![]() The narrator explains that she “owe her existence three times” (Paragraph 3). A “whiff of smoke” can cause the narrator to remember the night she was in a house fire in this very home (Paragraph 2). However, she knows her mother’s body remembers her history because the narrator’s own body holds memories. The narrator says that she “tend to forget the Flying Avalons” since her mother has kept no objects from that part of her past (Paragraph 2). ![]() Nevertheless, the mother, Anna, still moves with grace and “catlike precision”-the result of her history as a performer. The mother’s trapeze days ended in the late 1940s, after “the war,” but by the narrative present, the narrator’s mother is elderly and blind due to cataracts. It is set in the small New Hampshire town that is the site of both the narrator’s childhood and the death of the mother’s trapeze partner. The story opens with the assertion, “My mother is the surviving half of a blindfold trapeze act” (Paragraph 1). This guide refers to the Harper’s edition of the story. ![]()
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