What's Mine and Yours

“Gee wedged himself between the grown-up bodies to kneel next to his daddy. He felt his mother lifting him away. He fought and kicked to stay close. She lost her grip on him, and he sank nearer to him, the one he loved.”

The death of Ray plays a big role in forming the man Gee/Nelson will become and introduces the theme of Shared Tragedy. It shows the devastation of a young boy losing the only father he ever knew, the only positive male role model he had in his childhood. This moment will come back to Gee in flashes when the parents protesting the transfer of east side children into Central High School use Gee’s own personal tragedy as an excuse to exclude him from the same aspirations Ray was fighting to provide. This moment is the foundation of everything Gee/Nelson will become: a man who struggles to face his own emotions and support his wife in grief.

“It had comforted her when the lawyer told her about the trouble in Robbie’s brain. It was why he needed the drugs, why he would disappear and get up to no good. It wasn’t that he had stopped loving her or the girls. It was like being sick, the lawyer had said, but it hadn’t made much difference to the judge.”

As Lacey May Ventura is introduced, her naivety is explored. Lacey May is a young mother with no work experience who finds herself struggling to support three children when her husband goes to prison. Her need to hold on to a reasonable explanation for Robbie developing a drug addiction is an example of her naivety. Lacey May has romantic feelings for Robbie during the whole novel despite marrying another man, and that is shown in her desperate need to believe that he is helpless against his addiction. This introduction also explains the way Lacey May responds to the transfer students at Central High School. Lacey May is still clinging to the ideas of a bright future Robbie planted in her head when he bought the house in the north part of the county, just as she continues to cling to the idea that his actions are not his fault.

“She texted him. I can’t go to the Sutton party alone. These people make me feel like I’m in high school again. He would know what she meant. It was like keeping a secret, like passing, like choosing between getting along and being clear about who she was.”

Noelle reaches out to her husband, Nelson, to ask for his support as she prepares to go to a party at the home of her homeowner’s association (HOA) president. Noelle compares the party to what she felt like in high school, and then expands on that by comparing that time to keeping secrets and passing (presenting as fully white). This touches on The Struggle to Understand One’s Identity Noelle has dealt with throughout her life. In this conversation, she foreshadows the fact that race plays a part in her identity struggle, as a Latina woman—with a racist white mother—who is married to a Black man.

“She knew well that sadness was a contagion. So was rage. She couldn’t allow him to see her swallowed up by grief.”

Jade struggles in the aftermath of Ray’s death, but chooses to hide her emotions from her son, Gee. By doing so, Jade contributes to Gee’s struggles as he grows up: the tension he doesn’t know how to control, the inability to share his emotions with the people he loves, and the habit of finding relief from his emotions in sex. At the same time, this moment illustrates the theme of Strong Women Fighting for Their Futures, as Jade hides her feelings because she wants to help Gee move past Ray’s death.

“She felt foolish for even taking Linette’s words to heart. She had always looked at Jade as if she had no right to be a mother—lots of women did that to her, especially when she was younger, carrying Gee around wherever she had to go. If she’d gotten an abortion, they’d have called her a murderer, but now they looked at her and Gee as if they were a waste of life.”

Jade shows a fundamental understanding of the way society looks at single mothers. She is aware that she would be looked down upon because of her economic status, her age, and her race no matter what she had done about her pregnancy with Gee. Although Jade is in nursing school and she had a man who cared deeply for her, society has little sympathy for women in her situation. Jade is a foil to Lacey May; both are Strong Women Fighting for Their Futures, but where Lacey May chose to lean on another man, Jade stands on her own two feet and is determined to make it on her own. This is both admirable and foreshadows difficulties for her son later in life.

“If there was something she could do for her son, it would be to never be indifferent to the course of his life. She would advise him. She would watch over him. It would be either her or no one, and he deserved more than that.”

Once again foreshadowing the future, Jade makes a promise to always be a part of Gee’s life. This will lead to Jade becoming overprotective, forcing Gee to go to Central High School and having a falling out with him when he chooses the school play over her desire for him to quit. This moment also gives insight into Jade as a mother. As someone who survived an indifferent mother and feels the eyes of society looking down on her, Jade responds by going too far in the opposite direction, pushing for Gee’s rights and justice in his name regardless of what Gee wants for himself. This leads to Gee walking out of her life, but it also allows Gee to live a life much different from his mother’s, as he does get many of the things Ray dreamed for him. It will also eventually bring Gee back to his mother in search of comfort.

