The Lost Daughter

Later in the evening, the rain is gone, and Leda takes extra care dressing and making herself up to go to the beach. Once there, she sees the young attendant, Gino, who tells her the storm blew several umbrellas away. He is the same age as Leda’s daughters and reminds her of her girls’ first boyfriends. She thinks about Marta and Bianca’s teenage years. As the girls matured, Leda realized that men in the street were no longer looking at her; their gaze was drawn to the bodies of her maturing daughters. Leda felt as if their budding sexuality “subtracted from” her own, so she began working harder to maintain her appearance, especially when her daughters’ young boyfriends came to the house.

After accidentally being too flirtatious with one of Bianca’s boyfriends, Leda realized that her behavior was inappropriate, and she made herself less conspicuous, appearing only when her daughters needed her. Faced with the young Gino, Leda decides to invite him to dinner. To her surprise, he accepts, and the two dine together. Although Gino works hard to keep the conversation moving, they clearly have little to say to one another. The topic turns to the missing doll, and Gino tells Leda that he combed the beach for the toy with no luck. He goes on to speak admiringly of Nina. She is one year older than him, and he despises her husband, calling him and his family “bad people.”

Leda gets home late from dinner and reflects on the evening with Gino. She wonders again how the young man would fare with her daughters and thinks about her tendency to compare Bianca and Marta to their peers. Leda never liked seeing her daughters outdone by other girls, and she sometimes “intervened rudely” if another girl overshadowed her daughters. Leda remembers one particular case with a girl named Florinda. Florinda was much more beautiful than Marta, and Leda worried that spending time with Florinda was making her daughter unhappy. This, in turn, made Leda feel inadequate, so she decided to put Florinda in her place, humiliating her by forcing her to clean up after both she and Marta tracked in mud and spilled crumbs in the kitchen.

Leda reflects that she often had trouble seeing her daughters objectively. She worried, for example, that Bianca was unlikeable but realized that the girl had plenty of friends. Her husband pointed out that the two were very much alike, and Leda wondered if her dislike for her daughter was “only the reflection of an antipathy [she] felt for [her]self” (60). She often resented that her daughters had inherited her “good qualities,” feeling like they failed to take advantage of them. She thinks it was easier to feel closer to her daughters when she could see “what seemed alien” about them (60), but this was rare.

Both Leda and her daughters were hyper-aware of their resemblances, and the girls held it against their mother that one was more beautiful than the other. Their looks were evidence of an “unfair distribution” of “the mother’s power […] beginning in the living niche of the womb” (61), and their unhappiness caused Leda guilt and also resentment. Her relationship with Marta was the most tumultuous. Her younger daughter accused Leda of giving her best qualities to Bianca, including her gracefulness and seductive figure. Bianca, on the other hand, always admired her mother, particularly her ability to peel an orange all in one go, making a snake out of the peel.

Looking at Elena’s doll, Leda thinks about her daughters. She thinks perhaps she took the doll because it represented Nina and Elena’s bond, illustrating “perfect motherhood.” She holds the doll close and kisses it, thinking she doesn’t want to return it. Some of the dirty water inside the doll comes out of its mouth and stains Leda’s shirt.

The next morning, Leda cannot find Nani when she wakes. She worries that someone has taken her but finds her in the kitchen. It is another rainy day, so Leda decides not to go to the beach. Instead, she goes to a toy store to buy some clothes for Elena’s doll. At the store, she runs into some of the Neapolitan family, including Rosaria, Nina, and Elena. Elena, still distraught, has developed a fever from the stress of losing the doll, and they have come to the store to buy a new one.

Rosaria says that “whoever took [the doll] should get brain cancer” (65), and Leda feigns sympathy, worrying they will see the doll’s clothes stowed in her purse. Nina admits how difficult Elena has been since Nani’s disappearance, as the girl refuses to let her mother put her down. Rosaria, her aunt, offers her arms, and Elena goes to her willingly, out of what Leda sees as “spite for her mother” (67), who had the gall to lose her doll. Rosaria soothes the child with exaggeration, then asks Leda what her own daughters were like as children. Leda says she doesn’t remember much and admits that she abandoned her daughters with their father for three years when they were small. This announcement shocks the Neapolitans, and in its wake, Leda takes her leave.

After leaving the store, Leda walks around the square, wondering why she shared such a personal fact with the Neapolitans. She thinks about the immediate change in how the women looked at her and how she would have liked to discuss the matter privately with Nina.

Leda thinks about herself as a young mother. She “felt lost,” condemned to the unhappy life of her female ancestors before her. When the children were young, her frustration manifested in a series of “alarming episodes” whose order she can no longer remember. In one incident, she hit Bianca after the child interrupted her while writing, breaking her already fragile train of thought. She took Bianca out of the room and slammed the door, causing the glass pane to shatter over her daughter. Bianca was unharmed, but Leda became afraid of “how far [she] could go” (73). Now, she tries to forget the moment.

She stands at the market’s entrance, hiding from the rain, and feels suffocated by the memory of Bianca surrounded by broken glass.