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Rita Cohen
Sheila Salzman is Merry’s speech therapist in Morristown. She is married to Shelly Salzman, a physician. Merry’s stutter greatly improves under Sheila’s care, and she comes to idolize the dedicated young therapist. The Swede has a brief, ill-advised affair with Sheila following Merry’s crime and subsequent disappearance. In later reflections, he sees the affair as a misguided effort to avoid the newly chaotic, senseless state of his life at that time. The Swede learns at the end of the novel that Merry ran to Sheila after bombing the post office and that Sheila and her husband sheltered her in their home for a few nights. When the Swede angrily confronts Sheila about her past actions, she justifies her failure to tell the Swede by insisting she was initially unaware of Merry’s crime and by suggesting that something untoward was being done to Merry at home (Sheila implies that she thought the Swede may have been abusing Merry).
Sheila Salzman Quotes in American Pastoral
The American Pastoral quotes below are all either spoken by Sheila Salzman or refer to Sheila Salzman. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 9
Quotes
But whether he was or wasn’t running the show no longer mattered, because if Merry and Rita Cohen were connected, in any way, if Merry had lied to him about not knowing Rita Cohen, then she might as easily have been lying about being taken in by Sheila after the bombing. If that was so, when Dawn and Orcutt ran off to live in this cardboard house, he and Sheila could run off to Puerto Rico after all. And if, as a result, his father dropped dead, well, they’d just have to bury him. That’s what they’d do: bury him deep in the ground.
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Sheila Salzman Quotes in American Pastoral
The American Pastoral quotes below are all either spoken by Sheila Salzman or refer to Sheila Salzman. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 9
Quotes
But whether he was or wasn’t running the show no longer mattered, because if Merry and Rita Cohen were connected, in any way, if Merry had lied to him about not knowing Rita Cohen, then she might as easily have been lying about being taken in by Sheila after the bombing. If that was so, when Dawn and Orcutt ran off to live in this cardboard house, he and Sheila could run off to Puerto Rico after all. And if, as a result, his father dropped dead, well, they’d just have to bury him. That’s what they’d do: bury him deep in the ground.
Related Characters:
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Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
