Drinking Coffee Elsewhere: “Geese” and “Doris is coming”

Comment one:
An interesting sequence of events that jumped out at me in “Geese” was one that took place between Dina and Sayeed. After Sayeed tried to kill Dina the two started to avoid each other at all costs. “Not a schedule exactly, but a way of doing things. If he returned from a day of looking for work he might ask every one how the day had gone. In that case she would not answer, because she was to understand that he was not speaking to her. If she was in a corner of the room she would go to another.”(Packer p.223) For some reason this reminded me of the intricate tango that takes place between a couple that is headed for divorce but can not come to terms with that fact yet. I know there was little if any love between Dina and Sayeed, but I could not help but be reminded of this exact tango my parents carried out for years preceding their own divorce. Nothing was admitted to be wrong, but nothing seemed to be going right either. The lack of communication and retreating to opposite ends of the house were common. For some reason when I read this quote this imagery leaped off the page and into my head, bringing me right back to the hostility of 1999.

Comment two:
In Doris is coming a passage that called to me was on page 246 where Doris is describing her return from school to home. “but she knew her father must be home; she could hear him hammering away. Her father was trying to build a third bedroom where their back porch had been, but the partition made from blankets never kept out the draft. She turned on the kitchen stove to warm the house and start dinner, wondering why her father had picked winter, of all times, to tear down two major walls of the house.” (Packer p.246) She goes on to describe the pock pock of the hammers meeting the nail heads. This jumped out to me being that my father did indeed make the same mistake when trying to renovate our porch into a “new room”. He picked late fall to start this project thinking it would only take a few weeks and that we would be spared from the cold arrival of winter because the gaping hole in the side of our house would be a finished room by then. Oh boy was he wrong the project took like 5-6 weeks longer than anticipated and I can still remember waking up in the morning for school to the pleasant smell of cooking gas. My mother used the same method of blasting the oven to warm the rest of the house. This one brought me back to 1989.

Posted by Michael Clark