We Are Okay

“It takes me a while, usually, to be able to listen. But when I do, I discover the secrets of pollination, that honeybees’ wings beat two hundred times per second. That trees shed their leaves not according to season, but according to rainfall. That before all of us there was something else. Eventually, something will take our place. I learn that I am a tiny piece of a miraculous world.”

Marin’s interest in the wonders of the natural world are significant in two ways: first, considering the enormity of the world helps her to feel as though her grief and pain are temporary and small in the grander scale of things; second, her interest in the Natural Sciences as a major is due to the comfort she finds in structure and facts. Later, Marin will tell Mabel that she is thinking of changing her major to the Natural Sciences; Mabel will be disapproving, but this passage suggests the reasoning behind Marin’s thoughts and the relief she feels at the thought of escaping the ambiguity of Literature.

“I guess when you spend a life riding waves—knowing that the ocean is heartless and millions of times stronger than you are, but still trusting that you’re skilled enough or brave enough or charmed enough to survive it—you become indebted to the people who don’t make it. Someone always dies. It’s just a matter of who, and when. You remember her with songs, with shrines of shells and flowers and beach glass, with an arm around her daughter and, later, daughters of your own named after her.”

Marin’s experience with the local surfers as she grew up in the shadow of the waves that took her mother’s life provides insight into the role the ocean plays in her mind and the minds of her community. Instead of hating and avoiding the ocean, Marin spends a lot of time there, watching the waves and thinking of her mother. The recognition she receives from people who knew her mother—approximately 15 years ago—tells the reader a lot about how the surfing community in that area views the ocean. Surfers view Marin’s mother’s death more as a sacrifice than a tragedy. Marin remains a symbol of that sacrifice and often receives tributes in the small items and stories about her mother. 

“She’s right. If Mabel’s talking about the girl who hugged her good-bye before she left for Los Angeles, who laced fingers with her at the last bonfire of the summer and accepted shells from almost-strangers, who analyzed novels for fun and lived with her grandfather in a pink, rent-controlled house in the Sunset that often smelled like cake and was often filled with elderly, gambling men—if she’s talking about that girl, then yes, I disappeared.”

This passage is one of the first suggestions of Marin’s profound alienation and dissociation from herself. Though a loss like Marin’s will change a person, the degree of change—of real change—that Marin describes shows the reader the depths of her suffering. Though the we doesn’t know it at this point, Marin’s grief is mixed with the shock of her grandfather’s betrayal, a combination which undermines everything Marin thought she knew about her life. At this point in her story, Marin fears that their life together was a lie; this lie appears to negate the foundation upon which she’d built her identity.

“They tease me for being a food snob, an easy misunderstanding to play along with, but I’m not that picky about what I eat. I’m just afraid that one day something’s going to catch me by surprise. Stale coffee. Squares of American cheese. Hard tomatoes, so unripe they’re white in the center. The most innocent things can call back the most terrible.”

After fleeing to New York, Marin stays in a dirty, cheap motel for two weeks. While there, she eats every meal at the diner across the street. Afterwards, she avoids diners or anything that reminds her of a diner. This passage describes the foundation of Marin’s policy of avoidance: if she can stay away from things that remind her of being at the diner, she can avoid the painful memories. On a larger scale, it shows the mindset behind her entire departure to New York and her refusal to take any of her possessions with her. In this seemingly unimportant passage about diner food, LaCour lays bare Marin’s strategy for avoiding her pain: avoiding anything that could remind her of that pain. 

“I do not mean the difficulty. I do not mean the sex. I mean there are too many failings. Not enough hope. Everything is despair. Everything is suffering. What I mean is don’t be a person who seeks out grief. There is enough of that in life.”

This exchange occurs after Marin tells the Columbian driver that her favorite book is One Hundred Years of Solitude. The driver has no problems with the more salacious aspects of the novel, but he cautions Marin against romanticizing the grief and despair in the novel. He does not know that Marin already lives with a deeply ingrained grief, so his advice could be seen as naïve. His suggestion is that Marin instead seek out media that contains more hope and happiness. Marin, who reads these texts on solitude, is not seeking out grief so much as she is trying to find ways to process her own.

“I thought that it was more likely the opposite. I must have shut grief out. Found it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods.”

