Spider legs appear twice throughout the novel, both times in clumps of three. The significance of the spider legs and the number three lies within Cheyenne culture as well as Opal’s superstitions about the number three and Orange uses this to foreshadow events that will occur in the novel.
When Opal first discusses numbers, she mentions that “Four and eight are her favorites. Three and six are no good” (Orange 161). Spider legs appear in the novel for the first time in Opal’s leg in a set of three right before Ronald tries to rape Jackie. To stop this, Opal beats Ronald with a baseball bat and when she returns to see if he survived, she sees him outside and thinks of “A Cheyenne word: Veho. It means spider and trickster and white man” (Orange 169). She also notes that Ronald “looked as white as any white man she’d ever seen” (Orange 169). The meaning of Veho allows the reader to make the connection that the spider legs were foreshadowing an event involving either a white man or a trickster; in this case, it was (at least what Opal perceives to be) a white man, Ronald. Orange also uses the fact that there were three spider legs to foreshadow that something bad is going to occur because, as Opal said, “Three and six are no good” which stands to reason given the event that occurred. The second time spider legs appear in the novel is in Orvil’s leg right before the powwow, also in a set of three. At the powwow, during the shooting, Calvin says, “Octavio gets hit and fires a few more back at Charles. Calvin sees a kid in regalia go down ten or so feet behind Charles” (Orange 273). The kid in regalia who gets shot is Orvil, indicating that the three spider legs once again foreshadow a horrible event. The word Veho linking spiders and tricksters also foreshadowed that the man who would shoot Orvil was Octavio, the one who initiated the robbery of the powwow. In addition to further confirming the validity of the number superstitions, Orange also confirms that spider legs indicate that a trickster or white man will have something to do with the occurrence.
I really like your assessment of Opal and Orvil’s connection through their experiences with spider legs and how the number three seems to carry with it menacing superstitious undertones. I’d like to elaborate a bit more on the significance of the spider legs to Opal and Orvil and how their shared experience is rooted even more in their ancestry and spiritual ties. Opal and Orvil both pull spider legs out of bumps on their legs, and Opal distinctly remembers her mother mentioning the symbolic significance of spiders as “home and trap (Orange 239). Though Orvil is not Opal’s direct descendant, Jacquie notes that he “looked like Opal. He looked like [their] mom, Vicky” (Orange 158). This implies that the spider leg occurrence is a hereditary, physical embodiment of a potentially spiritual warning of the “dark times” (Orange 3) to come. Opal and Orvil share loose family ties but strong emotional ones, and their legs occur at major turning points in their lives: adolescence. Opal mentions that her spider legs coincided with her “first moon” and the “shame” (Orange 243) of burgeoning awareness of sexuality and the end of childhood. This is later revealed in Opal’s interactions with the pregnant Jacquie and the predatory behaviors of Ronald, the “Veho… spider and trickster” (Orange 169). The numerology of the number three is important to the experiences of Opal and Orvil’s spider legs, but I think it points to the larger connection between the two that lies in the spiritual, “grotesque yet magical” (Orange 243) bond they share within their blended family.
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