THE SPACE IN
DUST
My analysis of Dust
by Martha Conway written in
1997 is about the space
reference and what I am going to make is a study of it thorough the plot and
the characters of this Hypertext.
Jane Brandt is in Santa Ana
(California)’s airport ready to take a plane which will take her and
her friend to New York City, Dan,
the friend, has family there and they take advantage of it. Between
We moved at a steady pace through the
airport, past all the couples and families, all the grandparents, small
children, fathers, the mothers carrying crayons. They had suitcases, paper cups
of fruit juice, each other. I envied how even in an airport they marked their
territory, they spread it around
She does not refer so much to the
plane itself, she just mentions that she decided to sleep in it. Once in
I climbed into a cab with a
bullet-proof plexiglas shield
that safeguarded the driver from me, with toothpick-thin holes for air and
sound. The driver listened to a Canadian finance report, as we drove. He was
the blackest man I had ever seen -- in the light his skin was the color of late summer grapes -- and his words were a soft
English ballad, a lullaby, when he spoke.
During the run from the airport to
Lucy’s apartment Jane decides not to tell us about the city but about the
It was dusk. I told him
After leaving the taxi, Jane goes
into Lucy’s apartment. Jane explains
us the house distribution, furniture and even the smell of it. First of all,
Lucy guide her to guest’s room, she
is interested in the draws on the table.
We went to a room that
was empty except for a white futon couch and a white drafting table. The table
was littered with pens and colored markers and paper
and notebooks and rulers, protractors, a ruler with pica marks. There was a
worn Turkish rug on the floor in faded cream and brown.
…
I followed Lucy out of the room and
through the apartment. All the furniture was designed to look like something
else. A love seat in the shape of a half-shell. A low green lima-bean table. Hung on the walls almost
randomly were brightly colored folk art, posters, colorful Mexican masks, but all had something wrong, almost
unnoticeable, like the mask that represented a buttocks and not a face. In the
poster a man read a book to a pig. And there was a painting of Madonna and
child that was warped in perspective, as if made by the child. I stopped to
look at a bright red bookcase -- it was filled with children's books, old books
from the thirties and forties, hard-back editions with colored
inserts and covering sheets of rice paper or perverted pen and ink art.
Lucy tells her new guest about her
children book collection and the reader cannot guess where they are until Lucy
takes out from the freezer a bottle of vodka, which place us in the kitchen.
We sat in the kitchen. It was a large
cold room with marble counters and colorful tiles. We
sat in the middle around a formica
burger-joint table.
…
The kitchen sparkled with unused
appliances and copper-bottom pots hung from the ceiling. There was no smell
anywhere in any of the rooms.
After the conversation between them,
Lucy decides to make Jane a present, they go into Lucy and Henry’s room and the hostess asks Jane to try some
clothes, the entire house is quite rare.
Their bedroom was upstairs on the street side with huge bay windows and
a very high ceiling. I lay on the bed which was large and soft (…) I looked at
the walls around me. There were two muted-colored
paintings with large signatures: a man with his finger in his nose, the other
of the same man protruding his tongue. In one corner stood a French dressing
table with a ruffle, a pale avocado green under gold, a repeating pattern of
ants. (…) The bedroom was
warm and dreamy.
When Dan came in from the airport, they went out to
dinner. They choose a Chinese Restaurant,
but the most important details of the dinner happen in the bathroom hallway,
which is where Dan realizes about Jane really likes her sister and he is not
happy with that. But Jane does not describe the corridor, maybe because her
drunkenness, she just tell us what is happening there.
After dinner they go to a brightly lit Italian café
near their apartment. They drink coffee while Lucy asks Jane about her
parents, Jane says that her parents are death and everybody is surprised
because not even Dan knew it. In this moment Jane starts to remember her
childhood.
When
I was a child he took me to church every Ash Wednesday. Remember you are dust,
the priest told us, to dust you shall return.
The fact of remembering makes Jane being exhausted, Lucy believes that
she is too upset to sleep alone and she decides to sleeps with her tonight, she
will be Jane’s mother for a night.
"Henry will sleep in the baby
room. You'll sleep in the guest room downstairs. Jacy
will sleep in the big bed with me. Don't worry, Jacy,
this is nothing dirty. Nothing will happen. It's not like the movies. You just
need a mother tonight."
Once they are in Lucy’s
apartment again and before they go to bed, Jane goes to the guest’s room, where Dan almost plead
for sleeping with her tonight instead of alone, Ney York City means something
different for Dan.
"I
thought we'd get a free dinner and a nice place to crash and we would laugh
about them," Dan said. "I thought
it would be
fun."
Jane denies the idea of Dan and goes to Lucy’s room, she does not describe it
again, and she lay on the bed. Whereas she is there she thinks about the vodka
and the antidepressants, she prefers vodka.
I got up to look for the vodka. There was very little left. I poured a
shot into the bottle cap and drank it. I did not aim well; some escaped down my
chin. Henry's chair was soft and comfortable and shaped like the palm of a
hand. Cloth fingers curved up as the back rest. I turned so I could see out the
window. A couple walked down the sidewalk, not touching, looking away as they
spoke. Their words were muted by the thick stone walls, as if the house was
under water. I heard the rattle of glass bottles and something roll down the
street. The vodka was gone. I got up from the chair and went back to the bed
and took Lucy's hand again.
The rest of the action remains in Lucy’s bed, where Jane feels so comfortable and safe between Lucy
and Henry.
I wanted
only this: to lie like this between them, one on each side, in a clean cool
room on a bed with clean sheets, the sound of even
breathing.
All the fragments of the text are taken from: the hypertext http://www.mississippireview.com/1997/conway.html
All the information about the real places (
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Reyes María Cañizares Flores
recaflo@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press