While this piece is really good, and grew on me, I didn’t really like it. It was good writing – really vulnerable when she was talking about the assault, but overall it wasn’t so good. We talked about this in class, but I felt like the ending was rushed. She spent so much time talking about the pool, and her neighbors – pretty privileged tone that I didn’t really care for – then the assault hit us. Which played nicely in with the idea of assault and surprise. But just as quickly as she became vulnerable, she went back to how great locker rooms were. It was a bit lack-luster.
And as I mentioned in class, the company she kept was bizarre. Even in the best writing – the assault scene – there were a lot of things that didn’t really make sense: like why the man could just hang out in the locker room without anyone going after him, or why the men were just standing outside of the locker room when they heard screams on the other side of the door. It seems the advice all mover-goers give to the person about to make the dumb mistake of going into the haunted house, or the abandoned hospital was taken but out of context.
All this isn’t to say that there weren’t some beautiful sentences. For example, when she is describing the scene where she is about to get beaten by the man in the locker room she states:
“He kept on coming, his face suffused with hatred, the eyes vacant—I have never seen such blankness before or since—looming over mine.”
The fear, and the visceral acuity of the scenario is perfectly described in just this one sentence.
