In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried

In the story, masks are both literal and metaphoric. Literally, a mask helps preserve the friend’s health, keeping invasive germs away from her fragile immune system. A downside of wearing a mask, however, is that, by covering the mouth and muffling sounds, it impedes communication. Metaphorically, a mask obscures emotions and feelings.

The narrator notices that her friend, the hospital patient, appears comfortable wearing it. She calls her “a pro” (2). The narrator chafes at its unnaturalness. Here the mask could be a metaphor for the acceptance of death. The friend has had more time to become accustomed to the idea, and the narrator notes her ease but rebels, refusing to accept it. The narrator also associates the mask with robbers and thieves; the questionable morality of these figures hints at the narrator’s sense of guilt, but the metaphor could also signify that she recognizes her friend’s diagnosis as a theft, an unfair confiscation of her health and life.

Images of hands appear in several places in the story. Hands can be healing, like the nurses who comfort the scared friend by “rubb[ing] her back in slow circles” (9). Hands communicate fear and anger, as exemplified by the incidents where the patient readjusts her wig, revealing that her disease and medical treatment has rendered her bald (10), or where she wordlessly “yanked off her mask and threw it on the floor” (9), and the instance when the narrator “twisted [her] hands in the time-honored fashion of people in pain” (8).