After they leave the car, Marin and Mabel discuss whether the driver had any actual insight to offer into whether or not Marin “seeks out grief.” Marin speculates that the driver was wrong, that she looks to fictionalized representations of the kind of pain and isolation she feels because those representations are an easier way to explore her feelings than facing her own realities.

“I can imagine how it would look to live there, and I know the things I would do, but I can’t feel it. I can’t say yes. I have only just learned how to be here. Life is paper-thin and fragile. Any sudden change could rip it wide-open.”

Mabel, on behalf of her whole family, asks Marin to come live with them and be a daughter and sister. Despite how much a part of her longs for that kind of belonging, her equilibrium is too fragile to consider it. Whether she’s right to do so or not, Marin is attempting to build a new existence that is separate from the painful memories of her grandfather. She believes that to survive the loss, she must divorce herself from her previous life and avoid feeling too deeply—this offer from Mabel’s family has the potential to destroy her efforts in both areas.

“‘I hope you don’t get in trouble,’ I said, but how could trouble find us? We were miraculous. We were beach creatures. We had treasures in our pockets and each other on our skin.”

This feeling, following the night Mabel and Marin spend on the beach together, is most purely happy and confident Marin is during the novel. She and Mabel have just become romantically and sexually intimate, and the wave of happiness she feels makes her feel indomitable. She knows they have broken rules and may be subject to discipline from their parents, but the euphoria of the experience makes Marin feel above the consequences. The difference between this and the later emotional numbness and distance Marin feels is a sad contrast. Additionally, this passage demonstrates the depth of Marin’s feeling for Mabel and how intense her pain must have been to have cut this connection out of her life.

“We’re as far apart as two people could be on a mattress this size. The space between us is worse than our awkwardness, worse than not knowing what she’s thinking during our long stretches of silence.” 

The forced closeness of the groundskeeper’s sofa bed emphasizes how isolated Marin’s been. Their previous disconnect had been based on silence and geographic distance. In her attempts to seal herself off from her pain, Marin has simply avoided reminders of her previous life. With Mabel present, Marin has a physical reminder of what she’s lost. In other parts of the novel, Marin wonders at the loss of the easy way she and Mabel used to touch and talk. This moment in the bed is a physical representation of her inability to reach out and connect with Mabel. 

“We were innocent enough to think that our lives were what they thought they were, that if we pieced all of the facts about ourselves together they’d form an image that made sense—that looked like us when we looked in the mirror, that looked like our living rooms and our kitchens and the people who raised us—instead of revealing all the things we did not know.” 

Marin reflects on a beach party she had with her friends after graduation. Earlier in the passage, she reflects on how beautiful they all were that night in the firelight. In hindsight, she realizes the fragility of their world views and their ignorance about the things that could irrevocably change them. In this quote, like other places in the novel, Marin articulates the difference between being complete and believing that you’re complete. Since the revelations about her grandfather, she’s been very aware of the gaps that people ignore to believe that they understand their lives. This reflection on a past party allows Marin to express the realization she’s had about her own lack of any real understanding of what was happening in and around her life.

“The fact of her was scary enough, but the fact of me, in an identical room, just as alone as she was, that was the worst part. There was only a wall between us, and it was so thin it was almost nothing. Jane, too, was once locked up in a room with a ghost. It was terrifying, the idea that we could fall asleep girls, minty breathed and nightgowned, and wake to find ourselves wolves.” 

One of the most traumatizing things Marin experienced at the motel was the howling of her neighbor. Instead of thinking the woman is crazy, Marin recognizes the similarities in their pain—the primary difference being that the woman howls hers out loud while Marin compresses hers inside. This passage finds Marin in a liminal state between wholeness and brokenness. The thin wall between her and the howling woman is as much of a metaphor as it is a physical barrier; Marin recognizes that very little separates her, the innocent girl, from a monstrous representation of grief. 

“I used to cry over a story and then close the book, and it would all be over. Now everything resonates, sticks like a splinter, festers.” 

This passage gives the reader insight into why Marin no longer enjoys the reading and literary analysis she used to get so much pleasure from. Books used to be a safe outlet for her pain and grief, allowing her to identify with the characters and achieve catharsis alongside them. Now, Marin’s grief is so sticky that it clings to every surface of her life; she is no longer able to experience the pain as mediated by a novel. The pain inside her now is so much more consuming that stories of grief add to the reservoir rather than draining it. 