“Here, she’d caught some of the neighbors looking a little funny at her Diane. While nobody said anything, Lacey May couldn’t help but notice. Noelle was the fairest, limber, big eyed, long haired. Margarita looked like her father: dark eyes and full lips, something alien about the way her face was put together. And Diane looked like neither of them with her high cheekbones and coiling hair, how brown she became in the summer. But Lacey May didn’t see her daughters that way; as far as she was concerned, they were all the same to her, hers. Colombia was just a place their father was from, like Ireland, or France. Everybody was from somewhere else. Even the Native Americans. And what did it matter? The earth used to be all one continent; she had heard it on a program.”

Noelle and Margarita both exemplify the theme of The Struggle to Understand One’s Identity. This observation by their mother, Lacey May, shows how Noelle and her sisters were raised by a woman who never did anything to help them connect to their Latina culture. This becomes a problem when Noelle enters high school and Lacey May comes out so strongly against the transfer of two hundred kids from the east side school. Lacey May expresses here that it doesn’t matter where Robbie is from, which, to her, is a form of acceptance; however, what she is actually doing is showing signs of racism by cutting off her daughters from a non-white culture she has no clear understanding of. Though she is condemning the neighbors who stare at her daughters, it is not because she is proud of their mixed heritage, but rather because she is angry that her own family is being treated as “other.” This reveals her lack of understanding of the importance that culture and acceptance play in the development of a child’s sense of identity.

“Maybe this was how she had looked at him every time she found him high, and he had lodged it away somewhere in his brain, because he recognized it now. It was her deepest feeling for him—he could see that. He wanted to say, It was just this once. He wanted to say he’d clean up his act. He wanted to say, I’ll get help. But it wouldn’t change the way she was looking at him. He could do nothing.”

Robbie’s addiction causes the girls to run off and get hurt, and for the first time, Robbie can see what his addiction has done to his marriage and his family. This moment is the one in which Lacey May realizes she cannot go back to her husband and she chooses to marry Hank. Not only does this moment change Lacey May and Robbie’s lives, but it changes things for the girls as well, taking away their only connection to their Latina heritage and leaving them with a mother who has good intentions, but doesn’t execute those intentions in a beneficial way. Once again, Coster illustrates the human failings of the parents in this novel and lays the groundwork for the struggles their children will face in overcoming their parents’ legacy.

“The papers said the initiative to merge the city and county school systems was popular. […] But it was hard for Gee to believe people were coming to this meeting in droves all because they wanted to shake hands. There had been talk of a band of white parents who planned to protest. He had no particular fear of white people; Gee sorted them into good and bad, safe and not safe, the way he did with everyone else. But he knew even good people could turn, let alone good white people.”

The initiative to merge the city and county schools is the catalyst that brings the Ventura/Gibbs family and the Gilbert family together. Robbie and Ray once planned to introduce their families and have barbeques together, but all that changed with Ray’s death and Robbie’s drug addiction. The situation is rife with a tragic sort of irony: Robbie moved his family to the north part of the county in order to provide a better life for his kids—and encouraged Ray to do the same. Now his daughter, Noelle, is attending the schools he’d wanted her to attend, but his wife is protesting the transfer of Ray’s son, and students like him, to that same school. At the same time, this meeting pushes Gee into feeling unsafe, foreshadowing the moment he will be violently attacked by three students in the hallway of his new school. 

“The trouble was in his body. It wasn’t only his receding gums, the blood in the sink when he brushed his teeth. Sometimes, he found himself standing with his shoulders up by his ears, or his fists clenched, or he’d be lying in bed listening to music and he’d notice suddenly that his legs were as rigid as planks of wood. He tried to help himself by discharging the ugly feelings. He did it in the bathroom at school, under a blanket in front of the TV, here in his room. The trouble always came back, but it still helped to snuff it out for a while.”

Gee struggles with expressing his emotion and that is seen in the tension that builds in his body. Gee never learned how to deal with his grief as a child, or how to process the violence he witnessed in Ray’s death. Gee’s body suffers the repercussions and the only way he knows how to make it better is through sex. This foreshadows the way he cheats on Noelle to deal with the emotions and secrets he feels he has to keep from her.

“Maybe he was trying to beat the universe to the punch. He’d ruin his own life before it got snatched away from him. But even to see his motivations that way was too generous. Maybe he merely wanted to punish her. Noelle had broken their first, most vital promise: to live well, to never look back. To go beyond what should have been possible for either of them. She had let herself sink, and he couldn’t follow her down.”

