Character Analysis
A Cover For Every Pot
Let's just get this out of the way: We heart Clara. She's totally smart, has an awesome sense of humor, is a fantastic conversationalist… and, oh, yeah: She's totally not a dog. She just was born in the wrong decade—she doesn't have the bodacious curves that were popular in the 1950s, but she's super pretty.
Unfortunately, she just doesn't get any male attention:
CLARA: Well, the last time I was up here [...] I sat there for an hour and a half, without moving a muscle. Now and then, some fellow would sort of walk up to me and then change his mind. I'll never forget just sitting there for an hour and a half with my hands in my lap. Then I began to cry, and I had to get up and go home.
Ouch, right? But this kind of rejection ultimately makes her the perfect companion for our Marty—she, like Marty, has made lemonade out of rejection lemons, and is a good-hearted sweetie-pie.
In a lot of ways, Clara is Marty's female mirror, another dutiful child and employee who's soon to be on the "wrong" side of her twenties without a family to call her own. But just the same, Clara is not—as Teresa is so quick to point out—"a nice Italian girl," and her self-possession and independence intrude on Marty's values. Not that that stops him from having fun, or falling in love.
Other than Mother
When Clara meets Marty's ma, things could go better: They end up arguing about the role of women in family.
"I don't think a mother should depend so much upon her children for her rewards in life," Clara says candidly when Teresa complains about how sad it is that her sister has to move from her family home. We wonder: Is Clara single and childless on purpose? She's NYU-educated and pursuing her career, after all. It's hardly as if her life is empty. Clara is the modern version of a woman, a sign of what's happening outside of the little corner of Marty's Bronx neighborhood.
Make New Friends. Or Don't.
That career of Clara's seems to be going well, and she's just been offered a Department Head position in Port Chester, just outside of the city. While she admits it's a rare opportunity—and one she'd never get in the New York City Public Schools, where men are happy to take up such gigs—she's still unsure about leaving her parental home for a town where she doesn't know anyone at all.
Clara confesses to Marty that she doesn't make friends very easily, but Marty, in the flush of new love (or something like it) insists that can't be true. Without anyone else to agree or disagree, we have to rely on our own instincts, but if her less-than-smooth conversation with Teresa is any sign, we think Clara might know what she's talking about.
What a Feeling
Perhaps the strangest, most credibly incoherent moment of Clara and Marty's love affair comes when Clara is trying to explain why she thinks Marty should buy the butcher shop. She says that he seems like a good man, and a good butcher:
CLARA: I have a feeling about you like sometimes a kid comes in to see me for one reason or another. And some of these kids, Marty, in my classes, they have so much warmth in them, so much capacity. And that's the feeling I get about you.
It doesn't make much direct sense, but we get what she's saying: She has intuition. She gets a good vibe from Marty.
There's a bit of nurturing in this, as she's encouraging Marty like he's her student. But there's something else, too, in this warm abstraction. And isn't that kind of feeling the way love begins?
Clara Snyder's Timeline