“I face away from her for a long time so that she won’t see my sadness. To be held like that, to be let go. But then the ghost of me starts whispering again. She’s reminding me of how cold I’ve been. How I’ve been freezing. She’s saying that Mabel’s warm and that she loves me. Maybe a love that’s different than it used to be, but love all the same. The ghost of me is saying, Three thousand miles. That’s how much she cares. She’s telling me it’s okay.” 

This moment in the groundskeeper’s home is a breakthrough for Marin. She has spoken of ghosts before and alluded to seeing herself as a ghost, but here, she communicates with the ghost of her former self in a way that moves her towards healing. This ghost reminds her that she is loveable and is loved. In the moments after this realization, Marin makes contact with Mabel, turning over and cuddling against her on the sofa bed. 

“I don’t know if I’ve ever thought this way about the expansiveness of a life. I think about it as it is in the wider world—in nature and time, in centuries and galaxies—but to think of Ana and Javier being young and in love, having their first baby, and watching him grow up, get married, move across the world, Knowing that they’ll soon have another descendent to love. Knowing that they’ll grow older as time passes, they’ll become old the way Gramps was, with gray hair and a tremble in his step, so much love still in their hearts—this astonishes me. I am capsized.” 

This passage, after Mabel tells Marin that her brother is going to have a baby, is an interesting parallel to the earlier passage about the honeybees and the trees. Then, the natural sciences gave Marin perspective about life and pain; now, her broadened understanding of the ages of a life gives her a similar perspective. Her view zooms out beyond a person’s present state, comprehending how big and full a single life can be. She begins to understand the way age and time and experience will shape a person, leaving them not unchanged but still something greater than the sum of their experiences.

“It was a summer of trying not to think too deeply. A summer of pretending that the end wasn’t coming. A summer when I got lost in time, when I rarely knew what day it was, rarely cared about the hour. A summer so bright and warm it made me believe the heat would linger, that there would always be more days, that blood on handkerchiefs was an exercise in stain removal and not a sign of oblivion.”

The summer of Gramps’s death is also the summer after Marin’s high school graduation and the summer before she and Mabel will leave to attend colleges on opposite sides of the country. Even in the moment, without the knowledge of what would come next, Marin knew it was a precarious and wonderful time, a season before massive changes set into their lives and alter them profoundly. It is evident in the way Marin describes it that she was not oblivious or blissfully ignorant, but was choosing to immerse herself in the present happiness without dwelling on the things she knew were to come.

“I listened to the same heartbroken song the entire bus ride home, because it was still a summer when sadness was beautiful.”

Marin reflects on leaving Mabel’s house on the morning of her departure for college. She recalls an innocence to her feelings of the time—smaller, romanticized sadness and loss. Her emotions were stable enough that she could experience pain without being overwhelmed. The note that sadness “was beautiful” suggests a contrast between that time and the present, when sadness is overwhelming and disfiguring. Instead of being nostalgic for happiness, Marin is nostalgic for a simpler kind of pain.

“You go through life thinking there’s so much you need […] You think you need all of it. Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother.”

Marin reflects on the items we accumulate to tell a story about ourselves. She seems to claim here that those things are unnecessary, but much of the rest of the book dwells on the barrenness and impersonal appearance of her dorm room, particularly in comparison to the signs of personality and passions that are present in the rooms of the other girls. The contrast between what she thinks about her lack of possessions and how she feels about it suggests that those sentimental items, while not physically necessary, are important reminders. They anchor a person in a feeling of home and belonging.

“I didn’t return Mabel’s nine hundred texts because I knew we’d end up like this no matter what. What happened had broken us even if it wasn’t about us at all. Because I know that for all her care and understanding, when this visit is over and she’s back in LA with Jacob and her new friends, sitting in her lecture halls or riding the Ferris wheel in Santa Monica or eating dinner by herself in front of an open textbook, she’ll be the same as she’s always been—fearless and funny and whole. She’ll still be herself and I’ll be learning who I am now.”

