Something Better

     Since going to the mission school, Aloma always looks to the next intended stages of her life that supposedly would be better than her current state. Her education provides her the environment to foster the ideas of a better life, creating expectations her life does not attain. These expectations and goals about finding a man and her lifestyle leads to unhappiness and frustration in her life after the mission school.

     While in school, Aloma read cartooned magazines, and “wondered what it meant to uncover a man’s feet” and “sleep in his bed” (13). These thoughts carried and were present when she meets Orren because he was the first person she had a relationship with. However, after being with Orren for a bit and even living with him she wonders “how it would feel to have someone else sleep beside her, or be inside her even, and if that would speak to her happiness, which she felt lay unborn within her” (127). From her expectations of what she wanted in a relationship, she picked the first guy that showed interest in her and let her escape her life by offering her to live with him. It wasn’t until she moved in with Orren that she realizes there could be a better guy out there.

     To move in with Orren, Aloma leaves her job as a piano instructor at the school. When she was a student at the mission school, she gets the opportunity to learn piano from Mrs. Boyle because she already took all the piano classes offered at her school. From this she learns about the “real world” that “promised such impossible pleasures, and all her pleasures so far had been such small lusterless things, that she found she could not imagine it all…so she counted the nowhere days of her growing up and she waited” (15). From school, an idea of going to college and joining a music program is implanted in Aloma’s mind, and that becomes her next goal towards her future career. Even when living with Orren, she thinks about “how one day soon she would audition for a music program and then Orren would be ready to go with her, or maybe not” (132). However, when she realizes that from helping Orren harvest, “with all the cutting and spearing she had completely forgotten to play piano” she becomes “disconcerted” because “it all seemed backward” (166). She was helping achieve Orren’s dreams and goals, even though her focus should be on her own goal to find a way to join a music program. While she still has some hope of moving on to the next, better stage of her life, she also reluctantly knows that what she expects might not happen.

     Since she was in school, Aloma believes “she would leave and find a riseless place where nothing impeded the progress of the sun from the moment it rose in the east until it died out easily, dismissed into the west” (13). This expectation sets up her disappointment when she moves in with Orren because it’s not a house, town, or environment she planned on living in. Even after a couple months, she feels “that no matter where she found herself, she would be nowhere” (154). She only wants to think of the town as temporary, a pit stop before moving closer to her goals. That’s why she felt a bit of panic as she realizes that “she wanted to escape all of it and mostly herself, a self she found to be increasingly shifty and desirous in ways that frightened her when she looked too closely” (166). These “shifty and desirous” characteristics, however, were developed during her time at the mission school along with her personality, goals, and expectations that overall made her the unhappy and dissatisfied person she is through most of the book.