Walking the Wall

Throughout this
book, the author, as well as the main character, draw on an image of
the sea, of mermaids, of being swallowed by the sea in a symbolic
baptism, she had to be submerged in order to come back up transformed.
What was interesting is that most of the time the “baptism” symbol ties
the person being submerged to something…for example, the Christian
baptism ties the persons to Christ (death, burial, resurrection), in
the book, Jessie’s mother is tied to her three friends in an impromptu
ceremony the three perform while standing in the ocean. Jessie is
struck by the memory and notes, “I’d never done any of those things my
mother had done. Never danced on a beach. Never made a bonfire. Never
waded into the ocean at night with laughing women and tied my life to
theirs” (91).  She had closed herself off from those sorts of deep
connections, further in the book, Thomas understands this need to not
be closed off, “When he swam nude, he felt he was venturing out onto an
exultant edge. Spiritual people had the habit of closing themselves
off, numbing themselves down. He felt strongly about it–people needed
to swim naked. Some more than others” (117). When Jessie begins to let
go and allows herself to swim naked, the experience was “exhilarating,
as if my body were emphatically awake and singing after a long silence”
(219). In the end, she finishes her reawakening from her numbness in a
ceremony similar to her mother and friends, but it was different in
that the connection she needed to feel was with herself, “I wanted to
tie a knot that would go on forever. But not with anyone else. With
myself” (318), which tied all the way back to the last paragraph of the
prologue, “Yes,
here I am returning, the woman who bore herself to the bottom and back.
Who wanted to swim like dolphins, leaping waves and diving. Who wanted
only to belong to herself” (3). She had come to find out that it was after belonging to herself that she was best able to belong to other people.