NO DUCKS GIVEN: Day Three: 2 January, 2024

the fact that we're broke because I had cancer, the fact that that broke us, it broke us, the fact that I shouldn't say that because here we are, still kicking... the fact that Phoebe helped us out and we'll never be able to pay her back...

I'm not even a hundred pages into Ducks, Newburyport but I can already see that we're going to at least touch on everything that could make a person fret circa 2018 before I'm through the thousand or so yet to come, like an Infinite Jest for grown-ups. Without any embarrassing attempts at AAVE, I'm guessing/hoping.

I went through a year of cancer treatments *at a remove* a decade or so ago, when my dad was diagnosed -- very early by a family doctor who was a little boy when my dad was in his prime, who noticed that my dad's voice had profoundly changed during that doctor's years of medical school and army service -- with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. But he was already on Medicare and so the financial hit was negligible, and the diagnosis was early enough that all he ever needed was a tonsillectomy and a few rounds of monoclonal antibodies and he was still cancer-free when he died last month of Alzheimer's and an opportunistic infection. But if it had hit him in his prime, when that family physician was still a kid and those drugs weren't around and Dad would have had to go the chemo route, it absolutely would have broken us. Our narrator caught a bullet that we dodged. But as she says, they're still kicking; whatever Leo does for a living earns enough to keep them in their house and feeding four children while she does unpaid labor at home and apparently supplements their income by selling homemade pies? Which, how much money can she actually make that way?

By the way, I'm sick of typing "unnamed narrator." Since she seems to have sisters named Abby and Phoebe, I've decided to start calling her Gabby, because her internal monologue is very gabby indeed and it matches nicely with the "bee" phoneme at the end of the others' names. And it was my very own personal nickname as a little girl who made frequent appearances in my mother's newspaper column that she wrote until my sister and I were old enough that we might have friends who could read it and mine it for things to tease us about. She gave us each code names to further shield us a bit: Gabby and Gus. Though everybody knew and none of our school mates were ever imaginative enough to seek ammunition in the newspaper.

Am I trying to hard to identify with this character?

Anyway, it's really mother and daughter relationships that loom large in the chunk I read today. Gabby, we learn, is still dealing with the somewhat recent loss of her own mother, whom she calls Mommy in her head (and yes, this makes my own eyes leak because it's only two weeks tomorrow since I lost my Daddy and yes, I still called him Daddy to his face even as I gave him his last kiss goodbye when he was just starting to turn cold), and her daughter Stacy* is a teenager so disapproving of everything that Gabby does as to make Gabby sort of low key afraid of all teenaged girls. 

We already know that Stacy is quite outraged by what she has recently learned about the history of slavery in the U.S. and successfully has applied abolitionist reasoning to argue her way -- and by extension, her siblings' way -- out of having a share in household chores. I wonder how much longer it's going to be before Gabby is being blamed for Trump (still president at the time of this novel), climate change, wage stagnation, health care costs, maybe even for getting cancer. Angry teenagers paint with very broad brushes.

Another motif that keeps coming up is famous old shipwrecks, first the Titanic and now the SS La Bourgogne of 1898, which hit another ship rather than an iceberg and which is infamous for the poor ratio of crew to passenger survival rate because "the crew kicked and stabbed the passengers so they could get on the lifeboats" and so only one woman was saved and 300 drowned. In Gabby's opinion, the Bourgogne was a worse disaster than the Titanic and I think she has persuaded me. But so, why does Gabby know so much about shipwrecks? It's that what she reads about in her vanishingly small spare time? Did she write papers about them in college? Was she in the Navy before she became a mother, full-time or otherwise? I still have so many questions.

But there are still no ducks, still no Newburyport.

*Whom I'm now more certain is Gabby's daughter from her first marriage, because Gabby recalls buying Stacy a miniature piano at a junk shop the day after Leo proposed to Gabby. And this probably just adds to Stacy's hostility, if she, for instance, resents having a stepdad? Or any of the many other things that children of divorce have feelings about? Unless maybe her bio-dad died and Gabby was a widow before marrying Leo? Like I've said, so many questions!