26 pages • 52 minutes read
The Leap
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Themes
The Unlikely Miracle of Life
The narrator sees her existence as owing to three dramatic and unlikely moments: her mother saving her own life, her parents meeting in the hospital, and her mother saving her from the house fire. The first and third of these actions are dramatic and emphasize the various contingencies that facilitated Anna’s or the narrator’s survival. The narrator notes, for example, that the gutter Anna leaped toward to reach the narrator’s room was “new […] put in that year” (Paragraph 24). If the gutter had instead been missing or too old to bear Anna’s weight, the narrator might have died in the fire.
The second event the narrator discusses—her parents’ meeting—is much quieter. Yet its inclusion in the story suggests that it is no less miraculous than the narrow escapes of the lightning strike and house fire; if the circumstances that allow a person to survive are sometimes unlikely, they are no more so than the circumstances that allow that person to live at all. The presence of the narrator’s stillborn sister is a reminder of the many people who might have come into existence instead of the narrator, but it is in the shortest paragraph in the story, just three sentences, that Erdrich most clearly develops the theme: “I owe my existence, the second time then, to the two of them and the hospital that brought them together. That is the debt we take for granted since none of us asks for life. It is only once we have it that we hang on so dearly” (Paragraph 17). The narrator is interested in interrogating this “debt we take for granted,” examining what it cost for her parents to meet. Unlike the moments of dramatic rescue and self-rescue, the narrator cannot even pinpoint a moment in her parent’s courtship for which to thank her mother—and notably just her mother.
“The Leap,” then, is essentially a tale of matrilineal heroism. Even the leap from the burning bedroom, accomplished with the narrator “curled […] against her [Anna’s] stomach” is a metaphor for being brought into the world (Paragraph 25)—for being born. If the hair’s breadth escapes down guy wires and the smiling apparition of Anna hanging from the gutters of a burning house are read as symbolic of more ordinary acts of self-preservation and maternal heroism, then the real miracle explored in “The Leap” is the leap of falling in love. It is through making such connections that the next generation enters this world.
The Compromises From Which People Make Their Lives
The narrator in “The Leap” sees her parents as having made disappointing compromises in order to create the lives they have (and to create her). She is attracted to the idea of her not-father, Harry Avalon, in part because he makes no such compromise, dying young and dressed in sequins. Yet the story ultimately refuses the sharp distinction between Anna’s younger circus days and her later identity as a mother, caregiver, and person needing care.
Anna enters the second phase of her life when she “exchange[s] […] one form of flying for another” (Paragraph 15): the trapeze for the books her second husband has taught her to read. This quotation can also be read as referencing the exchange of Anna’s tales of world travels for her reading lessons. In dreams of travel, the narrator’s father finds his flight even as he forgoes the possibility of specialized medicine or life in a city, moving instead to a farm he “[doesn’t] care much for” and becoming a country doctor (Paragraph 16).
The marriage thus begins with sacrifice from both partners, but despite the narrator’s professed bewilderment at these choices—“It still seems odd to me, when they could have gone anywhere else, that they chose to stay in the town where the disaster had occurred and which my father in the first place had found so constricting” (Paragraph 16)—her parents are happy. Her mother loves “the sagging farmhouse with its scrap of what was left of a vast acreage of woods and hidden hay fields that stretched to the game park” (Paragraph 16). She is “never […] without a book” until blindness takes her ability to read (Paragraph 15), and even then, she has her husband to read to her for a time. The narrator’s father has Anna, who, with her tales of adventures, is for him a quiet form of flying.
Furthermore, when Anna tears herself from her respectable doctor’s wife’s dress and stands before the crowd in her pearls and stockings, she becomes briefly once more a Flying Avalon, striking an optimistic final note and suggesting her integrated identity. Her graceful movements in blindness are similarly framed with reference to her past; she is “one with the constant dark now, just as the air was her home” during her circus days (Paragraph 6). Though the narrator is drawn to the sequins and stripes of Harry and the big top, Anna’s life speaks to the possibilities of gracefully embodying all of life’s phases.
The Difficulty of Knowing the Past Through Story
“The Leap” explores the narrator’s family history in part to illuminate the difficulties of knowing the past. Rather than allowing the reader to settle in and believe the narrative, the narrator constantly shows herself to be reconstructing, speculating, guessing, and even sometimes skewing the past around her own interests and insecurities.
The narrator makes clear that telling the story of her mother’s past is an act of archival reconstruction: “It is from those old newspapers, now historical records, that I get my information. Not from my mother, Anna of the Flying Avalons, nor from any of her in-laws, nor certainly from the other half of her particular act” (Paragraph 3). The eyewitnesses are dead or uninterested in talking, so she must rely upon what is clearly extensive research in “Boston and New York tabloids” and other “breathless” coverage (Paragraph 3). The sources’ status as tabloids and their lurid interest in the death of Harry imply that they are not wholly credible, adding a further layer of uncertainty to the narrator’s retelling.
The tentativeness of the reconstruction stays on display throughout her account of the events: Harry “must certainly have seen” the “blue radiance” of the lightning through his blindfold; his last thought was “perhaps just a prickle of surprise at his empty hands” (Paragraph 8). She herself is playing Harry’s death for all it is worth, vividly inhabiting the final moments that he had no chance to share with anyone. Her speculative tone extends to the events at the hospital, where the narrator concludes that Anna “must have hemorrhaged” (Paragraph 10), and to the house fire, the causes of which remain ambiguous. It was “probably from standing ash” (Paragraph 18), though it might also have been from creosote in the chimney. She suggests that her absent-minded father might have caused it by forgetfully emptying ashes from a stove into a cardboard box, vividly imagining the possibility until blame plausibly attaches to him.
The narrator seems most aware of her own failings as a storyteller when she discusses her dead half-sister. She admits, “She was a girl, but I rarely thought of her as a sister or even as a separate person really. I suppose you could call it the egocentrism of a child, of all young children, but I considered her a less finished version of myself” (Paragraph 11). Here the narrator sees the faults of her own subjective position, the “egocentrism of a child,” which refuses to acknowledge the sister’s independent existence. The charge of egocentrism could be leveled at the rest of her narration as well, which figures two events prior to her birth as her mother moving to ensure her existence, subsuming her mother’s life story into a mere prelude to the narrator’s.
If narratives are untrustworthy, however, the body can hold truths. Anna’s body, the “catlike precision of her movements in old age” (Paragraph 2), testifies to the truth of her past as a trapeze artist, even as she does not speak about it, hoard memorabilia, or even retain any “flair.” The narrator knows to trust her mother’s muscle “memory of double somersaults and heart-stopping catches” because of the way her own body recalls the night of the house fire (Paragraph 2). Sounds or scents can transport her back to that night. The emphasis on mother and daughter’s physicality in the rescue scene—the “brush of [Anna’s] lips” and the sound of her heart (Paragraph 25)—therefore provide a tacit answer to the narrator’s anxiety about whether she, the second child, and this small New Hampshire town are enough for her mother.
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By Louise Erdrich
