The Leap

“I would, in fact, tend to think that all memory of double somersaults and heart-stopping catches had left her arms and legs were it not for the fact that sometimes, as I sit sewing in the room of the rebuilt house in which I slept as a child, I hear the crackle, catch a whiff of smoke from the stove downstairs and suddenly the room goes dark, the stitches burn beneath my fingers, and I am sewing with a needle of hot silver, a thread of fire.”

The narrator experiences a flashback where the memory of the house fire intrudes upon the narrative present, triggered by a “crackle” or “a whiff of smoke from the stove downstairs.” Erdrich’s lengthy sentence creates the sensation of being carried away by recollections, as the narrator is. The final vivid images, a “needle of hot silver” and “thread of fire” use metaphor to connect—or, figuratively, stitch together—the everyday objects in the present to the room and narrator’s past.

“They loved to drop gracefully from nowhere, like two sparkling birds, and blow kisses as they threw off their plumed helmets and high-collared capes. They laughed and flirted openly as they beat their way up again on the trapeze bars.”

The narrator describes Anna Avalon and Harry Avalon using a simile that compares them to birds and then follows this up with further avian imagery: They wear plumed (feathered) helmets and they “beat their way up” as if on beating wings. The imagery underscores the glitz and romance the narrator associates with this period of her mother’s life.

“In the final vignette of their act, they actually would kiss in midair, pausing, almost hovering as they swooped past one another. On the ground, between bows, Harry Avalon would skip quickly to the front rows and point out the smear of my mother’s lipstick, just off the edge of his mouth.”

The Flying Avalons’ flirtation is part of their act, and the “smear of […] lipstick” provides proof that they did, in fact, meet in midair.