|
Minerva Pray, matriarch by default, moved into a vacuum left by tragedy to care for her three orphaned granddaughters. It wasn't an ideal situation for the girls or for herself -- they needed a mother and a father, and having to act as both robbed Minerva of being a grandmother, but she managed. How well is evident some years later when trouble once again visits her family.
The three sisters have always been a diverse litter. Eleanor is an agoraphobic who runs a simple bakery; Freddie is a marine biologist who lives in California with her husband; and Jo-Nell is Tallulah's most shameless hussy. Eleanor and Jo-Nell live in uneasy truce with Minerva until Jo-Nell, navigating under the influence of too many tequila sunrises, broadsides the midnight train with her Volkswagen.
The accident isn't fatal, but it is serious enough to bring Freddie home from Baja, Mexico, with mixed feelings about returning to "that realm of fantastic cooks, ancestor worshipers, prejudiced fools, and eccentric ladies who took to their beds for decades," and leaving her husband in the company of a conniving, female grad assistant.
Eleanor is unsettled by Freddie's adventuresome nature and independence. Her agoraphobia, unnamed as are many phobias in small southern towns and relegated instead to the category of a peculiarity, does allow her to a circumscribed function outside the walls of her house, but it is more than enough for her to serve as a surprisingly well-informed participant in the goings on in Tallulah.
Jo-Nell, who isn't about to let a broken leg and hip stand between herself and amorous adventure, seduces just about everyone at the hospital she hadn't already before the accident, and then decides she's going to leave Tallulah when she heals and go back to Minerva's hometown of Mt. Olive, Texas, and start over. Her intentions alarm Eleanor, who can't imagine how she and Minerva will manage without her and sees her family as spinning apart.
Then, suddenly Minerva is gone, taken by a heart attack, and the sisters draw together once again. Minerva's legacy to them is a priceless compendium of motherwit which guides them, armed with courage and love, into their individual futures. Her words spur the sisters to put pain behind them -- ". . . the soul heals. It thaws out bit by bit, the way the ground warms after a hard winter. . . . You don't give into your broke heart -- you just let the wide, cracked spaces fill up again."
American Pie is a gently and beautifully written work that explores the strength of roots and family with delicate humor and unwavering compassion. Michael Lee West's distinctive voice and vision are those of a major southern writer.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
Support your