The Office of Historical Corrections

“Lyssa saw her opening. She had been here all her life.”

Although “here” refers to the city in which they live, it also refers to how Lyssa has lived her life by making decisions to better herself—even when those decisions are morally questionable. As a Black woman, she is used to facing discrimination and taking every opportunity she can to level the playing field. In this instance, sex with the music video director is one such opportunity.

“Lyssa couldn’t remember walking around without suspecting that something inside of her wanted her dead. What future had there ever been but the imaginary?”

Despite her doctor’s insistence on protecting her “real” future—her life—rather than her “imaginary” one—the possibility of children—Lyssa is adamant that the possibility of cancer is just as imaginary as the chance of her having children. Her feeling that all futures are uncertain is emphasized by her hypothetical question here.

“Reuters picked up none of the refugee camp photos Rena spent months arranging into a photo essay but did pick up a photo she’d taken of JT in his hotel room.”

This quote explores Intersectional Discrimination: Skin Color and Gender. Rena travels to a refugee camp and takes hundreds of photos, choosing the best and submitting them to a magazine, but the magazine is uninterested in this topic. Instead, they choose a simple photo of JT—a white male—believing it will appeal better to their readers.

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The land of the blind would be built for the blind. […] The one-eyed man would adjust, or otherwise be deemed a lunatic or a heretic. The one-eyed man would spend his life learning to translate what experience was his alone, or else he would learn to shut up about it.”

In their time together, JT and Rena play games, one of which is to determine which proverb is the worst. Rena settles on this one. She subverts the proverb by reflecting on how a one-eyed man would feel isolated in the land of the blind. This becomes a metaphor that reflects her struggle with grief and guilt over Elizabeth’s injury. Because she is unable to grapple with her feelings, she does not share them with anyone and feels isolated by her lack of shared experience.

“She lived. Or someone lived: it was hard to match the person in the rehab facility with the person her sister had been.”

This quote reflects Rena’s internal conflict. After her sister ends up in a rehab facility, Rena does not visit her for three years. One of Rena’s Manifestations of Grief is present in how she externalizes her guilt over not visiting; rather than acknowledging that not visiting was her choice, she focuses on how her sister has changed.

“But what did it matter what she deserved, faced with the hilarity of one more person telling her glibly that better was out there when she was begging for mediocrity and couldn’t have it?”

A view into Rena’s past relationships shows her struggle to find acceptance and belonging. She was constantly told by men that she deserved better, yet she would have been happy settling with them. Ironically, these sentiments from past men caused Rena to seek out worse circumstances rather than better ones.

“All the people who couldn’t see beauty or danger when it was looking right at them, when it adjusted itself and walked out of their upstairs bathroom after tucking their husband’s penis back into his boxers.”

This quote is an example of the motif of hidden danger. Rena sees herself—despite her allure—as dangerous, priding herself in her ability to fool the wives of the men she sleeps with. These thoughts parallel how she feels about Connor. Just as he seemed innocent and loving before shooting Elizabeth, Rena makes herself seem innocent while attempting to destroy happy relationships.

“It was a lovely daydream Dori was having for her, but if Rena went to Michael’s door speaking of her kitten heart, he would only hear kitten, he would only think of pussy.”

As Rena considers how her heart has softened recently, she is still jaded about men, believing they only care about sex. She expresses this through wordplay here, morphing “kitten,” something innocent, into “pussy,” something sexual.

“Before this winter, if you had said Confederate flag, Claire would have thought of high school beach trips: rows and rows of tacky souvenir shops along the Ocean City Boardwalk, her best friend, Angela, muttering They know they lost, right? while Claire tried to remember which side of the Mason-Dixon line Maryland was on.”

The opening lines of the story immediately characterize Claire as someone uninterested in the Confederate flag or its history, contextualizing Claire’s adamant defense of the flag later on as strange and insincere. These lines are complicated further in the text when it is revealed who Angela is—and the fact that she is a Black woman—something that is not clear in these lines.

“She is strangely embarrassed by the picture, the way it turns her into someone else. She wasn’t wearing the bikini to bother Black people—for Christ’s sake, there were none in her father’s new neighborhood to bother even if she wanted to.”

Ironically, Claire uses the lack of Black people in her neighborhood as justification for why she was not doing anything wrong by wearing the bikini. However, this statement highlights how ignorance and insensitivity perpetuate through segregation; without being exposed to Black people, Claire never has to consider whether her actions are insensitive. The backlash to her photo outside this bubble—in the real world—highlights the flaws in her home environment, but rather than grow and learn, Claire doubles down and defends not only her actions but the segregation she’s accustomed to.

“Even now, Claire recognizes renderings of the planet on sight, cloud spotted, big and bright and banded, unspectacular until you consider all it holds in orbit.”

As Claire remembers teasing Aaron about how “boys go to Jupiter”—the title of the story—she thinks of drawings of Jupiter and “all it holds in orbit.” Jupiter symbolically represents Claire, who holds many things in orbit throughout the text: Aaron’s affection and care, the student body’s ire, the attention of thousands of people who react positively or negatively to her photo, and more. She holds these things due to her white privilege but fails to see them or appropriately handle them, instead dismissing everything as inconsequential, revealing her ignorance.

“Grief has a palpable quality, and it is all she can feel unless she’s making an active effort to feel something else.”

This quote encompasses the theme of the Manifestations of Grief. To avoid her grief over her mother’s death, Claire turns to alcohol to “feel something else.” Although she does not acknowledge it, she embroils herself in controversy to feel anger and annoyance in response to her grief over Aaron’s death.

“The first person to speak is a weepy white sophomore boy, who expresses how distraught he is to be on a campus that has been touched by hate and personally apologizes to the Black students on campus.”

