that their child was no more than ‘a car, or a refrigerator, or a window… just one more thing they possessed in their lives’ (X, 5, p.438) is the real plight and plea of the disenfranchised teenager.

  This is not merely an adolescent on a whinge about more allowance or a less-stringent curfew.  Deirdre’s insights are much deeper than that, even though she may not even have realised that till now.  If a confused and misguided kid at the beginning, she has matured into a reasonable, thoughtful creature deserving of our respect and admiration.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the unselfish conclusion she draws about her own life and about what’s best for her friend Sandy which serves as the climax of the book:

  If parents love, why don’t they care?  And, if they don’t care, then is it really love?  Is it not possible, that to do what’s best for a child, it might mean that the parents don’t always get what they want?  If we do love, truly love, then we really must put the one we love first, even if it means inconvenience for ourselves.  Because in the end all that matters is that we do what’s truly best for the people we love the most.  (X, 5, p.439)

  And thus Deirdre has identified the quest for giving and receiving unconditional love as her own raison d’etre… for better or for worse.

 

* * *

 

Surf City Source Media Group.    Excerpted texts ©Jonnie Comet Productions; used by permission.  

The wisdom of Deirdre

The narrator’s philosophy of life, as taken from the text of Deirdre, the Wanderer, by Jonnie Comet

edited by Colin Bunge

 

  Like Jane Austen (herself another solitary Sagittarius thinker), Deirdre, heroine narrator of Deirdre, the Wanderer, is prone to philosophising, drawing conclusions from her own experiences and perceptions and attempting to relate them to some greater truth of the world universal.  Whether she knows it or not, some of her snippets of wisdom are actually spot-on and worthy of remembrance and emulation.

  Here are a few.
 

  I’d come to hate the idea of work like that, an ‘occupation’, you know, the kind of thing you do every day because it’s your life.  To me the idea is exactly the opposite– you use the job to support what you want to do; and for adults that’s supposed to mean taking care of your family.  (I, 1, p.2)

   The only thing your average guy wants is to get into your panties.   (I, 1, p.3) 

  … you always hear these stories of stupid runaways who get picked up nearly freezing to death on the streets of Manhattan or whatever.  I’m sorry; but being homeless in a place like New York is just stupid.  (I, 1, p.4)

  School was never very difficult for me and I truly wonder why so many people think it’s so awful.  Most of them should instead count their blessings that they even have a home life that lets them attend it.  (I, 1, p.7)

  Lies can come in handy sometimes.  (I, 1, p.7)

  There’s something weird about the idea of peeling down my shorts in front of grown men, even when I’ve got a perfectly legitimate swimsuit on underneath, that never appealed to me.  (I, 1, p.34)

  Many girls in high school like to indulge the fantasy that they’re all a lot more experienced than they really are; they think it makes them more intriguing to the boys if there’s a kind of shadow or smudge on their reputations.  (II, 2, 60)

  I was impressed that a young guy would recognise good old-fashioned labour as a respectable means to get started in a working career.  I couldn’t recall any guys at my school who might’ve been so eager to be servile at the same age. They were all focused on university and sports, not on actual work.  (II, 3, p.83)

  This is the islands’ caste system– Black locals working in service jobs for White tourists from America.  Up in comfortably liberal Connecticut one might have thought this was horrifically bigoted, some form of segregation deliberately perpetuated by rich racists.  But the locals in the islands didn’t think of it that way.  After all, once you get past the façade of tourism, you realise that ninety percent of the islanders are Black.  So there isn’t really anyone else do the actual labour round here.  The other thing is that the people doing this menial servitude don’t feel exploited at all.  Practical young guys like Theo crave tourism jobs.  They aren’t concerned with what colour everyone is.  They’re clever and recognise that this is the opportunity to make money, especially in tips, and you don’t get tips working at a fixed wage for some government-regulated equal-opportunity employer.  You get tips by working for rich White tourists from America.  If anyone in the islands didn’t appreciate that because of some high humanistic ideals, he’d be considered an idiot.  And he’d be poor.  And meanwhile everyone else would be dropping four figures’ worth of cash into Barclays Bank each pay period.  (III, 4, p.111)