Nelson keeps his emotions hidden, pushed down so that he doesn’t have to deal with them. To have a wife who not only shows emotions, but who is experiencing the grief of a miscarriage, is a difficult thing for him to deal with. He turns to sex to cope, having an affair with a junior publicist while Noelle remains at home working her way through grief alone. This insight into Nelson—into the love he feels for Noelle, but also how he relies on her to keep him steady and how he feels betrayed by her emotional reaction to the miscarriage—is one way in which Coster hints to the reader that Nelson is more than he appears to be. In a play on The Struggle to Understand One’s Identity, Coster hides Nelson’s identity from the reader, but leaves hints throughout the novel that Nelson and Gee are one and the same. This quote gives some of the biggest hints, not only regarding the depth of his relationship with Noelle, but about his driving need to keep his true self locked up, even from her.

“The trouble was her chin. It was broad, and it made her face resemble a square. She had inherited the shape from Robbie, and she’d have given anything for her face to come to a fine point like a heart (Diane), or a neat horizontal ridge like a diamond (her mother; Noelle). But her face got her work, and she couldn’t complain.”

This is the first of several comparisons Margarita makes between herself and Robbie, the parent she feels she most closely resembles. Margarita did not have Robbie in her life most of her childhood. For that reason, Margarita and her sisters missed out on not only the typical support a father offers his family, but they on exposure to their Latin heritage as well. In addition, Margarita’s resemblance to Robbie includes experiences with addiction, something Coster hints at throughout the novel but never fully explores. All of the Ventura girls struggle with their identity; For Margarita, this appears in her resemblance to the father she adores but knows is flawed.

“Diane had gotten used to no longer being seen as one of the Ventura girls, a small figure in the tableau of her sisters. She had a life in town outside of them, even outside of Lacey May, Robbie and all his trouble.”

The Struggle to Understand One’s Identity is a major theme of the novel, and it is touched on here from Diane’s point of view. As the youngest child in the Ventura family, Diane was often the peacemaker, but she was also often overlooked. As an adult, she is the last of the three daughters to still live in the town where they grew up. Diane clearly holds onto her childhood connections to her biological family, but she has found her own identity outside of them as an adult. Unfortunately, Diane feels unable to share this identity with her family.

“Within a few minutes, the commotion subsided, and the girls assumed their places: Noelle slumped into her usual chair in the corner; Margarita climbed onto the windowsill and tapped at her phone. Diane stayed beside Lacey May and fussed with the hospital bed, cranking it so she could sit upright.”

The way the girls settle in Lacey May’s hospital room touches again on the theme of identity. Diane is the peacemaker and caregiver. Noelle is a reluctant visitor, still the rebel she was as a teenager. Margarita is present, but not present, using her phone and social media as a buffer between her and her family. The way they sit, and the way they interact with each other and their mother, reflects the way they see themselves within the family. Even Lacey May’s position in the room as the patient puts her in the center of attention, the star, the same as she often was when her children were younger.

“He kept hearing Adira crying, telling him he knew nothing. He saw her tears spilling freely, her wet cheeks, and destroyed hair. Without wanting to, he found himself defending the Central Students in his mind. It’s not most of them, he thought. There’s always one. And then, involuntarily, before he could stop himself: One is all it takes.”

After running into his friend Adira in the aftermath of an attack by a couple of white girls, Gee finds himself struggling with the situation. Gee doesn’t like conflict; he doesn’t like strong emotion. For Gee, defending the students who attacked Adira is the best way to avoid the strong emotion that comes with such an attack. However, with Gee’s trauma and his experiences as a Black man in a predominately white city, he also understands that it doesn’t take a lot for violence to touch a person’s world, especially a person of color. This moment is a small example of Shared Tragedy, and also foreshadows the day when violence touches Gee’s world.

“She knew Ruth would understand, not only because she was a nurse, but because she’d chosen to be a free woman: to live alone, to raise her boy, to have a career. Even if they weren’t kin, Noelle was struck with pride every time Ruth rose from one of their visits to say, I’ve got to get to my shift.”

Noelle’s future is foreshadowed in her admiration of Ruth. As a teen, Noelle admired Ruth because she was different from Lacey May. Noelle was a strong-willed, independent teenager and part of that was because of the role model she had in Ruth. When Coster introduces Noelle as an adult, she is about as far from that strong-willed, independent teenager as she could get, having become a broken woman who felt little passion for anything. Yet Noelle turns her life around after her divorce from Nelson. At the end of the novel, she ends up just like Ruth: single and raising her child on her own.

“When Robbie first started disappearing, they worried he’d been hurt, but he always turned up afterward. It became the pattern, a normal thing, but Margarita never lost sight of the fact that one time the disappearance would be for good. She didn’t think of it much—what was the point? When he died, he died, just like any of them, but she wondered about it now.”

