Zoyd/Merle compare & contrast

[Michael Bailey]

Both singly raising a daughter, in Merle’s case it’s certain Bert Snidell
was the biological father whereas for Zoyd there’s some uncertainty about
Brock Vond’s role


Zoyd and Frenesi did formally get married whereas Erlys and Merle never did

Both daughters reconnect with their mothers after a long time of longing

Merle remained itinerant much more so than Zoyd, who evolved a home around
a trailer.

Zoyd faced persecution and intimidation and eked out a living from music,
welfare, and odd jobs;

Merle also did odd jobs but was much more involved in his own career,
developing skills

Both Merle and Zoyd had a wide circle of acquaintances and friends


Zoyd was more fraught:

“Frenesi, do you think that love can save anybody? You do, don’t you?” At
the time he hadn’t learned yet what a stupid question it was. She gazed up
at him from just under the brim of the hat. He thought, At least try to
remember this, try to keep it someplace secure, just her face now in this
light, OK, her eyes quiet like this, her mouth poised to open. . . . Mean
or not, he hadn’t cried about it for a long time. The years had kept
rolling, like the surf he used to ride, high, calm, wild, windless. But
increasingly the day, the necessary day, presenting its demands, had
claimed him, till there was only one small bitter amusement he refused to
let go of. Now and then, when moon, tides, and planetary magnetism were all
in tune, he went venturing out, straight up through the third eye in his
forehead, into an extraordinary system of transport whereby he could go
gliding right to wherever she was, and incompletely unseen, sensed just
enough to be troublesome, he then would haunt her, for as long as he could,
enjoying every squeezed-out minute. A vice, for sure, and one he had
confessed only to a handful of people, including, it may have turned out
unwisely, their daughter, Prairie, this very morning. “Oh,” sitting over a
breakfast of Cap’n Crunch and Diet Pepsi, “you mean you dreamed—” Zoyd
shook his head. “I was awake. But out of my body.” She gave him a look that
he didn’t, so early in the day, attend to the full risk of, telling him she
trusted him not to be running some cruel put-on. They’d been known not to
share a sense of humor on many topics, her mom in particular. “You go there
and—what? You perch somewhere and look, you keep flying around, how’s it
work?”

“It’s like Mr. Sulu laying in coordinates, only different,” Zoyd explained.
“Knowin’ exactly where you want to go.” He nodded, and she felt some
unaccustomed bloom of tenderness for this scroungy, usually slow-witted
fringe element she’d been assigned, on this planet, for a father. What
mattered at the moment was that he knew how to visit Frenesi out in the
night, and that could only mean he must feel a need for her as intense as
Prairie’s own. “Where’s it you go, then? Where is she?” “Keep tryin’ to
find out. Try to read signs, locate landmarks, anything that’ll give a
clue, but—well the signs are there on street corners and store windows—but
I can’t read them.” “It’s some other language?” “Nope, it’s in English, but
there’s something between it and my brain that won’t let it through.”
Prairie made a sound like a game-show buzzer. “I’m sorry Mr.
Wheeler. . . .” Let down and suspicious, she drifted away again. “Say hi to
’em up on Phantom Creek, OK?”



While Merle accepted Erlys leaving him for Zombini with some equanimity -

[after Erlys left] “Merle waited in East Fullmoon as long as he could,
waited for mail, a telegram, a rider, a carrier pigeon circling in from the
winter skies, and in the meantime learned how straightforward it would all
be, taking care of this baby here, long as he didn’t fret about the time or
any need he might’ve thought he had to get on with some larger plan—with
Erlys gone, anything like that was out the window and down the turnpike
anyway—and that long as he just kept breathing smoothly in and out, just
staying within the contours of the chore of the moment, life with young
Dahlia would provide precious little occasion for complaint, bitter or
otherwise.”