The actions of the first speaker at the town hall—a white boy who apologizes—stand in stark contrast to the silence of the Black students. This student represents the idea of white guilt, as he assumes offense on behalf of the Black students and believes that it is his responsibility, in his privilege, to feel anger and grief for them. While rooted in good intentions, he speaks instead of allowing the Black students to speak for themselves.

“‘Papa will have his name back,’ she said. ‘You know who he was,’ I said, but it didn’t seem to comfort her any.”

While Anne is obsessed with clearing her father’s name, Cecilia believes the public facts surrounding his conviction are unimportant when his family knows who he actually was. This idea is explored further in “The Office of Historical Corrections” with Cassie’s job fixing historical inaccuracies. This quote interrogates the reasons people privilege the historical or public record over private knowledge and raises questions about reparations and justice. While private knowledge of someone’s innocence is important, it does not undo the harm done by institutional violence, something Anne intrinsically understands.

“I didn’t—and still don’t—dare compare the terms of my life to my mother’s, the stakes of my choices to hers, but I understand more now about how it feels to love the excess in people, about how knowing someone else’s love will consume you doesn’t make it any less real or any less reciprocated, about how you can leave a person behind just to save the thing they value most - yourself.”

These thoughts from Cecilia draw a parallel between her life and her mother’s. Just as Papa’s pursuit of justice caused Anne to leave her home at 18, Anne’s obsession causes Cecilia to leave. In both instances, they both attempted the “thing they value most,” which is their own well-being. The difference between the two, however, is that Anne was overwhelmed by guilt at Papa’s death and returned back into the life she attempted to escape, while Cecilia is adamant that she is going to stay away from it.

“I slipped a bronze key off of its hook and closed it into my palm. I wanted someone to stop me or I wanted someone to tell me it was mine. I squeeze the key into my palm and walked out without anyone noticing.”

Cecilia’s last act in the text is to steal a key from the Alcatraz gift shop, partially as compensation for the $227,035.87 they are owed. More important, though, is the symbolic significance of the key. While it is a literal replica of a key that would have unlocked Papa’s jail cell, it is also a “key” toward unlocking Cecilia and Anne’s future in which they are not inundated with guilt and grief over Papa’s past.

“But now he fumbled for what was left to be sorry for. He was sorry he hadn’t been kinder the morning after? […] He was sorry she didn’t get what she wanted? What had she wanted? She had the same feeling she’d had when he unceremoniously handed her back her underwear. Like it was a technicality that she hadn’t specifically told him she wanted to be treated like a person.”

Moments before the artist is pushed into the volcano, he is confused about what he has left to apologize for to The Girl Who Had Wondered All These Years What to Call It, shown through his string of hypothetical questions. These thoughts convey the true hollowness of his apologies and his lack of understanding about how to show empathy or feel truly sorry. The woman’s thoughts also answer the question of the story’s title: She simply wants to be treated like a person.

“Fuck love. This was not a love story.”

Vera is adamant that her life is not a love story, revealing her independence and contextualizing her refusal to make decisions around love. This foreshadows her decision in the text to destroy the false documents Derek procures for her: She refuses to follow him out of love instead of doing what is best for William and herself.

“‘I love you,’ he said. ‘You love rum,’ said Vera. ‘I love you and rum,’ said Derek. He kissed her again. Later, Vera went into the back room to call her parents. […] ‘I love you,’ said Vera. ‘Are you drunk?’ said her mother.”

The juxtaposition between these two conversations—one in which Derek tells Vera he loves her and she dismisses it, and the other where Vera tells her mother she loves her and she dismisses it—conveys Vera’s conflict about Running from Versus Reckoning with the Past. She is torn between two worlds, unable to commit to loving Derek while still professing her love for her mother back home.

“My memories of celebrating Juneteenth in DC were my parents taking me to someone’s backyard BBQ […] at not one of them had I seen a seventy-five-dollar bakery cake that could be carved into the shape of a designer handbag for an additional fee.”

Cassie sees a gentrified, white-owned bakery attempting to capitalize on Juneteenth by offering an expensive cake, showing their lack of understanding about how the holiday is celebrated by the Black community. The bakery also does not understand what Juneteenth is, as Cassie has to correct their sign. This quote introduces an important internal conflict for Cassie throughout the text: She fixes historical inaccuracies on signs and feels that her job is important, but it does little to fix the larger issue at hand. No minor change will help them to understand.

“I had been sent by the director to be profiled in The Post, to show we were inclusive and nonthreatening.”

This quote shows the theme of Intersectional Discrimination: Skin Color and Gender. Because of Cassie’s status as a Black woman, she is nonthreatening—while Black men are not—while also being diverse—as white women are not. Instead of being prized for her ability to do her job or her strengths, she is instead used for her racial and gender identity.

“Ready to believe in the comfort of the familiar, we tried that first year to be real friends, went on study dates and girls’ nights and salon outings, built the trappings of a closeness that never quite took. We were the only two Black women in the department.”

This quote reflects the complicated nature of Cassie and Genie’s initial “friendship.” Instead of bonding over similarities in their likes or behaviors, they are forced together because of their skin color. This shows another facet of racist microaggressions—essentializing people of color and assuming they’ll all get along with each other rather than recognizing their individual tastes and personalities. This makes Cassie feel hostile toward Genie, which carries throughout most of the text.

“The thing about one drop of blood? It’s only you people who believe in it now.”

This quote from Mrs. Varner is a reference to the one-drop rule of the early and mid-20th century United States, wherein any person with a Black ancestor was considered Black by law. Ironically, Mrs. Varner is adamant that no one believes in that rule any longer except Black people, even though she is adamantly defending her whiteness and her grandson fights for white supremacy. Additionally, the phrase “you people” shows her desire to continue separating herself from Cassie and Genevieve and their Blackness.