  For the first time I realised how Black people up in White, middle-class Connecticut had felt.  And I know it sounds arrogant of me but I began to feel proud to share that feeling of being considered worthless for no good reason.  The pride didn’t earn m¢e a pay cheque, didn’t provide a roof over my head, didn’t increase my sense of independence; but in a way it was far more valuable than any of that, because it strengthened me, and the strength of it would never be taken from me.  (IV, 1, p.125)

  The whole issue of sexual harassment always made me a little mad– guys will be guys, you know, and it’s a pretty feeble chick who can’t deal with it even before it starts.  (IV, 4, p.144)

  ‘You’re only as poor as you feel.’  (V, 1, p.159)

  In spite of what I’d seen of marriages I really believed most people would honour one.  (V, 2, p.164)

  I’d never been much for lip gloss, normally– only the really good stuff, which no-one ever buys, is safe for kissing and if the dumb girls in school only want it to look so ‘kissable’, why put it on if it’s only going to come off all over the guy’s face?   (V, 2, p.164)

  I’ve always noticed how most older men seem to believe whatever they want to be true, even when all the evidence is against them.  (XI, 2, p.211)

  When a woman realises her potential for self-fulfilment nothing but lack of opportunity ever stops her from experiencing the whole thing.  (VI, 4, p.237)

  Honesty is only a virtue if what you’re being honest about is virtuous in itself.  (VII, 3, p.285)

  They were middleaged American businessmen on holiday and seemed agreeable enough, and I almost felt sorry for them; but they were obviously too eager to have a teenaged chick to share amongst themselves and one can hardly sympathise with that motive.  (VII, 4, p.292)

  University guys in the ’States are coddled.  Down [in The Bahamas] young men mature more quickly– they have a lookout on life that sort of demands responsibility and they work their tails off.  (VII, 5, p.296)

  Any suggestion of sadomasochism between girls arouses men– for some reason.  (VII, 6, p.307)

  Every girl can use a little help, you know– especially when she’s built like me.  (VIII, 1, p.318)

  I think every man of a certain age must fancy getting with some cute teenaged chick and having his way with her, no matter what the law or society might say.  I suppose in some ways it might be only natural.  (VIII, 1, p.322)

  There is no security like cash when you are on the go.  (VIII, 13 p.335)

   ‘No self-respecting woman would spread her legs for a picture like that unless she needed the money.’  (VIII, 4, p.342)

   The almost-legal ‘seventeen’ seemed more credible than the just-legal ‘eighteen’– anyone who would lie about her age would lie enough to get something more out of it.  (X, 4, p.420)

   If we do love, truly love, then we really must put the one we love first, even if it means inconvenience for ourselves.  Because in the end all that matters is that we do what’s truly best for the people we love the most.  (X, 5, p.439)

 

* * *

 

Surf City Source Media Group.    Excerpted texts ©Jonnie Comet Productions; used by permission.   

What does Deirdre look like?

A contextual analysis of the narrator’s appearance in Deirdre, the Wanderer, by Jonnie Comet

  with Colin Bunge, for Surf City Source

 

It is worthy of note that within the full text of Deirdre, the Wanderer, the narrator never describes her physical appearance definitively.  Displaying possibly a noble sense of modesty or, more likely, a teenager’s tendency towards self-effacing humility, she provides scant details that, added together, approach but never complete a conclusive representation.

 

Sketch by the Author’s daughter Mary, 2009; based on context clues in the story

 

  Clearly Deirdre is healthy, hardy and durable, physically quick, agile and adept, and within a normal range in height and weight.  She labours hard, swims well and takes on physical challenges without fear of failing due to her own inability.  Merely carrying all her luggage for such durations and such distances as she does is sufficient proof.  And yet none of this strength of body comes at the expense of physical attractiveness; for she possesses all the parts of a young woman– and, as is made evident by the approbation she receives when she is observed outwardly by both sexes, in a rather pleasant proportions.  But as to particular details we must rely only on the infrequent clues from the narration itself.

