65. Push-Pull. In Sophie’s next entry, she says the whole crew is piled in a rental car on the way to Bompie’s—Uncle Dock found someone to start repair work on The Wanderer, so everyone is able to visit Bompie. Sophie says everyone is “touchy and crabby and hardly speaking.” Apparently, Dock was upset that they won’t be sailing The Wanderer around the Irish coast, because he wanted to stop at another friend’s house on the way. But Sophie says he was finally able to convince the other uncles to drive to the house and make a brief stop there. Sophie concludes her entry by saying she feels pushed and pulled: while she’s excited to see Bompie, she’s also terrified of seeing him.
Here, the conflicted relationship Sophie has with the water gets applied to her relationship with Bompie—while she looked forward for so long to meeting Bompie, looking up to him and, in some mysterious way, deeply identifying with him, she’s still—for some reason she can’t quite pin down—wary of actually meeting him in the flesh. We might infer that she’s worried that Bompie won’t be the same as how she’s imagined him, or that he’ll let her down in some way.