The Pinballs

The novel deals frankly and openly with the types of abuse children can experience from their guardians and the effects that treatment has on their behavior, personality, and actions. Harvey, Carlie, and Thomas J are abused by their original guardians in a variety of ways, and each of them tries to survive their abuse and neglect in a different way. Children are “entirely dependent upon parents or caregivers for their safety in their environment” (Davis, Shirley. “The Long-Term Effects of Abandonment.” CPTSD Foundation. 25 Feb 2021). When abandonment and abuse compromise that safety, children survive their circumstances by adapting in unhealthy ways.

Harvey has been abandoned by his mother, emotionally abused by his father, and run over by his father’s car while his father was drunk driving. Because of the acute physical mistreatment by his father, Harvey’s perception of his parents has been dictated by something called splitting, “an unconscious defense mechanism that provokes an individual to perceive people in a distorted manner as either ‘all good’ or ‘all bad’” (Leonard, Erin. “What a Relationship With a Parent Reveals About a Partner.” Psychology Today. 17 April 2019). He idealizes his mother, despite evidence that she is not “all good.” He convinced himself that “if she knew about these broken legs—well, she’d come get me. I know she would” (68). He tells his father that he is sure she “wrote to me dozens of times over the years only you never gave me the letters” (82). He “searched the trash cans for scraps” (82) but didn’t find anything, so he decides his father “probably flushed them down the toilet” (82). Even against evidence to the contrary, Harvey tries to maintain the fiction that his father is “all bad” and his mother is “all good.” Deep down, “Harvey knew it was true” that his mother never wrote to him and ignored his father’s letters about his injuries and illnesses (83). He has maintained this fantasy as a defense mechanism, and once it crumbles, he becomes despondent.

Carlie and Thomas J are subject to different types of abandonment. Carlie has been abandoned and abused all her life. Her birth father “left before [she] was born” (64), and her first stepfather left and “even stole all [her] baby-sitting money” (65). Her second stepfather “was the first person who ever wanted to do [her] harm,” and, while she was “perfectly safe” outside the house, when Carlie got home, she “got mugged and attacked” (65). Like Carlie, Thomas J has been abandoned by his parents and then emotionally neglected and abandoned by the Benson twins.

One of the results of abandonment is that children start “feeling unsafe in the world and feeling people cannot be trusted” or as if “they do not deserve positive attention or adequate care” (Davis). Carlie’s personality is shaped by the former, and Thomas J’s by the latter. When talking to Harvey, Carlie seems surprised that Mrs. Mason “hasn’t done us in yet” (64). She expects to be “done in” by the adults around her. When she arrives to the Masons with her social workers, “she had disliked Mrs. Mason” immediately because she has learned to be “suspicious of people” (9). She thinks Mrs. Mason is trying to look like Mrs. Walton, the mother from the CBS drama The Waltons, which aired from 1972 to 1981. Carlie is suspicious that Mrs. Mason is not who she appears to be, and that behind her cordial and motherly exterior is someone who will hurt Carlie again.

Thomas J was raised in neglect by the Benson twins, who “had forgotten him” sometimes (51). They kept him inside the house, and he did not speak to or know anybody outside until he went into foster care. He does not often speak; he “had never learned the art of talking” (61) because the twins often did not speak to one another or to him and did not care to socialize him. Socialization is extremely important in childhood as it “allows kids to build skills that will help them be confident and autonomous later in life” (“The Importance of Socializing for Kids.” Child’s Play: Early Learning Centre). When Thomas J starts to open up with Mr. Mason, he is diffident and extremely dependent on his assurance. He offers Mr. Mason a one-sentence thought, which was “the longest and deepest speech Thomas J had ever made,” and he then “looked quickly at Mr. Mason to see what he thought of it” (90). Thomas has not learned how to be confident in his speech or opinions. Because being deprived of communication and connection is all he knows, Thomas J does not realize the twins provided him with inadequate care. When Mr. Mason tells him to remember that that the twins thought they were doing Thomas J a kindness, he insists that the twins “were doing me a kindness” (131). He does not yet realize that such profound neglect is a type of abuse, and he does not realize he deserves greater love and care.

Harvey, Carlie, and Thomas J are each subject to different types of mistreatment. They internalize this treatment, which affects their personalities and shapes their coping mechanisms. Children are malleable and impressionable, and abuse can have extreme consequences both short and long term.