t out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year's Day. Trips to Demby for VD shots common" (11). It is to answer these questions and to protect their "paradise" that the elder men look seventeen miles away to a former convent where "there [are] women like none [they] knew or ever heard tell of" (8).Unlike the citizens of Ruby who believe that "paradise" is found through an isolated location, the residents of the Convent discover the true meaning of "paradise." The Convent is the home of four broken women fleeing from emotional hurt spanning the spectrum of the guilt of killing one's own children to sexual abuse. These four women, Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas isolate themselves within the confines of the Convent walls rather than deal with their pain. It is within these walls that they realize "that they [can] not leave the one place they [are] free to leave" (262). At the center of the Convent is Connie, a woman of warm living flesh very unlike the cold dead metal of the Oven in the center of Ruby. It is through Connie that the women are able to understand and accept their problems and thereby come to the realization that "paradise" is a concept rather than an isolated locale. Connie tells the women, "'. . . I will teach you what you are hungry for'" (262). The women hunger for "paradise" and this is related in the story of Piedade that Connie tells the women. The women begin to heal and attain "paradise" through the teachings of Connie. She forces the women to let go of their pain by "stepping-out" of their bodies and transferring it onto drawings of themselves on the cellar floor. By putting the pain outside of themselves, the four formerly broken women are able to achieve "paradise" and "the longed for [cleansing] rain had finally come" (266) to wash away their sins.Even as the women revel in their new found "paradise," the men of Ruby discover the falsity in their own de...
