4. I used to think that just a change in venue would banish forever
from my life the things I most despised. But that was not to be so. As each
day unfolded before me, I could see the sameness in everything; I could see
the present take a shape—the shape of my past.
This passage appears in “Cold Heart,” as Lucy waits alone on a bleak
Sunday for Peggy to call, and it illustrates Lucy’s disillusion about making
a new life for herself in North America. Despite her grand hopes of escaping
her homeland, Lucy, in the months since her departure, has failed to realize
her dreams. Though she has shed much of the homesickness that had previously
besieged her, she experiences other forms of heartache, many of which
parallel the bane of her island existence. At home, Sundays depressed her,
and here, they depress her, too. She has fled her unhappy family only to
witness the decline of Lewis and Mariah’s marriage, in which Lewis, with his
philandering, behaves much like her father. Most important, as the paragraph
immediately following this quotation indicates, Lucy still finds herself
caught in a battle for freedom from her mother, whose mocking voice rings in
her head and whose letters she can neither bear to read nor discard. Lucy
also continues to mirror her ambivalence toward her mother in her
relationship with Mariah. As her problems follow her across a great
distance, Lucy comes to see that her difficulties transcend her
environment.
