Incidents Around the House

Bela is the eight-year-old narrator and protagonist of Incidents Around the House. Bela is a thoughtful and empathetic child who is affected by her environment. She often worries about her parents’ marriage and happiness. Because her parents frequently overshare with her, especially when they think she is sleeping, she is attuned to the unrest in their marriage. She only has one friend her own age, Deb, and this loneliness makes her vulnerable to the entity known as Other Mommy, who initially promises to be Bela’s friend. The entity also tempts her by promising to fix the marriage: “If we switched places, I could say all sorts of things that would make your mom and dad love each other again” (259). Bela’s love for her family and desire to fix things make her vulnerable to the entity’s deceptive tactics.

Though she hides her negative emotions so as not to worry her parents, Bela also experiences anger and rage. Bela admits that one of the things she liked about Other Mommy was that she now “had a friend who wanted to yell as badly as [she] sometimes [did]. [She] had a friend who wanted to scream. Doesn’t everyone want to scream sometimes?” (203).