Luster

Chapter 3 opens with Edie’s confession that she had an abortion in her junior year of high school. At the time, Edie worked retail in a small women’s boutique in Upstate New York. She describes how isolated and awkward she felt even at that young age. Edie shares that, “I was not popular and I was not unpopular” but rather that she was not seen (44). The older man who impregnated her was named Clay; he worked at the gun shop in the mall where she worked and was only “the seventh black person I’d met in Latham” (44). At their first meeting, Clay talks about his own conflict with his family, and Edie divulges how her mother died and “how I found her with one shoe still on” (44). Despite her subtle fear of Clay, Edie feels bound to him in “a mutual understanding that we were both looking for something to destroy, […] a language developing between us that wasn’t so much romantic as it was breathless with shared conspiracy” (46). Her father returns home after a long absence. Edie confesses that she is pregnant; her father takes her to a clinic to have an abortion.