  We discern that she is probably shorter than average, or at least shorter than she would like to be, for she complains that

  Being short, young and female often gets me overlooked, especially by pushy New York types.  (I, 1, p. 9)

  She also compares herself to the height of the helm of the yacht Fast Pitch; typically a sailboat of this size (56 ft) might have a wheel of perhaps sixty inches in diameter, suggesting that Deirdre is conspicuously closer to five feet than to five-and-a-half feet in height.  (I, 4, p. 35)

  As to colouring she is naturally fair, so that despite the sun’s blessings she is able to appeal to the lecherous Teutonic restauranteur Ray as though one of his own ethnicity.  Reluctantly she admits,

  ... as a blonde, grey-eyed, Nordic-looking waif, I had a different appeal to him.  (VIII, 1, p. 322)

  This makes some sense, for her given name and Catholic religion may suggest she is at least partly of Irish heritage.  But her parentage must also include some more southern-European blood as well, because she does tan well without burning, and quickly too, as she reports:

  Of course I’d been pretty white after a whole autumn in Connecticut; but I was surprised at how quickly the mild Bahamian winter sun improved that.  I didn’t burn at all and in just three days I was noticeably tanner and quite evenly too….  (II, 1, p. 41)

Looking so well-tanned she fools the local social star Tony Albury about her age as well as her residency status:

  I just stayed there, leaning way back on my elbows, with the jacket falling open so that my suntanned stomach and the bikini top looked sort of obvious.  (V, 2, p. 168)

  And at the island of Sans Souci she is able to cultivate a rather comprehensive suntan, enough to impress Emily (VI, 3; VI, 4).  Indeed she seems to derive some pride from having good sun colour, as it complements her adopted persona as a Bahamian belonger; and she is even offended that the tourist boys would presume she is a tourist:

‘Whoa, you’re local?’ he marvelled.  Couldn’t they tell by my tan?  (VIII, 1, p. 314)

We read early that she has no disproportionate interest in food and, whilst certainly not anorexic, tends by habit to underfeed rather than to overfeed herself, almost conspicuously, as others have noticed: 

  I asked for strawberries on a crepe and hot tea– that was all.  Jeri and Marian looked at me and teased me about being skinny or watching my ‘girlish figure’ or trying to ‘stay cute’ to impress someone.  (I, 2, p. 18)

  In fact there are few accounts of Deirdre having much more than a muffin and tea at any time, despite the fact that working in a bistro, a night club with a kitchen, and a lunch café she might have been entitled to eat well and cheaply into the bargain.

  So, establishing that she is slender we might assume that in body type she is not at all buxom and more likely tends towards the opposite.  She never describes herself as any more than modestly-endowed and marvels that anyone would even care to look at her breasts, such as in the dance club (VII, 6, p. 307; also VII, 3, p. 283 and VII, 5, p. 301).  She does not care for her string-bikini top since it only exaggerates youthfulness of her figure (V, 4, p. 189) and so worries about being seen in the swimsuit by 23-year-old Clive who truly ought to be able to discern that she is not the 18 years old he has been hoping she is.  But this is an example of how Deirdre uses her past experiences with adult yachties in Connecticut to uphold a maturer image; and Clive is bewitched probably more because of her behaviour and her situation than her figure.

  Deirdre does recognise a certain benefit in being less than full-bodied, even in the workplace.  She does not take exception to the required uniform for work at the outdoor bistro in Freeport:

  The thing about a tanktop, though, is that you really can’t wear a bra with one.  Now I didn’t absolutely need one– I could still wear tanktops at my age.  (IV, 2, p. 130)

  The reader will note that Deirdre quite often does without a brassiere, frequently preferring the white tanktop and a shirt half-buttoned over it; so given her prudish attention to propriety in public (vis. IV, 4, p. 147) one must assume she is respectably presentable like that.

