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Summary
Chapter 3
As Lara prepares for bed and listens to her family doing the same, she thinks about how her daughters revert to younger versions of themselves when they’re all home. Maisie has a rescue dog named Hazel, who sticks by her side whenever possible, just as she did during Maisie’s time at veterinary school. When Lara gets to their room, Joe has already fallen asleep with the light still on. As she lies down Lara’s thoughts shift to the past. Veronica never went to college because she needed to stay home with her younger brothers. Lara and Veronica were much less close after high school ended and Lara went to the University of New Hampshire. During the first production of Our Town Veronica was the first of the two girls to be romantically involved with Jimmy—the boy playing George, Lara’s character’s love interest. Jimmy was a 22-year-old math teacher when Lara and Veronica were both minors. Lara and Jimmy begin to spend time together as they rehearse for Our Town, and she eventually loses her virginity to him.
In 2020, Joe and Emily get up and begin their work on the fruit farm at first light. Emily had shown interest in farming from a young age, but Lara and Joe are worried that Emily’s dedication to Three Sisters Orchards isn’t organic, but is the result of guilt she feels for her bad behavior as a teenager. As children, Emily, Maisie and Nell would sit watching and re-watching the Duke movie The Popcorn King after Joe casually mentioned that Lara once dated him. The fixation continued as the girls consumed every TV show and movie about him they could find. At 14, Emily convinced herself Peter Duke was her real father, pointing to her hair color and her personality as proof. She held onto the idea obsessively, refusing to believe anything Lara said to the contrary.
Chapter 4
Lara walks Hazel to the orchard, where they find everyone working in the area they’ve been assigned. Emily’s boyfriend, Benny, helps their family when he’s not busy with his own family’s farm. Benny and the girls grew up playing together, and Joe and Lara secretly hold onto the idea that Emily and Benny will get married and join his parents’ farm with theirs. When he was a sophomore in high school, Benny persuaded Joe to replace forty acres of plum trees with dark sweet cherries. These cherries are harder to pick but far more profitable to sell, which becomes clear when the profits from the dark sweets pay for Nell’s college degree and help with Maisie’s vet school fees.
As they pick cherries, Lara tells her daughters how she left college for an audition in California. Lara insists she wasn’t a very skilled actress. In fact, she says, she learned to act from a State Farm commercial. She found that under-acting made her stand out and served her much better than hamming things up. Emily disagrees, saying her mother is underselling herself, and Nell reminds Lara that the whole family has seen her talent preserved on film. Lara dismisses her, explaining that her own method of being herself onscreen just happened to be what Bill Ripley wanted for his movie. Upon her arrival in Los Angeles, she gets a luxurious welcome and a drastic makeover. After her screen test, she returned to Durham, only to fly back two weeks later for a second test which involved swimming. She feels furious and objectified, but she does the screen test and gets the part. Although she was scared, as she tells Nell in the present, she returns to LA and joins an acting union. She moves in with an assistant, but the release of the movie keeps getting pushed back. She does commercials and a sitcom to pass the time and earn money. Nell, as she listens, expresses how jealous she is that acting professionally came so easily for Lara while she feels it’s out of reach for herself. Lara firmly tells her daughter she wouldn’t trade her life with them for any amount of fame.
Analysis: Chapters 3 & 4
As the novel gets into its stride in this section, the themes of repeating cycles and responsibility come to the fore. Lara lingers on aspects of her story which don’t seem important to her daughters as she reflects on her past and present roles as mother and lover. As the girls head to bed at the beginning of Chapter 3, Lara observes how her daughters psychologically revert to younger versions of themselves when they are together, despite how much they’ve grown and changed during their time apart. Familiar roles from childhood resurface, and everyone defaults to the version of themselves they were when they were all previously living under one roof. Lara’s daughters’ affection and disagreements make her feel as though no time at all has passed, as they all return to the patterns of behavior they established as three little girls and two parents. Even Hazel the dog cycles back to behaving as she did when Maisie was younger. Time feels fuzzy in this novel because of the way Lara narrates her flashbacks, but also because of how moments of Nelson family life in 2020 seem to parallel previous scenes from the 1980s and 90s.
Read about the the Cyclical Nature of Life as a motif in Tom Lake.
In this section, it becomes clear that Lara’s behaviors are part of greater cycles. Lara first hurts Veronica by impulsively abandoning her to take the starring role of Emily in Our Town, where her indiscretions with Jimmy begin. Even though Veronica is the first person to date Jimmy, he cheats on her with Lara, which Lara refrains from remarking on at this early point. This period of her life mirrors the impulsive and emotionally driven decisions she makes later with Peter Duke. In that relationship, Lara not Veronica, is the one who is abandoned for an actress who is playing Emily in Our Town, and whom she thought was a close friend. Later on, she’s forced to come to grips with how painful her betrayal of Veronica was, but in this section it goes largely unexplored. Lara doesn’t stop to wonder whether she’s a bad person for sleeping with Jimmy, especially as she’s a minor and he’s 22 when it happens.
Read about the play Our Town as a motif in the novel.
She’s not the only teenager in this section who’s unaware of how her behavior might be received. Emily’s teenage obsession with the idea that Peter Duke was her real father is part of her struggle with identity and belonging. She’s an angry, moody teenager who is frustrated with her place in the world. It’s a feeling she can't articulate directly, but which she can channels through this fantasy of her mother depriving her of a life with her real, glamorous father. Her belief that she belongs somewhere else is similar to the way Lara, in her youth, sought fulfillment in external validation and attention. Lara and Emily also both try to change something fundamental about themselves when they are young teenagers; for Emily it’s the “truth” about her father, and for Lara it’s her name and her desire to stay out of the spotlight. Lara’s attempt is slightly more successful, as her daughters didn’t know that her real name was Laura until they heard the Duke story. There’s an important pun in the discussion they have about this. Lara explains that she changed the spelling because to her it sounded more exotic and Russian. Her daughters explain it back to her as “taking the ‘u’ out” of her original name. By removing the “u/You,” Lara has removed the part of herself that she doesn’t see as interesting and doesn’t want to carry onto the stage with her.
