That Summer

Beatrice’s interest in taxidermy is a symbol that arises throughout the novel and has a number of possible interpretations. Most obviously, the animals and the practice of taxidermy are representative of Beatrice’s unconventional identity and life plans. However, they also have other meanings. The dead mice sequestered in the back of her mother’s freezer are symbolic of the many secrets that have settled unnoticed in the Shoemaker family; although the family might appear happy and perfect, it nonetheless hides something rotten at its core, just as the mice hide amongst the otherwise sustaining contents of Daisy’s freezer.

Finally, the mice that Beatrice guts, stuffs, fluffs, and dresses until they appear alive are symbols of pretense and deception, mirroring both Hal and Diana’s duplicity and reflecting the artifice with which Hal has created himself as the perfect husband, hiding the rotten truth about his past from his wife and daughter. Just like the carefully preserved and posed mice, the members of the Shoemaker family are dressed up as characters in Hal’s production of the perfect suburban life, each playing their role until it eventually becomes unsustainable and the farce begins to collapse. 

When planning for her summer away on the Cape, the teenage Diana receives a yellow bikini from her older sisters in a symbolic acknowledgement of her budding maturity and adulthood. The bikini is emblematic of the steps Diana is taking toward independence and sexual maturity as she looks forward to meeting boys and hopefully experiencing her first kiss that summer. On the Cape, Diana explores her own pleasure, masturbating for the first time and beginning what she believes to be a relationship with Poe. When he invites her to the bonfire party at the end of the summer, Diana sees it as the culmination of everything she has hoped for since the day she received the yellow bikini. Even Hal imagines that she might have been given the bikini in the same way he was given a box of condoms by his father: as a sanction of newfound sexuality and as an admission into the various acts that constitute adulthood.

The yellow bikini is a symbol not only of Diana’s sexuality but also of her vulnerability, and throughout the novel it is clear that the two go hand in hand. It is her desire for Poe which makes her vulnerable to his manipulations, and Diana struggles not to blame herself and her naivety for the events that follow. At the end of the novel, more than 30 years after Diana was first given her yellow bikini, Beatrice stands on a paddleboard wearing a yellow bikini of her own. It is no coincidence that the symbol reappears here in connection with the character who represents the next generation of women as she stands at the precipice of maturity and sexuality. Once again, the yellow bikini serves as a reminder that along with Beatrice’s independence comes excitement and joy, but also vulnerability.