Madwoman

Toward the end of Clove’s father’s life, he started to threaten to kill the family and himself. He made the threats constantly and almost casually. He tried to convince Clove that killing the family was the most logical and rational choice of action to take, as, to his mind, his darkness had started to infect the rest of the family.

After he moved the family to Hawaii, Clove’s father started to escalate his abuse of her mother, with multiple broken bones and a ruptured bowel in the months after they arrived on the island. The day that her father died, he and Clove had swum far out into the ocean, where “something happened that changed [her] forever, something [she] will tell [the reader] about in detail, but not yet” (175).

When they came home from the water, Clove took a nap while her father got drunk. She awoke to the sound of her parents fighting, with her father threatening, once again, to kill Clove and her mother. Clove stood in the hallway, tracing a rust-colored mark on the wall with a finger and thinking, “I’m done living in a place with my mother’s blood on the walls” (176).

One week after Tootsie arrived, Clove’s husband takes the family out for an evening of fun at a local pizza restaurant. Tootsie continues to pressure Clove to find a nanny, which she claims she’s still working to find. Tootsie also harasses Clove over her spending, and Clove tries to react to her mother-in-law’s criticism with patience.

That night, Clove and her husband have sex. Clove imagines the butcher in his place the entire time. Afterward, she tells him that she found someone as a nanny for the children, and he agrees to hire her, trusting his wife’s judgment.

As she composes the cease-and-desist letter that she plans to send to her mother and her mother’s lawyer, Clove remembers a day weeks before her father died, when she attended her mother’s employee barbecue with her father. During the barbecue, Clove felt alternately worried for her mother and furious with her father. She stole two beers and took them out of sight to drink in peace. When she came back to the party, she sensed the energy between her parents, and she understood that her father would be violent later that night. Despite this, Clove’s father continued to put on a public act of geniality toward his wife and daughter.

Thinking back on this night, Clove realizes that the reason she doesn’t want to help her mother all these years later is because her mother failed to protect her from her father’s abuse. That night, one of her mother’s coworkers, an older man named Gary, groped and aggressively approached Clove. Her mother was too focused on her father to witness what was happening. Later, Gary trapped Clove in the stall of a public bathroom, forcing her to stab him with a broken bottle to get away. However, on leaving, she discovered that her parents had left the party without her, and she had to take two separate buses to get back home. She later found out that her mother had ended up in the hospital that night from one of her father’s beatings.

In the early morning, Clove prints off her cease-and-desist letter for her mother and slips out of the house to mail it. She feels a deep sadness when mailing the letter, and as she leaves, she picks up her packages and promises to stop making impulse purchases.

At Earthside, Clove asks Jane whether she ever felt loved by her mother. Considering the question, Jane says that she did, but she learned better, eventually understanding that she had to approach life on her terms. Later, they attend an Earthside staff party at Mike’s rental home outside of the city. Jane reveals to Clove that she’s currently without a home, crashing on the couch of whoever will let her stay over. Clove impulsively invites Jane to live with her, taking care of her kids in exchange for rent. In her desperation, she realizes that if she has to go to jail due to abandoning her family, she’ll need someone at her home to help her husband watch the children.

Clove feels as if she is behaving strangely. She reads the label of the can of kombucha she’s drinking, and, realizing that the label indicates that the drink is alcoholic, reacts with shock, as she hasn’t had any alcohol since she was with the butcher. Jane drives her home, pushing her the whole way to open up more about her past. Clove decides to open up to Jane about her true past, and she tells her the whole story of her childhood.

Jane asks several questions, probing deeper into Clove’s past and motivations. Clove tells Jane that she needs to reciprocate and tell Clove about herself. Jane admits that, in her younger years, she worked as an escort until an older client of hers began to pay for her to live for free. