Secrets and Guilt: The Weight of Buried Truths in Tourist Season

In Tourist Season, Enid Shomer weaves a collection of stories where secrets—about adoption, crimes, family history, and infidelity—act as silent forces that shape lives. Guilt becomes a double-edged sword: it drives characters into self-imposed exile, yet it also forces them into painful confrontations with the truth. The thematic claim of this analysis is that buried secrets and the guilt they generate are not merely destructive; they can serve as catalysts for transformation, revealing the profound gap between public identity and private remorse.

The Weight of a Stolen Child: Sheila’s Burden

In “The Other Mother,” Sheila carries the devastating secret that her adopted daughter Royal was actually kidnapped from an airport restroom by Sheila’s ex-husband Win. For years, Sheila lived in ignorance, but when Win reveals the truth, guilt crashes down on her. She becomes a fugitive not just from the law, but from her own conscience. The secret forces her into a life of lies: “the rest of her life must be a lie, a lie that fills her chest like a heavy, dead second heart.” Sheila’s guilt is paradoxically both isolating and propelling. She considers returning to Mobile to protect Royal, but she knows that confession would shatter her daughter’s world. The secret becomes a kind of prison, yet it also sharpens her resolve. Shomer uses the symbol of the moon barely a sliver to underscore the darkness Sheila navigates—her path forward is uncertain, guided only by the dim light of maternal duty. Sheila’s story illustrates how a secret kept to shield a loved one can still corrode the keeper from within.

Garland’s Lack of Remorse: The Thrill of Rule-Breaking

Garland McKenney, the protagonist of “Fill In the Blank” and “Sweethearts,” offers a stark contrast to Sheila. Garland commits robbery, arson, and shoplifting without obvious guilt. When her accomplice Linda confesses to the police, Garland feels relief rather than remorse. During the robbery planning, Garland experiences a “calm that surfaced moments before now settled around her like a soft old blanket.” Her secret crimes are not burdens but sources of excitement. She compares her rule-breaking to “another tap on the gas pedal.” Yet the narrative complicates this apparent lack of guilt. Garland’s inability to feel genuine remorse alienates her from Linda, and she is left alone in a park, still wrestling with the personality test’s final question about what makes a good life. The pager number 666 that appears in her story hints at a moral void, a devil-may-care attitude that society deems dangerous. Garland’s guilt, or lack thereof, challenges readers to consider whether shame is necessary for moral growth. The fire she starts symbolically connects to her destructive tendencies, but also to a potential for purification—yet in Garland, no such cleansing occurs. She remains a “tourist in her own life,” drifting through consequences without internal change.

Frieda’s Unspoken Atonement: The Pilot’s Hidden Guilt

In the title story “Tourist Season,” Frieda, a former Women’s Airforce Service Pilot, harbors a secret guilt about a near-fatal incident during training. She once lost her bearings over the ocean and was nearly shot down by friendly fire. When interviewed for a book, she tells the story, but the book omits it. The secret festers: “For months afterward she broke out in a cold sweat at odd moments.” This guilt is tied to her current life as a retiree in a Florida condo, where she feels trapped in a marriage with Milt. She longs for the freedom of flying, but her pacemaker grounds her. Frieda’s secret is not criminal like Sheila’s or Garland’s, but it reveals a deeper dissonance between her adventurous past and her mundane present. She uses small talk as “a snail laid down its own slippery, protective runway,” a metaphor for how she papers over her regrets. The Polaroid camera that neighbor Irv Snyder carries—snapping pictures of young girls—serves as a symbol of capturing fleeting moments and perhaps a desire to hold onto youth. For Frieda, the secret of her near-death experience and the loss of her flying identity generate guilt over not living authentically. She confronts this not through confession, but through small acts of rebellion, such as insisting on the trip to St. Augustine. Her guilt is a quiet tide that erodes her contentment, forcing her to recognize that “she wasn’t much of a talker. She was a doer.” The secret of who she once was haunts her, and her journey toward acceptance is both poignant and unresolved.

Complexity and Contradiction: Guilt as a Double-Edged Sword

Shomer does not offer easy moral lessons. Sheila’s guilt is crippling yet protective; Garland’s absence of guilt is liberating yet empty; Frieda’s suppressed guilt is a gentle but persistent ache. The theme of secrets and guilt is further layered in stories like “The Summer of Questions,” where Riva discovers her father’s gambling addiction and his theft from the family business. The secret fractures her image of her family, and she feels “the image of her family fractured into flimsy splotches.” Here, the secret is not carried by the protagonist but revealed to her, forcing her to grapple with inherited shame. The symbol of the wolf tail might represent a wild, untamed truth that cannot be domesticated. The contradiction lies in how secrets both protect and poison relationships. Linda, in Garland’s story, feels so consumed by guilt that she confesses, while Garland remains indifferent. Shomer suggests that guilt is not a universal response; it is shaped by personality, circumstance, and the nature of the secret itself. The collection’s epigraph-like question from the reader’s guide—“In what ways are the characters in these stories all tourists in their own lives?”—applies directly to secrets and guilt. These characters are tourists because they are disconnected from their own truths, visiting their own histories as strangers.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does Sheila’s decision to keep Royal’s kidnapping a secret affect her sense of identity?
   Sheila’s secret forces her to view herself as a liar and a fugitive. She describes the lie as “a kind of eternity” that nullifies her past. Her identity becomes split between the mother she wants to be and the woman who must deceive her daughter. The secret erodes her self-trust, and she feels she can never again live openly.

2. Why does Garland feel relief rather than guilt after confessing to the robbery?
   For Garland, confession is an abstract transaction—she anticipates “something beyond the punishment,” a feeling of optimism. She sees the legal process as a performance, not a moral reckoning. Her lack of guilt stems from a worldview where rules are obstacles to be manipulated, not moral boundaries. The story suggests that Garland’s emotional flatness is a defense mechanism against deeper pain.

3. What role does the setting of Florida play in the theme of secrets?
   Florida in Tourist Season is depicted as a transient space for retirees, tourists, and escapees. Characters like Sheila and Frieda are drawn to Florida’s impermanence—it is a place where secrets can be hidden among the crowds. The “tourist season” itself implies temporary visitors, mirroring how characters treat their own lives as temporary, avoiding permanent confrontation with guilt.

4. How does the symbol of the Polaroid photograph relate to guilt in Frieda’s story?
   Irv Snyder’s Polaroid camera is used to capture young women, ostensibly for souvenirs, but it also represents a desire to freeze moments and avoid reality. For Frieda, the camera symbolizes the way she captures her past in snapshots—safe, static, and disconnected. She cannot fully integrate her flying history into her present because she has sealed it away like a photograph.

5. What does Riva’s discovery about her father’s gambling reveal about the cost of family secrets?
   Riva feels betrayed not just by her father’s crime, but by the years of silence that left her “the last person on Earth to know.” The secret robbed her of agency and forced her to question everything about her family. The cost is a shattered trust and the burden of now having to decide whether to expose or perpetuate the secret herself. Shomer implies that secrets can be more damaging than the truth they hide.