Set against the backdrop of the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak, a young woman, Gravely Eaton, is stuck working at the family funeral home with a father she hates. The world is dying around her, but there seems no escape from her boring life with no friend...
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I spent the rest of that day moping around my apartment trying to make sense of the previous 24-hours. I couldn't. I looked for any type of silver lining for what happened at the gym. It occurred to me that while dad had only been short- tempered with me, maybe he really hadn't lapsed back to his old self. Try as I might, that feeling of living a nightmare hung over me. I fought the urge to pour myself a drink. If I needed anything positive to lean on, it was the fact that I hadn't had a drop of booze in two weeks. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my father was the root cause of my drinking issues. Since I had the excuse for my depression, I knew what the solution was. I poured myself that drink, and then another. I drank until I fell asleep on my sofa.
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Evening came and there was no sign of him. I collected my washables, sheets and towels mostly, and entered the laundry room. It was something to do. Over the previous weeks, father had been wonderful about taking on that chore, but it was back to the grind for me, despite a crushing hangover. I started a load and was about to go back to my living room when I spotted father's book on the counter. "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus". I recalled writing a book report on the novel for a grade-ten literature class. That's why the novel was in the building. Father had no doubt found it on my bookshelf. Thinking back, I managed a passing grade on the report but, as Jessop had pointed out so directly, my academic credentials were merely adequate, even in high school.
The novel was written by English author Mary Shelley in the early 1800s. Her book, which fascinated father for days, is very different from the monster movies produced by Hollywood. It's true that the Shelley tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, the young scientist who gave life to a man-like creature from raw materials pilfered from dissection rooms and slaughter-houses, but the techniques used in the movies were dreamed up by studio writers, not Shelley. In her book, she wasn't explicit about the science behind animating her monster. And Shelley's grotesque wretch was so much more talkative and sympathetic than the Karloff monster came across on celluloid.
Somehow the sound of the washing machine proved to be company for me so I stayed there. I sat down on the hard laundry room chair and leafed through the book. The words on the pages and the images they conjured seemed new to me, though I had read them only five or six years prior. When I had read the novel for my book report, that was school work, just an assignment from a teacher – something you had to do. Now I was reading the information from a different view, as an adult, a working girl frame of mind. You have different perceptions when you're living life in the real world. Often, you look for meanings or guideposts you can use to keep you on course or explain the manias of the day. More and more, I was searching for things to make sense of my life.
