Looksmart’s Mother Character Analysis

“If I remember myself correctly,” he says, “I would have wanted to eat that fish.”

“But you were a gentle child, always wanting to please.”

He lets out a sound like laughter and turns away.

“Don’t you mean always wanting to please you?”

“Of course, you would have forgotten what a car right out of the box looks like, or smells like. The freshly stitched leather, the air of wealth that breathes out of the air conditioner. My car is like a racehorse—skittish, responding to my every thought, my lightest touch. But you wouldn’t know anything about that. Not these days. What with that wreck of yours still sitting there under its tin roof.”

Like a fat toad, he wants to add, at the heart of his life.

For the past six months, he has had a lover: a white woman with a daughter who attends the same school as his girls. She is wealthy and lives alone on a hill that overlooks the old city centre of Johannesburg. Her house is made almost entirely of pale blue glass, and yet she remains to him opaque. They are dipping their toes into the forbidden, as one might try out a new drug.

He doesn’t even particularly like his lover—as a person, that is—but at the time he didn’t have the right words to repel her. Nor did he have the inclination, in spite of not quite liking her: he was too curious, even flattered, to turn away.

Nothing has ever come back to her. Everything around her—and much that has been happening in the country at large has only confirmed this—has only ever held evidence of loss or decay.

But recently she has also been observing all the new buildings starting up out of the earth, and the green crops of weeds appearing in the most improbable places. A few days ago, when she and Bheki were driving into the village, she noticed a cloud of yellow butterflies hovering around the weeds and spilling over across their path. Bheki drove on through them as though they weren’t there, and neither of them said a word about it, but in that instant Patricia saw that there was an altogether different way of viewing the world: as an inexhaustible source of renewal and growth.

“If I remember myself correctly,” he says, “I would have wanted to eat that fish.”

“But you were a gentle child, always wanting to please.”

He lets out a sound like laughter and turns away.

“Don’t you mean always wanting to please you?”

“Of course, you would have forgotten what a car right out of the box looks like, or smells like. The freshly stitched leather, the air of wealth that breathes out of the air conditioner. My car is like a racehorse—skittish, responding to my every thought, my lightest touch. But you wouldn’t know anything about that. Not these days. What with that wreck of yours still sitting there under its tin roof.”

Like a fat toad, he wants to add, at the heart of his life.

For the past six months, he has had a lover: a white woman with a daughter who attends the same school as his girls. She is wealthy and lives alone on a hill that overlooks the old city centre of Johannesburg. Her house is made almost entirely of pale blue glass, and yet she remains to him opaque. They are dipping their toes into the forbidden, as one might try out a new drug.

He doesn’t even particularly like his lover—as a person, that is—but at the time he didn’t have the right words to repel her. Nor did he have the inclination, in spite of not quite liking her: he was too curious, even flattered, to turn away.

Nothing has ever come back to her. Everything around her—and much that has been happening in the country at large has only confirmed this—has only ever held evidence of loss or decay.

But recently she has also been observing all the new buildings starting up out of the earth, and the green crops of weeds appearing in the most improbable places. A few days ago, when she and Bheki were driving into the village, she noticed a cloud of yellow butterflies hovering around the weeds and spilling over across their path. Bheki drove on through them as though they weren’t there, and neither of them said a word about it, but in that instant Patricia saw that there was an altogether different way of viewing the world: as an inexhaustible source of renewal and growth.