  But her slenderness may be due less to conscientious toning and dieting than to merely being young and incompletely developed.  Dancing at the club in Nassau she acknowledges that she has little to hide beneath the front of her knickers (VII, 2, p. 276) and, fully aware of what her own body lacks, she marvels that no-one has even checked her ID at this job:

  I’d long been aware that I wasn’t really fooling anyone– my figure was hardly what you’d call voluptuous and any guy out there who’d ever ogled a girl my real age would have known I couldn’t have been eighteen.  (VII, 5, p. 301)

  This is a problem that eventually backfires in an arrest for underaged dancing, not of Deirdre but of someone whom she had never suspected could have been under eighteen, a incident that underscores the willing suspension of disbelief about Deirdre’s own age by club staff and patrons alike.

  She also remarks that because of her slight build she feels inadequate to wear even moderately mature fashions, such as Sandy’s stockings:

  I’d never worn thigh-highs before.  But these were really nice, all lace; and I smoothed them up each leg, not going too quickly.  The gripper tops squeezed just enough; I marvelled that they would stay up so well on my skinny legs without suspenders.  (IX, 5, p. 384)

  One of her favourite words for herself is ‘skinny’, even when she compares herself to the lithe and lovely– and skinny– Iris as insufficiently shapely (VII, 6, p. 307).  Frequently she refers to herself as ‘little’, emphasising her unworthiness for what she must face in intellectual, emotional and physical terms.  With the horny girls in the Bimini apartment, she recognises her underdeveloped physique as a liability: 

I’d already imagined that Rosie in particular might have had some kind of young-girl or even paedophile fantasy, since being so short and skinny I looked so much younger than the rest of them….  (II, 3, pp. 61-62)

  Even so, she does admit some satisfaction with her own body.  She can accept the girls’ compliment on the shape of her bottom:

  Cassie turned her head and looked at me then.  Suddenly she made a little giggle.  ‘She does,’ she said, and then looked at Rosie and the two of them laughed.
  I sat down not knowing what any of that meant and then Rosie turned to me and said, ‘Cassie and I were just remarking that you have a really sweet little butt.’
  I went red again.  It wasn’t that I minded being complimented on my bottom.  I like my bottom.  (II, 2, p. 56)

  To her credit, Deirdre does not seem to take as flattery the attempts of others who throw compliments at her only in the hope of gaining her attention and interest.  She does not regard herself as pretty enough to deserve it nor vain enough to fall for such ill-aimed ploys.  Eric the eager dance partner in Nassau never compliments her, but the beachcomber at Rocky Point (VI, 6) and the admirer in the red tropical shirt at Mick’s (VII, 4) convey their interest based on her appearance; and the attention of the two oglers in East Bay Street (VIII, 3) is anything but flattering.  Being no fool Deirdre knows she receives this attention only because she appears young, female and available, which of course is no basis for flattery at all:

  … like the other [harassed] women, I was treated as I was treated only because of my sex, my age and my appearance, and that made me feel even more camaraderie with them.  (VIII, 1, p. 322)

  It cannot be overlooked that girls of this age are inherently contradictions, especially in the motivations for their various behaviours.  One moment Deirdre is a naïve prude and the next she is flaunting herself before would-be admirers.  Of course she is hardly unintelligent enough to deny that she has the power to attract male eyes and the ability to steer the consequences toward her own ends; that comes from basic female instinct.  When, wearing the ‘too-tight’ bikini, she meets the middleaged Bill Clark at the Freeport marina, she decides to ‘pour on the sugar’ and see if her feminine wiles are sufficient to secure her a ride to Freeport:

  His eyes went over me whilst I stood there– I slowly inhaled, filling out my chest a little, and put more weight on one foot to rock one hip out.  The bikini felt a little snugger than usual.  I knew what it’d look like– I didn’t mind.  (III, 1, p. 81)

