How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
"Am I not what you wanted? Do you have to correct my brain, too?" (5.32)
Esther recalls Deborah saying these words with "bitterness" even at just ten years old; it was after the Blaus made her go to see a child psychologist. Deborah's problems have already basically formed at this point.
Quote #8
The Families. "Make him well," they say. "Make her well," they say, "with good table manners and a future according to our agreed-on dream!" She sighed. Even the intelligent, the honest, the good, find it too easy to sell their children. Deceits and vanities and arrogances that they would never stoop to for themselves they perpetrate on their children." (14.17)
After Jacob Blau insists on seeing Deborah, even after Dr. Fried has advised against it, Dr. Fried muses that parents live through their children and put a lot of pressure on them to live out their own fantasies and unfulfilled dreams. They sometimes want them to take unrealistic life paths they'd never expect themselves to take.
Quote #9
In the perfumed and carefully tended little girl, a tumor was growing. The first symptom was an embarrassing incontinence, and how righteously wrathful the rigid governess was! But the laziness could not be cured by shaming or whipping or threats. (5.19)
Deb's parents didn't realize at first that she had a tumor in her urethra. She was five and started having accidents. The nanny in charge of Deborah would yell at her and beat her for having them; it was just assumed that Deborah was being bad. Esther explains this to Dr. Fried and cries out that she didn't know what was wrong with Deborah. But the damage had already been done: Deborah has believed from that point on that something is terribly wrong with her at the deepest level.