What's eating Elly Patterson: a recapitulation.....

[dreadedcandiru2]

Elly's baffled and unacknowledged desire to somehow couple with Phil isn't the only factor that must be considered when we look back at her life; we also have to remember that she's transfixed by the following vision:

Place: Chapel Hill Memorial Gardens, Milborough, Ontario, Canada. Date: 28 August 2021.
[We find John, Michael, Liz and April putting flowers on a grave marker.]

Michael: It's hard to believe it's been five years since Mom passed on. I thought she'd be here for years and years...

John: It was simply her time.

Michael: Was it, Dad? I look back at the past and I can't but remember that she did a lot more than we ever gave her credit for; I feel kinda bad that we didn't do more for her when she was alive.

This vision, this nightmare fantasy in which she will only praised for her years of hard work long after she's died leads her on like a pillar of smoke during the day and a pillar of fire during the night. We all know the causes and they're all in Elly's head. The first, of course, is that she is sick with the fear that she doesn't really matter, that her life has no impact and that all she does is play a minor supporting role in the lives of people who have an important part to play in the human drama. As she sees it, she has no identity of her own as it seems to her that she's not so much an individual as she is a female adjunct of a male of some sort. This not-really-hidden self-loathing has a sidekick: her preference of The-world-that-might-have-been to the World-that-is; she's never really happy with all the desirable things in her life because that which she thinks should be hers means more. A third concern is that she can't rest or take time off lest chaos befall the world due to her laziness; this means that enforced idleness is the sheerest cruelty possible to inflict on her. Since she doesn't want to admit that she has to do endless hours of futile busywork just to feel minimally useful, John doesn't know what Elly does all day. As I've said before, what she thought was a slam at her for being lazy was his comparing how long it would take his mother to clean a house their size and figuring out that she could have tidied up at least three of them per diem; her claims of overwork don't thus make sense unless the tired joke he makes of dusting the attic every day is more than hyperbole. We also need to contend with her very real need to not look weak by telling people what's really bothering her and its twin, the belief that they already know. Finally, there's her warped perception of risk. My guess as to why she never considered getting a lock to the gate is that it was better that April be exposed to harm than to have random strangers think that she was some loon hunkered down in her bunker. This constellation of hang-ups seem to have the revenge effect of making what seems like a unrealistic fantasy of martyrdom at the hands of the clueless a near certainty. In the real world, Mike would have stated that if she was upset with her lot in life, he would have known.

Comments

[kefkaownsall.livejournal.com]

One thing
I think April will be happy

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

Which, of course, will anger those around her; it would never occur to the assembled idiots that she has a right to resent years of being treated like an unwelcome nuisance.

[josephusrex.livejournal.com]

I've got to insist that the unsecured gate really did have more to do with a sneaking desire to kill April. I can't even say "subconscious," since I'm pretty sure Elly had active fantasies about life with one less child.

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

The "I don't want to be thought of as living in a fortress" shtick is how she disguises this murderous little what-if of hers; what's sort of obvious is that she blames April for a calamity that was set in motion long beforehand and by her own hand. As you know, Elly made a big, ugly public spectacle of herself in a successful effort to derail the construction of a sports arena that would have provided sufficient tax revenue to fund the arts because she suffered from the paranoid misapprehension that the jocks were planning to visit genocide on the arts community. Since Milborough was forced to forswear the license to print money (which was meant to soften the blow of a reduced block grant from the Province) at her panicky, ignorant behest, the library and other cultural institutions wound up having to make do with less to support the demands she'd willed on the city. One of the things that they regretted having to get rid of was a reliable human pack mule named Elly Patterson. Given Elly's poor grasp of cause and effect, she blamed April for something that was not her fault. My guess is that if John had got a vasectomy in 1982, Elly would still have found some way to waste time and sabotage her alleged career.

[josephusrex.livejournal.com]

Also: In the news today, Stephen Hawking is quoted thus: "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

If he'd tried that in the Foobiverse's Journal, he'd have been told he had no right to say that, and was a prick besides.