New Holland

New Holland is the Iowa town where Pandora grew up visiting family and where, as an adult, she tries to build a temporary home with her brother, Edison. Its modest landmarks carry the promise of shared memory, yet the town’s altered places and Edison’s unease expose the distance between the siblings’ past and present. It becomes both the setting for their attempted closeness and a measure of how differently they experience belonging.

Setting and remembered landmarks

New Holland has a population of about 16,000, though it sprawls at its edges. When Pandora and Edison search for an apartment within a half-hour walk of Solomon Drive, the restricted radius makes her worry they may run out of options. Driving through town, she leans on familiar sights as possible anchors for her brother: a decorative wooden windmill in the center, De Vries Bakery and its S-shaped Dutch Letters filled with almond paste, Norman Borlaug Park, and a tall white silo that had once marked the end of the siblings’ long drive from Los Angeles.

The landmarks are not preserved childhood scenery. Edison finds the windmill jarringly small; the bakery, Pandora recognizes, will become a temptation during their planned food deprivation. The retired fire engine that the children once climbed has been removed after parents judged it unsafe, and Himmel’s Meatpacking Plant has modernized, losing the pink plaster pig that used to distinguish its roof. The changes make the town recognizable but not recoverable: its details summon the siblings’ earlier visits while showing that time has continued to alter the place.

Finding a home in the town

Pandora and Edison’s apartment search is shaped by both geography and the way landlords respond to Edison’s body. Three landlords initially sound encouraging on the phone, then tell the siblings the apartments have already been taken after seeing him. Pandora suspects they fear he might damage the properties and wonders whether the refusals could be challenged. Her inquiries reveal that the Americans with Disabilities Act does not cover obesity, leaving landlords legally free to refuse to rent to him on that basis.

Their search eventually brings them to Prague Porches, where the landlord, Dennis Novacek, is himself seriously overweight. He takes to Edison and makes the two men’s shared enthusiasm for Pizza Hut’s garlic-butter stuffed crust part of their rapport. Pandora is relieved that her brother can connect with a prospective landlord, though he lets Novacek assume that he and Pandora are married. The apartment is an opening, but not a straightforward welcome: after Novacek Googles the name on Pandora’s check, he begins offering to lease them appliances, and Pandora resents being treated as a notable person rather than an anonymous renter.

Two days later, they move in. Their three bags leave the apartment’s space largely empty; the beds have arrived, but there is no table, and their belongings collect in piles on the carpet. Pandora imagines the scene as a spartan beginning that might one day be remembered fondly, then questions whether that kind of tenderness can attach to a period in which she and Edison are eating nothing. The bare apartment makes their plan tangible while also emphasizing how much of their new life has been organized around absence.

Childhood, family, and the pull of return

New Holland is bound to Pandora’s family history, but family ties do not affect her uniformly. Her younger sister, Solstice, visits every other summer, and Pandora notes that Solstice—rather than the other relatives—has maintained the regular habits of sending presents, cards, and visits. Their mother, Magnolia, died when Pandora was thirteen. As an adult, Pandora describes Edison as the one blood relative she clearly and cleanly loves: the shared past belongs uniquely to the two siblings, and her loyalty to him becomes the basis from which she understands her loyalties to Fletcher and her children.

A childhood association with New Holland also shapes Pandora’s understanding of chance and survival. In her mid-twenties, cycling along a deserted two-lane road in town, she collides with a parked car. As she examines her damaged bicycle, she thinks of Magnolia, who had stepped off a curb without looking both ways. Pandora draws from that memory not a grand explanation of loss but gratitude for the ordinary, constant acts of attention that allow people to navigate danger and remain alive. The remembered town thus holds both the family’s grief and Pandora’s quieter, more modest response to mortality.

The town as a test of belonging

When Edison returns to New Holland as an adult, the childhood landmarks do not reassure him as they do Pandora. Their glimpses of earlier visits to their grandparents seem dreamlike and unsettling to him. Crossing town, he appears to wonder what he is doing there; the open skies and wide spaces feel claustrophobic rather than liberating. In early December, the fields are bare and the skies gray, giving the landscape no seasonal warmth to soften that estrangement. Pandora can identify the place as familiar, but she cannot make familiarity into comfort for her brother.

That contrast persists in the apartment and in the siblings’ daily routine. Pandora finds the undertaking difficult partly because, unlike her earlier projects, it depends on not doing something; the absence of meals also makes visible how much time eating and its surrounding tasks had occupied. She feels weak, misses Fletcher, and struggles to stay focused in the bland, underfurnished apartment. Edison, meanwhile, calls their new place a pad and later describes their different worlds by setting his nights in Manhattan against her life among Iowa corn. New Holland is therefore not simply the location of a reunion. It is the landscape in which the limits of shared history, family devotion, and a jointly imagined plan become increasingly legible.

Departure and narrative significance

Pandora’s account ultimately qualifies the transformation she once hoped the New Holland period might represent. She says Edison did spend two very long months with her family, but the precise weight she associates with him is only a guess; she also acknowledges that she never urged him onto an industrial scale. The recollection of his stay is real, while her interpretation of it as a sustained, disciplined change may be self-flattering. Her retrospective uncertainty prevents New Holland from becoming the setting for a simple success story.

The final image of the visit is domestic and unsettled. Before Edison’s flight back to LaGuardia, Pandora finds the oversized jeans she had once pretended were used for a snowman and later treated as tongue-in-cheek decoration for an invented Coming of Size party. She brings them upstairs for him to pack, dreading their absence after he leaves. The next day she drives him to the airport; returning home, she is disturbed by the empty maroon recliner at the head of the table and has Fletcher take it to the dump. New Holland remains the place of their shared attempt, but its ending is marked not by a secure new home or a confirmed metamorphosis, but by departure, a vacated seat, and Pandora’s recognition that affection and proximity cannot guarantee change.