Sexuality Theme Analysis

“You see,” he said, cutting off a slice of the stiff, yellow fiber, “eating cane is like living life. You gotta know when to stop chewing—when to stop trying to wrench every last bit of sweetness out of a wedge—or you find yourself with a jawful of coarse straw that irritates your gums and the roof of your mouth.”

[…]

“Here,” he said, holding out a piece of the cane wedge of her, “try it the way I told you.”

And she did.

“Ya know, ya can’t keep him runnin’ away from things that hurt him. Sometimes, you just gotta stay there and teach him how to go through the bad and good of whatever comes.”

“You sure it’s Basil who don’t want to sleep alone?”

The gentle pity in the faded blue eyes robbed Mattie of the angry accusations she wanted to fling at the old woman for making her feel ashamed. Shame for what? For loving her son, wanting to protect him from his invisible phantoms that lay crouching in the dark? No, those pitying eyes had slid into her unconscious like a blue laser and exposed secrets that Mattie had buried from her own self.

“About throwing away temptation to preserve the soul. That was a mighty fine point.”

Now it crouched there in the thin predawn light, like a pulsating mouth awaiting her arrival. She shook her head sharply to rid herself of the illusion, but an uncanny fear gripped her, and her legs felt like lead. If I walk into this street, she thought, I’ll never come back. I’ll never get out.

I’ll be damned, the young woman thought, feeling her whole face tingle. Daddy’s into feet! And she looked at the blushing woman on her couch and suddenly realized that her mother had trod through the same universe that she herself was now traveling.

He silently turned from the anger that his seeming unreasonableness fixed on his wife’s face, because there were no words for the shudder that went through his mind at the memory of the dead brown plastic resting on his daughter’s protruding breasts.

[S]he turned and firmly folded her evening like gold and lavender gauze deep within the creases of her dreams, and let her clothes drop to the floor.

“The Good Book says them things is an abomination against the Lord. We shouldn’t be havin’ that here on Brewster and the association should do something about it.”

“My Bible also says in First Peter not to be a busybody in other people’s matters, Sophie. And the way I see it, if they ain’t bothering what goes on in my place, why should I bother ‘bout what goes on in theirs?”

“They love each other like you’d love a man or a man would love you—I guess.”

“But I’ve loved some women deeper than I ever loved any man,” Mattie was pondering. “And there been some women who loved me more and did more for me than any man ever did.”

So Lorraine found herself, on her knees, surrounded by the most dangerous species in existence—human males with an erection to validate in a world that was only six feet wide.

“Oh, I don’t know, one of those crazy things that get all mixed up in your head. Something about that wall and Ben. And there was a woman who was supposed to be me, I guess. She didn’t look exactly like me, but inside I felt it was me. You know how silly dreams are.”

“Woman, you still in bed? Don’t you know what day it is? We’re gonna have a party.”