French Braid

“Ensconced in her parents’ small household, she had envied her school friends with their swarms of relatives all mixed up and shrieking with laughter and fighting for space and attention. Some had stepsiblings, even, and stepmothers and stepfathers they could pick and choose at will and ostracize if things didn’t work out, like rich people discarding perfectly okay food while the undernourished gaze longingly from the sidelines.

Well, you just wait and see, she used to tell herself. Wait until you see what your future family’s going to look like!”

These recollections flow through Serena’s mind as she awaits the train to take her home to Baltimore. She has spent the day with the family of her boyfriend, James. These people embody all the seemingly wonderful qualities she envied as a child: They are warm, outgoing, inclusive, and accepting. By contrast, she has just seen her cousin, Nicholas, whose appearance reminds her of her family of origin: small, unfamiliar, emotionally distant, and aloof, the hallmarks of a perpetually disaffected family. Serena describes the raucous, outgoing family as feasting, while the awkward, small family starves.

“This was all because of her cousin, really. Running into him had sent a kind of jagged feeling down the center of her chest, a split between the two parts of her world. On the one side James’s mother, so intimate and confiding; on the other side Nicholas, standing alone at the train station. It was like taking a glass bowl from a hot oven and plunging it into ice water: the snapping sound as it shattered.”

The author implies that Serena’s inner dream of belonging to a gregarious, inclusive family like James’s belies the lurking, undeniable reality that she comes from a family that is totally different in its way of relating. Seeing her cousin shocks her back to the real world, in which she might long to be part of James’s family but cannot find a home there, just as she could not bring herself to sleep with James in his parents’ home. When Serena reappears in Chapter 7, she has married someone named Jeff, indicating her relationship with James does not endure.