Life with a parent who has an addiction can cause a child to consider things that are adult in nature. Margarita shows here that the idea of Robbie’s death has been hanging over her since she was a young girl. Living with adult problems as a child can impact a person’s perception of the people around them as well as their own identity. In this case, Margarita is someone who attempts to keep an optimistic outlook by ignoring unpleasant realities. Being home forces Margarita to confront those realities, and that changes her perception of herself, foreshadowing a shift that proves to be helpful for her future.

“No one else knew what it was to see a man you loved so reduced, to be in the presence of the one you’d chosen and still to feel him as an absence, a missing thing, although you had him close. The last thing he needed was to be punished, no matter what Hank or Ruth said. Every time she punished him, she punished herself, the girls. Hadn’t the years taught her that?”

Lacey May’s connection to Robbie has never broken, even when he sold their house out from under her. What Lacey May expresses here is classic enabling behavior, but it’s also an expression of the deep affection she still feels for her first husband. This moment gives insight to the reason why Lacey May never completely cut ties with Robbie despite the trouble his behavior brought to her family over the years.

“Noelle had left, then Margarita, and Diane, and he had missed every window to win her back. It was his own fault. He would wish he had never started, but it would be pointless. Prayers couldn’t undo time, undo who you were.”

Touching on the theme of Shared Tragedy, Robbie describes his attempts to win back Lacey May and recover from his addiction, which began when Ray Gilbert was senselessly shot and killed. Robbie’s addiction doesn’t just impact him; it has changed the entire dynamic of his family and taken him away from them. This quote explores the struggle people with addiction often go through. Robbie is aware he has hurt his loved ones, but he feels powerless to change it, and his love for his family is not strong enough to overpower his addiction. This quote also foreshadows a moment in which he will confess his lingering love to Lacey Mayr, and the reason why she will once again reject him.

“He knew lots of people who had been beaten up before, but he’d never been one of them. He had survived it; it was over; he was on the other side of it now. What had stuck with him was the feeling of being overpowered. He had been feeble, trapped. There was nothing he could do but give in.”

Gee was a child when violence entered his world, and a teenager when it came back for him. The way in which he describes having known people who were beaten illustrates that violence is not an uncommon thing in his life despite the fact that this is the first time it has happened to him. This moment is a defining moment in Gee’s life, one that will stick with him as he grows into adulthood. This occurs as a direct result of Gee opening up to Noelle, and it explains why he cannot share his true self with her when they are adults. He doesn’t want to feel feeble or trapped again. Every attempt Gee made to show emotion was punished or rejected in some way, so as an adult, Nelson fails to connect with Noelle when she needs him the most.

“It was too easy for people to see their interests and disinterests as pure, functions of their desires and personalities. They just didn’t like Nelson much; they just preferred that other candidate for mayor; something about that doctor just didn’t sit right with them. She might not have believed it herself, if not for Nelson. Maybe that was proof she really was white—she had to love him in order to see.”

Noelle has some distance from her family and Nelson now, and she can look back on the behavior of her family and others around her and see the subtle racism they display. Noelle understands that it is sometimes an unconscious thing that comes from a social construct, and she admits that even she didn’t recognize her own internalized prejudices until she was with Nelson. Now, she recognizes that people behave with prejudice all the time without realizing it, and that these small acts of racism are just as harmful as the bigger, more obvious acts of discrimination.

“She used her phone to play a bolero on the speakers. It was all she listened to these days, although she couldn’t say why. Maybe it was being divorced, wanting cliches about love lost. Maybe it was about wanting more Spanish as she prepared to adopt a baby. Or maybe the music brought romance into her life without any of its accoutrements: a husband, a shared bank account, the problems of pleasing a man.”

In the aftermath of her divorce, Noelle is a different person. Touching on the theme of identity, Noelle has gone from a strong-willed teenager to a broken, unhappy wife to a woman who knows exactly what she wants. Not only has she accepted the relationship she has with her family and friends, but she is planning to go forward with having a child on her own. Noelle has also embraced her Latin heritage in a way she never really had the opportunity to do as a child. This quote not only sums up her feelings on her marriage, but it offers a sense of optimism and hope that was missing from her earlier moments.

“I should have told you about how losing the pregnancy affected me. I thought mostly about you, my duty to snap you out of it, to get us back to our life. […] It was hard to watch you lose your way. You were the one who kept us steady, who held it all together. Your strength was a fact of my life, and I passed it off as my own. I am sorry about that.”

Here, Noelle reads an email from Nelson, who returned to Europe after the divorce. Nelson finally tells her how he felt before their marriage fell apart, an example of his character growth—something that only occurred when Noelle seized control over her own future. Noelle notes that she’d wished for this very sort of openness from him in the past. Nelson’s email explores the theme of Shared Tragedy in reflecting upon the loss of their unborn child, and it illustrates the struggle of attempting to understand another person, even a loved one.