Flowers in the Attic: "Minutes Like Hours"
Entry posted by Maggie Mae
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Minutes Like Hours: Page 112 of 411 (Kindle Version)
Jesus. I'm on page 112. I now understand why Fred Clark's Left Behind Fridays have been going on for years.
QuoteAll the days dragged by. Monotonously.
Just like this book.
We get a paragraph of melodramatic teenage thoughts that lead me to believe that I could have been a much better writer had I not ever read such pondering about time.
Then we get a paragraph of "what Chris thinks" about the same thing she was just thinking about.
Momma comes to see them. She brings them games. So now they kids have a stack of board games, including the absolute worst game ever invented, Monopoly. Fun fact: Monopoly was originally created to help show how certain economic principles work. Also, the house rule about free parking sucks and should be abolished.
The twins aren't interested in games, or toys.
For some reason, the kids wake up at the same time every day, despite not having an alarm clock. They do have wristwatches, though.
More logistics about how they go to the bathroom and get dressed. I'd wonder if perhaps the "All the days dragged by" was some sort of literary device to help you understand that the book is dragging because the kids are locked into a room with the same routine; but i don't know if VC is that smart.
The grandmother quizzes them about the bible, they repeat back verses much like an internet atheist. However, you'd think that asking kids to repeat verses from Job is just asking for trouble. If she told me to recite a verse, I think I might go directly to Ezekiel 23:20. Then again, Grandmother has a whip and she's not afraid to use it.
The mother shows up at 6 pm every evening with gifts, books, games. Does she ever remove broken items, trash, etc?
Momma worries about how she's getting fat. Because that's what your children who are locked into an attic care about. How you aren't getting your daily run in because you bring food to your imprisoned children.
The kids go to the attic and break a piano trying to tune it and listen to old records on a Victrola (records are these things we listened to music and audio recordings on before tapes, which came before CDS. You can still find CDs for sale sometimes. It was much less convenient than an MP3 but the sound quality was amazing and it's all probably nostalgia for me.)
Carrie is a brat.
The kids take lots of baths because they are bored.
They mock the grandmother, which is dangerous because you never know where she might be lurking.
Cathy starts calling the twins "our twins" which is bizarre and sad. As they are the primary caregiver now, the twins are exhibiting learned helplessness at times with temper tantrums more suited to 3-year-old toddlers rather than 5-year-old children who should be in school,
Carrie will only wear ruffled lace panties, which I'm not sure is information we need, nor does it develop the character in any meaningful way.
We also get our first glimpse at the reality of living in a room with kids not long out of diapers. Carrie gets diarrhea from fruit, Cory has a temperamental bladder. Cory is frequently peeing in a blue vase and Cathy is washing out lacy ruffled panties. Gross.
They try to explain why they are imprisoned to the twins and it's just sad.
Halfway through the chapter Momma didn't show up on a Sunday until the evening. She came in dressed for sailing, tan, bragging about how she's made plans for the afternoon, though she was kind enough to cut them short so she could see her children for five minutes before dinner. Her brothers taught her to sail. Which is pretty contradictory to the original claims that nothing fun was allowed in the Foxworth Ancestral Home.
Cathy grows a tiny bit of a backbone and pushes back and asks why. Until Chris comes down and tells her to stop shouting at "our mother." He's such an ass. He kisses up to her a bit, complimenting her on her outfit and hugging her. Cathy shouts a bit, tells her she has to tell her father about them, that she wants to go sailing. Momma does the dramatic thing and sinks weakly into a chair.
And then she confesses that she hasn't been honest. Well, shut the front door, I did NOT see that coming.
The letter that was written before they moved to Foxworth had a note from the grandfather. The grandfather said that he was glad that Christopher the Elder was dead and the only good thing about the marriage was that it hadn't created any Devil's Issue. (WTF?) Mother Olivia made plans for the concealment of the children that Grandfather didn't read. Cathy compares Chris to their father in the middle of this.
Anyway, it takes over a page for mamma to come out and say that she plans on keeping the kids in the attic until Grandfather dies. Mother of the Year, might as well ship that right off to Foxworth.
Links to previous recaps
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