This passage is another that demonstrates the distance Marin feels from her past and identity. She notes that what happened “wasn’t about us at all,” not seeming to realize that such a monumental change to one of them would impact both of them—though Gramps’s death wasn’t “about them,” Marin’s suffering certainly is. Marin also seems unaware of how this experience—and particularly Marin’s abrupt departure—would have changed Mabel as well. This dissonance further shows the degree to which Marin feels disconnected from the world around her. 

“The truth is, I only called so that I could remind him—and myself, maybe—that I’m still a part of the world. It feels like now or never with him, and I’m not sure if I want to lose what’s left of the life Gramps and I shared. I used to be sure, but now I’m not.” 

Here, we see Marin’s tentative forays into understanding Gramps as a person with pains and losses of his own. Instead of describing their lives as a lie, she shifts to the more forgiving term “pretend.” In doing so, she grants Gramps an early wave of forgiveness, however uncertain it may be at this time. In realizing her grandfather’s enduring grief in a way that also recognizes the care and good times he was able to give her, she’s grants the good times equal weight to the bad times. The good times become less of a deception and more a grieving, mentally ill man’s efforts to care for his granddaughter. 

“I’m not saying that it doesn’t scare me, to bring it into the light. My mother on Ocean Beach. Her sun-faded peach surfboard leaning under arm. Her black wet suit and wet hair. Her squinting eyes and her huge smile. It scares me, yes, but it also feels right.” 

Another very important moment of progress occurs after Mabel leaves, when Marin finally has the strength to put things on her bulletin board. Where previously her board had been blank to reflect her inner turmoil, Mabel’s visit has allowed Marin to reclaim and reassert some of her identity. Though these additions are small—Hannah’s hand-made snowflake chain and the photograph of Marin’s mother—they represent an important step towards healing. 

“Because if we have any sense of self-preservation, we do the best with what we’re given. I was given cakes and cookies and rides to school. I was given songs and dinners at a table with brass candlesticks. I was given a man with a sensitive heart and a devious sense of humor and enough skill at cards to win me a year of private college—tuition and room and board—and I took all of those good things and told myself they made us special. Told myself they meant we were a family the way Mabel and Ana and Javier were, told myself that we weren’t missing anything. We were masters of collusion, Gramps and I. In that, at least, we were together.”

These final chapters demonstrate the remarkable progress Marin has made over the three days of Mabel’s visit. Here, she’s able to clearly articulate the way she and Gramps cobbled a life together to the best of their ability after their losses. She recognizes that there was something missing from that life, an emotional intimacy and shared truth that she saw when she looked at Mabel’s family. Importantly, she is also able to see all of these elements as something good, rather than something false, while still acknowledging their inability to connect to each other.

“Someday is an open word. It could mean tomorrow or it could be decades away. If someone had told me while I was huddled under the motel blankets that Mabel and I would be together again someday, that I would tell her the story of what happened someday and feel a little better, a little less afraid, I wouldn’t have believed it. And it’s only been four months since then, which is not long to wait for someday.”

This passage is an example of how transformative and healing Mabel’s visit and Marin’s willingness to open up has been. Other areas of the novel have dealt with Marin’s sense of perspective—the literary, the scientific, and the breadth of a lifetime as seen in her consideration of Ana and Javier’s lives. Here, Marin is able to apply that perspective to herself; she thinks about how impossible it would have seemed, four months ago, that she would heal even this much. In this realization, the idea of more healing with more time becomes possible and, along with it, hope.

“Gramps set up that tree every year. He pulled out the decorations his dead wife and dead daughter bought and pretended to be a man who had lost too much and survived it. He pretended, for me, that his mind and his heart were not dark and convoluted places. He pretended that he lived in a house with me, his granddaughter, for whom he baked and often drove to school and taught important lessons about how to treat stains and save money, when really, he lived in a secret room with the dead. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s more complicated.” 

Here, we see Marin’s tentative forays into understanding Gramps as a person with pains and losses of his own. Instead of describing their lives as a lie, she shifts to the more forgiving term “pretend.” In doing so, she grants Gramps an early wave of forgiveness, however uncertain it may be at this time. In realizing her grandfather’s enduring grief in a way that also recognizes the care and good times he was able to give her, she’s grants the good times equal weight to the bad times. The good times become less of a deception and more a grieving, mentally ill man’s efforts to care for his granddaughter.