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. She shudders when the stair squeaks on her way down and the bird twitches, but it doesn’t fly. She heads quickly to the kitchen and eats and plans for the removal of the bird. Then she hears a pounding on the door and sees that it’s the unskilled carpenter who appears every spring to put up new window cords. Her mother never liked him, and nor does Laurel. He’s brash and ill-mannered. His name is Mr. Cheek, and Laurel asks him for help with the bird. He immediately botches the attempt, and the bird flies into Laurel’s room. When he heads into her room, and she follows, she notices him staring into her suitcase. He also gazes at her dresser and scares the bird again. He is making things worse, and Laurel grows angry. When he starts asking Laurel why she didn’t get married again, she tells him to leave.

When Missouri arrives, Laurel tells her about the bird. She shows Missouri the stain the bird has left behind on the curtains. Missouri puts on her raincoat and hat and grabs a broom. Laurel doesn’t want Missouri to kill the bird, but she tells Laurel there’s no other way: “He ain’t got no business going into your room” (167). Laurel holds the door open, and she hears Missouri drop the broom. She runs upstairs and finds the bird on the floor, looking injured. She takes two wastebaskets and scoops the bird up. She races down the stairs, “without the full knowledge of what she carried” (168). She feels something like a wind on her face and then the bird is free, flying off and away. Missouri says, “All birds got to fly, even them no-count dirty ones” (168). Missouri cleans the curtains of the stain.

After that, Laurel burns the letters her mother kept from her father and then gives Mrs. Adele Courtland the little soapstone boat her father made for her mother. Adele protests and presses it back into Laurel’s hand. heads upstairs and puts on her city clothes and finishes packing. She is about to leave and wait for the bridesmaids when she hears a sound from the back of the house.

There, she sees Missouri washing out the curtains that the bird stained and hanging them to dry. She heads into the kitchen and realizes she forgot to look through the cabinets there for memories of her parents. She goes through one of the cupboards and finds her mother’s breadboard. Just as she begins to examine it, Fay enters the room. Fay screams, “You mean to tell me you’re still here?” (172). Laurel asks Fay what she did to her mother’s breadboard; it’s filled with gouges and burns. Fay says she cracked walnuts on it with a hammer. Anyway, Fay says, what would anyone want to do with an old breadboard? Laurel tells her that her husband made it for her mother. Her husband was an artist who had a “gift of his hands” (175), and her mother welcomed the gift with honor. Fay tells Laurel that Becky died “a crazy,” and Laurel stands up for her mother, saying, “My mother never did hurt any living creature” (174). She tells Fay that her husband, Phil, was what their family needed because they were a “family of comparatively helpless people” (176), and that’s what bound them together.

Laurel says she’s taking the breadboard, and Fay protests, but Laurel says she is going to take it and fix it because “a coat of grime is something I can get rid of” (176). Fay has words about Phil, Laurel’s husband, insulting Laurel enough that Laurel raises the breadboard as if to hit Fay. She lowers the board, realizing that she wasn’t late in leaving; Fay came home early. She thinks, “there is hate as well as love […] in the coming together and continuing of our lives” (177). Laurel drops the breadboard, and Fay snidely tells Laurel she doesn’t know how to fight, but Laurel realizes that it is Fay who doesn’t know how to fight. Fay, she realizes, “was without any powers of passion or imagination in herself and had no way to see it or reach it in the other person” (178). Fay tells Laurel to take it, but Laurel realizes the past is dead. She tells Fay she doesn’t want the breadboard anymore and lays it on the table with the realization: “Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hand” (179), and in the heart that can be emptied and filled again. She leaves the room. The bridesmaids are waiting, hurrying her up to get her to the airport and home to Chicago.