The interesting thing about Elly is that there's an image that leads her like a pillar of fire by night and a a pillar of smoke by day. It's the image of everyone in the world celebrating the fact that she's a part of it and deferring to her without the messy conflict that she probably wouldn't be able to handle even if Marian had seen fit to actually let her win an argument for once. What she does now is bitterly complain to everyone in earshot that it will only ever occur to them to be sincerely grateful for what she does for them and what she had to give up twenty or thirty years after she dies. What she does not do is consider that despite her imaginings to the contrary, she isn't exactly what you'd call anonymous.
First off, she's known for locking her kids out of their house for hours on end because she's too damned fragile to deal with them. She's known for letting a large, shaggy dog roam around at large because she's too stupid to keep track of him. She's known for complaining about a fictitious ten pounds that's an artifact of the terrible posture she won't admit to. She's known for being too stupid to understand when a woman is trying to tell her that she can't afford to pay her. She's known for being a deluded nitwit screaming about an unpopular cause. She's known for being a dunderhead who seems intent on murdering her youngest child out of sheer shit-for-brains negligence. She's known for being the mental absentee owner of a bookstore. She's known for sitting on her ass letting her daughter plan a tasteless wedding. Most of all, though, she's got a public identity that can be summed up rather simply:
Axiom 1v:
Elly will be known at "that train-obsessed dentist's screaming lunatic of a wife" for years to come and people will be telling horror stories about having to deal with her and her infantile rages long after she dies.
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