Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great

“I think it’s pretty smart of me to pretend that I hate Turtle because he smells.”

When Sheila runs into Peter and his dog Turtle on the elevator at the beginning of the story, she lies and says she can’t possibly ride in the elevator with such a smelly animal. Although she congratulates herself on the ploy, her focus on being “smart” is a way of distracting herself from the feelings of shame over her fearfulness. This interaction succinctly characterizes Sheila, whose character arc is a journey toward greater honesty and vulnerability.

“The more I talked about it the better it sounded. Spending the summer in the country. Spending the summer in Tarrytown. Spending the summer in a house. Spending the summer in my own beautiful bedroom!”

As lifelong New Yorkers, Sheila and her family are accustomed to small living spaces and not having much room to spread out, so when Sheila’s father tells her she will have her own room for the summer, she is delighted; the use of anaphora with the phrase “Spending the summer” conveys her exuberance and sense of anticipation. However, the room she dreams up in her head is nothing like the room she finds in Tarrytown. The situation creates a basic form of irony in which expectations clash with reality.

“How could they do this to me? Their own child. Their younger daughter. Didn’t they understand? Didn’t they care?”

This passage depicts Sheila’s outrage after she discovers the Egrans’ dog in Tarrytown. When she wonders how “they” could “do this to [her],” “they” are her parents, who knew about Jennifer before they arrived but withheld the information because they knew Sheila would have refused to make the trip otherwise.