Buffy St. John

Buffy St. John is Kelly Kelleher’s closest friend and former roommate at Brown University, a lively, worldly presence whose Fourth of July party brings Kelly into contact with The Senator. She frames the novel’s contrast between sociable confidence and private vulnerability: Buffy’s practiced ease in company surrounds Kelly, even as Kelly’s silence and separation from her friend become part of the story’s emotional cost. At the end, Kelly imagines herself free of the sinking car and held by Buffy, turning toward the friendship she had shut out.

Identity and Social World

At twenty-six, Buffy works for Boston After Hours, a magazine published in Boston, while Kelly works for Citizens' Inquiry. The two women are the same age, but the narration distinguishes Buffy as more worldly, experienced, and adventurous. Her style is deliberately vivid: she paints both fingernails and toenails in arresting green, blue, and purple shades, and she frequently replenishes the condoms she carries in her several purses. Kelly, by contrast, has carried a condom for months without managing to mention or offer it. That contrast gives their different degrees of sexual candor a concrete form in their belongings and habits, without making Buffy simply a foil: the narration identifies her as Kelly’s closest friend.

Buffy is the hostess at the oceanfront cottage on Derry Road, the property of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Edgar St. John, who are away during the party. She and Kelly had roomed together at Brown, and their closeness predates the chance gathering at which Kelly meets The Senator. The party is set on the evening of the Fourth of July, amid parked cars and celebrations elsewhere on Grayling Island; its social bustle makes the cottage a point of connection before the night’s events pull Kelly away from it.

The Party and Kelly’s Departure

Ray Annick has invited The Senator to Grayling Island. Buffy tells the guests she does not expect him to come, so his arrival in the rented Toyota is a surprise. Buffy is among those gathered when the Senator enters, and her party becomes the setting for the immediate rapport between him and Kelly. Their first meeting is presented as new: Buffy later insists that they had not been lovers, or even acquaintances, before that day. Her certainty matters because it counters speculation that Kelly and the married Senator already had a secret relationship.

Buffy helps stage the party as a social occasion, not merely a backdrop. She arranges the guests for Polaroid photographs, her camera held in green-painted nails, and directs them to look up and hold still. Her playful command to the group captures the event’s buoyant, performative surface. Elsewhere, her father’s tall American flag flaps above the gathering, while firecrackers sound at a neighboring house. These ordinary Fourth of July images of guests, photographs, flag, and fireworks recur beside the danger Kelly cannot yet understand.

When Kelly prepares to leave with The Senator, Buffy pinches her teasingly and asks why she must go then, rather than a little later. Kelly apologizes, flushed and embarrassed, but cannot tell Buffy what she believes is at stake: that if she does not do as he asks, there will be no later. The departure therefore strains a friendship in a moment when Kelly feels unable to explain herself. She anticipates that Buffy may later condemn her for leaving, while also recognizing the intimacy between them that makes the silence painful.

Friendship, Desire, and Misunderstanding

Buffy’s later defense of Kelly is direct and emphatic. She denies that Kelly and The Senator had been lovers at the time of the accident, or had known each other beforehand; Ray Annick shares that account. The narrator likewise describes them as new acquaintances who seem to have taken to one another. Buffy’s testimony establishes both the short history of the encounter and her loyalty to Kelly against suspicions surrounding it.

That loyalty coexists with the distance that develops between the friends. In the years after the accident, Buffy, Jane, and Stacey ask why Kelly will not talk about G-----; they interpret her silence as heartbreak, her cynicism about men as depression, and her refusal to answer their telephone calls or her tendency to keep to herself as possible suicidal behavior. They are concerned, but the account makes clear that these interpretations are discussed among the friends rather than directly with Kelly. Buffy’s concern thus does not overcome Kelly’s withdrawal, and friendship cannot by itself make Kelly disclose what she is experiencing.

In the imagined rescue near the end, Kelly reaches toward the relationship she had avoided. Coughing and choking, she strains to lift her torso and head, then imagines herself hugging Buffy hard, loving her like a sister, and apologizing for deliberately shutting her out over the previous two or three years. She calls what happened an accident and insists that no one is to blame. The passage is framed as a possible reprieve rather than a secure reversal of the drowning: Kelly asks whether it has happened, while the narrative continues to place her in the accelerating car and the surrounding marsh. Buffy’s embrace is therefore both a vision of rescue and a measure of how much friendship Kelly has lost access to.

Fourth of July Images and Narrative Contrast

The party’s patriotic signs gather meaning through their recurrence around Kelly’s peril. The flag on the St. John property is described as the tallest on Derry Road, perhaps on Grayling Island. Buffy jokes that her father is a patriot who served in the CIA for twenty years and did not get his ass blown off. Later, the Fourth of July is called a holiday Americans almost all celebrate, with its rockets and bombs; the text links the continued presence of the flag to the familiar national song. At the party, the flag waves above the noise of firecrackers, while the Senator’s political hopes later surface in his terror of public disgrace and lost ambition.

Against that public spectacle, Kelly’s crisis is private, bodily, and nearly wordless. The fireworks and flag remain visible in the world around her, but they cannot reach her in the submerged Toyota. In her imagined escape she bargains with a rescue team to amputate one or both legs if necessary, promising to sign a release and not sue; the desperate offer makes survival the only priority. Buffy’s imagined return follows that plea, turning the friend who had been left behind at the party into the person Kelly embraces in her vision. The contrast does not make Buffy responsible for Kelly’s fate; it shows how the story sets public celebration and political display beside a woman’s isolation, fear, and belated wish to reconnect.