  Also authentically for her age, Deirdre frequently laments that she has been normally overlooked by boys in school and is unused to genuine approval of her appearance.  Perhaps the most meaningful compliment on her physical prettiness comes from her soulmate Sandy MacNally.  After Deirdre somewhat obliquely refers to Sandy’s beauty (IX, 2, p.362) as a reason they had received some inappropriate male attention, Sandy pays her back with heartfelt sincerity, almost disguising the compliment as an apology for having received so much herself:

  ‘You have such a sweet figure,’ she said; and she leaned down on her hand with her elbow on her leg.  Then she sighed again.  ‘Mm, mm….  I love how you look.  I so envy you for it.’
  I went redder.  ‘Envy me?’  Now I turned round and stared back at her.  ‘But you are–’
  ‘Shhh.  Don’t say it.  I like thinking of you as the pretty one.  I’ve never–’  But she wouldn’t finish.
  I frowned.  ‘Never what?’ I asked after a moment.
 She shook her head.  ‘No; I shouldn’t say it.’
  ‘Say what?  Sandy, please–’
  Sandy shook her head again, sadly.  ‘It’s unbecoming.  It’s just–’  She sighed a little and finally sat up straight, turning to gaze out the window at the mist.  ‘All my life, Deirdre, I’ve been the pretty one.  The one other people want to be with, because of how I look, or where I live, or who my parents are….’  She shook her head like that again.  ‘I’ve never agreed with them; I’ve never liked it.  I certainly never wanted it.  But now–’  She turned then and gazed back at me whilst I just stood there in the stockings and my underwear and let her look.  ‘Now I have a friend that’s every bit as pretty as they’ve always called me.  Even prettier.’ …
  I was beet-red.  Honestly I’d never been called ‘pretty’ in my life– not since I was old enough to look like anything, you know.  (IX, 5, pp. 384-385)

  For all her innocence, naïveté and personal bias, Sandy is no idiot; she has even seen Deirdre naked.  If she considers her figure ‘pretty’ than we must too.

  Deirdre’s most valuable attribute may be the fifteen-year-old’s blessing of being able, through dress, vocabulary, attitude, or sheer acting ability, to pass for either younger or older.  Dimensions of figure and height notwithstanding, she apparently evinces some childlike winsomeness at the same time she betrays a certain worldliness.  Rosie the dominatrix considers her no more than a helpless ingénue to be overlooked, ordered round and exploited during the same day that Mrs Clark regards her as a sensible and responsible university student on hiatus who is worthy of being entrusted with the safety of her child.  Not just in taking a job as an exotic dancer, but in most of her forays into the adult world of wages, leases and transportation opportunities– and perhaps only out of fear of the consequences should she attempt the opposite– she conducts herself with a level of maturity and deportment that belies her youthful appearance, so that she is consistently taken for being a ‘baby-faced young adult’ (vis.: Oyster’s Pearl; XI, 4, p. 35) rather than a sullen adolescent who would run away from home just to have her own way.

  Establishing Deirdre as relatively short, slender and young-looking reinforces the notion of her inexperience and vulnerability, which is crucial to eliciting a reader’s sympathy  Much of the conflict, both internal and external, in Deirdre, the Wanderer would not work if this heroine were, like many perfectly-normal 15-year-old girls, perhaps 5 feet, 7 inches in height, 130 pounds in weight, athletically and sturdily built and in a C-cup brassiere.  Deirdre’s strength stands in spite of her modest physique and in areas other than what aesthetics, weight or dimensions can represent.  From an outward perspective we need to sympathise with her, worry about her, encourage her; and this necessitates a heroine who at least looks like she might need our interest.  But inwardly, even though she is not fully aware of it herself, Deirdre already possesses the wherewithal to face the inevitable challenges she has not yet imagined; and in that she is tall in our view, the kind of self-reliant woman whom anyone should consider admirable.

 

  * * *