Word: macon
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...Ezra, Pearl's favorite, becomes a kind of surrogate mother, collecting the family together for the homemade dinners their mother never provided and taking it upon himself to keep up at least the appearance of a family. The Learys' mother, Alice, is a stranger to her children as well. Macon recalls with bitter amusement how once during one of her inspired whims, she subjected them all to an experimental nudist elementary school. Resembling none of her children in temperament, she disappears one day on the back of her hippie-boyfriend's motorcycle...
Even when the mother is present in the home, there remains a suggestion of irresponsibility. Muriel, the dogtrainer, is sensitive to Macon's disapproving observation that she is bringing up Alexander, her illegitimate son, on a diet of television and Oodles of Noodles. Similarly, Macon silently reproaches his wife for having allowed Ethan to attend camp, despite his objections. The suggestion of her maternal irresponsibility echoes again later in her rejection of Macon's conciliatory proposal to have another baby to make up for their loss...
...Carney, a sympathetic neighbor, confesses to Macon that at times she feels like "a Gold Star mother": "Like someone who's suffered a loss in a war...and then forever afterward she has to go on supporting the war...because otherwise she'd be admitting the loss was for no purpose." Tyler, however, mourns the tragedy of the family less as a lost, noble cause than as an illusion offering the comforts of a live burial...
...wonder, then, that Macon finds relief in the "bizarre" Muriel Pritcherd and her slightly-sordid transient air. Macon is half-fascinated and half-repulsed by Muriel's comic pretensions of gentility. She shows up at Rose's wedding, the only woman wearing, Macon notices, spiked heels with ankle straps. She isn't even really pretty, her youthfulness appearing more immature than sexy. Upon his first sight of her at the Meow Bow vet clinic, Macon notes the knobby collarbones "promising unluxurious flesh...
...Muriel has a certain flair. In one of her spirited moments, she belts out a reckless rendition of "War Is Hell On the Homefront, Too." Muriel, he realizes, is a fighter. Her pathetic ignorance wages war on the conventional proprieties that have long ossified the rest of the Learys. Macon's decision to give up middle-class respectability for its underside of secondhand thrift shops and carry-out pizza dinners turns out, ironically, to be less of an escape than an adventure in responsibility. He discovers himself feeling an odd protective concern for the sickly seven-year-old Alexander...