Tuck
The other sister — sent to fetch a woman back and found sitting far too close to her instead. She falls in love constantly and recovers fast.
The next one. She admits she cannot tell a blind alley from a boulevard and that signposts only unsettle her mind.
The book
At a glance
- One of the two sisters of the May chapter
- The sisters claim all of Spain as their torment
- Anyone in front of her
- Her sister Nip
- Solita Solano · 1888–1975 · Troy, New York
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeTuck is an invented character in Ladies Almanack, the 1928 mock almanac by the American writer Djuna Barnes, and the second of the two sisters who arrive in the May chapter. Where her sister Nip observes, Tuck is the one things happen to. She is sent along on an expedition to retrieve a wandering woman and is discovered, within the space of a sentence, sitting much too close to her.
Nip and Tuck are generally identified with the American journalists Janet Flanner and Solita Solano, who lived together in Paris and belonged to Natalie Clifford Barney's circle. Barnes never confirmed it.
How the book draws them
- Caught mid-detourMusset, walking away from the woman she has just dismissed as a pedant, hears a short sound behind her and turns to find Miss Tuck seated a little too close to History, toying with minor details that went as far back as the fall of Rome.
- The failure reportShe comes back leaning on a tiny pocket handkerchief to say that Musset was quite right: the woman thaws nothing but facts, and there was not one unfathomed mystery in the lot, nor one crumb untabulated.
- Beaten by an educationHer complaint is that whatever she tried, the woman had a reference for it — now Horace, now Spinoza, and then, in a dreadful whisper, the Descent of Man, which she says she will have nothing to do with here or then.
- The recovery rateShe finishes the report by putting a soft little hand into her sister's and reminding her how fast she recovers, and how many hours there are in a day.
- Lost without signpostsTold she is going astray, she protests that every law of love and desire was long ago as mixed as a traffic jam, that she cannot tell a blind alley from a boulevard, and that signposts serve for nothing but unsettling her mind.