How Far She Went

The collection’s second story, “Solomon’s Seal,” brings the second reference to Solomon’s seal; the first appearance occurs in the book’s epigraph with an excerpt from a poem entitled “False Solomon’s Seal.” Like the first story, the protagonist is an unnamed female grappling with loneliness and isolation—with equal resignation, but this time mixed with anger. Told by a third-person omniscient narrator, the story opens with an angry and resentful protagonist looking back on a marriage marked by failure from its onset: “How they started out, that was how they wound up [...] She didn’t even unpack her [hope] trunk [...] What was the use of being house-proud in a house like that? [...] he didn’t care, why should she?” (22-23).

She and her husband Carl continue to live in a marriage of isolation and separation for 40 years. She turns to gardening to mitigate her anger: “The madder she got, the greener everything grew” (24). The only part of her garden that fails to grow is the Solomon’s seal. Carl finds companionship in TV, meals, and most of all, his dogs.

Despite the loneliness their union brings, she is surprised when Carl asks for a divorce.