“I started writing to you. The words just poured out. I started describing the C-section. I knew you'd want to know everything. I had to type as fast as I could, just to keep up with your questions.”
You're still the one I want to tell about my day. That makes this a love letter, doesn't it? I'm writing you a love letter.”
...Bou...
Dan gives details of her life and the things he talks about with her throught the excerpts. In CALL, we realize that Bou is the recepient of what started as a simple letter but turned out to be a love letter. “It's four years, four months since we said goodbye, or whatever we said. You're still the one I want to tell about my day. That makes this a love letter, doesn't it? I'm writing you a love letter.”
He also knows her reactions to his words and the curiosity he’ll built up in her because of his stories: “I started writing to you. The words just poured out. I started describing the C-section. I knew you'd want to know everything. I had to type as fast as I could, just to keep up with your questions.”
Bou means a lot to Dan : “There's nothing I won't tell you, except how much I'm still thinking about you, which you know.”
In the excerpt Window Glass, there are some background facts that Kafka lets the reader know, through Dan, about Bou: “your father's people arrived in New England on a wooden boat, swapped beads for Beacon Hill real estate, and settled down to wait for you. Meanwhile your mother's folks went on up to New Hampshire, cleared the land and named it Logs.”
She also did some ballet when she was little, as well as horse-back riding. This fact made her competitive with Dan, who was also a dancer: “What she really means is that she wishes she could dance better than you.”
Dan also tells about the images he invoked when hearing Margot talk about Bou’s dance and riding obsession: “All at once I saw you. You were three feet tall, hopping around a lawn in a pink tutu over white tights. There you were again, an eight-year-old rider in a hard cap, boots, tiny jodhpurs, like a young Princess Anne. Everything Margot said, I saw instantly. I had Bou the ballerina, Bou the horsy girl. From what Margot had told me two days before, I especially knew Bou the shy Andover junior who didn't go on dates, smelled permanently of manure, and thought lesbians were transvestites who smoked cigarettes in holders and flattened their hair with brilliantine.”
Some other information about Bou’s family is found in Boutique Mademoiselee: “Your father was a financial counsel which was actually a kind of lawyer, and your mother a preschool teacher and perpetual student of early childhood...you said that you had two brothers, but that the middle one, Nathan, had drowned.”
© Image from http://www.salem-news.com/stimg/march032008/woman_shadow315.jpg (30/11/08)