The Optimist's Daughter

Laurel awakens in the chair where she fell asleep next to the sewing machine. The storm has moved on, and she remembers a dream in which she was “like a passenger who had come on an emergency journey in a train” (159). After she wakes up, rested, she realizes her dream was based on something that really happened. When Laurel and Phil were engaged, they took a train from Chicago to Mount Salus to be married. As the train climbed, Laurel looked down and saw two rivers: “This was the confluence of the waters, the Ohio and the Mississippi” (159). At the time, she saw herself and her husband as like the river. The confluence, an “act of faith” (160), had brought them together, and in their love they united. As they rode along in the train with the river, Laurel watched it and thought, “It’s our turn […] And we are going to live forever” (160). She realizes that though their marriage was brief, “there had not happened a single blunder in their short life together” (162).

She leaves the room and turns off the lights all over the house that she switched on the night before. She spots the bird right away, sitting in a curtain fold at the stair window.