Manhattan Beach

Since childhood, Anna has traveled between the masculine world of her father and the feminine, domestic world of her mother and sister. She accompanies Eddie on his expeditions, becoming an accomplice of sorts, instrumental to his gaining preferment with superiors like Dexter. Although she has the masculine privilege of being out in the world, Anna draws on traditionally feminine soft skills— discretion and social agreeableness—to help her father with his business ventures. Her diplomatic skills continue at the home, where she lies to her mother to cover where she and her father have been.

In the world of her mother and sister, Anna is a practical helper and nurturer. The world the three of them inhabit—dancing until “all of them grew flushed” and “the small apartment shook and rang with a cheer,” which helps them try on coquetry and relive Agnes’s forsaken career as a Follies dancer—is “like a language that turn[s] to gibberish when [Eddie] listen[s]” (28). This gibberish parallels with Lydia’s echolalia, which Agnes and Anna attempt to respond to and Eddie does not. In their domestic realm, away from the outside eyes that would judge Lydia as freakish, they express themselves without being self-conscious. Nevertheless, Anna learns to sew, dance, and serve as a caretaker for Lydia.

When her father judges her too big to accompany him in the missions of his world, and she finds herself unable to be consigned to her mother’s domestic, feminine realm, Anna searches out her own secret world. She encounters a neighbor boy, Leon, and has sex with him, indulging a transgressive sexual curiosity forbidden to women at the time. When she seeks to become Lieutenant Axel’s first female diver, she penetrates depths that he and his sexist brigade deem inaccessible to her: “There were no facts. There was just him” (170), a man who opposes her wishes.

Like many forward-thinking women in wartime society, Anna traverses between the masculine world of adventure and ambition and the feminine world of domesticity. She takes a risky dive in New York Harbor at night, where she finds her father’s sunken pocket watch. When she keeps the watch, she inherits his legacy of adventuring and declaring her own destiny. At the same time, she also uses her feminine wiles, such as when she dons her mother’s sea-green strapless gown and seducing Dexter.

Later, when she becomes pregnant, Anna finds a way to balance her diving career with the task of gestating and caring for a baby. Rather than going back to the home and hiding her unwed motherhood in a sham marriage, as was typical of women in the postwar era, she charts her own course by moving to California, pretending to be the wife of a fallen soldier, and becoming a single, working mother. By the end of the novel, her father inhabits both gender roles as well; as he makes peace with his daughter Lydia and caresses his grandson, Eddie lives in domesticity with Anna and Brianne while he simultaneously provides for them.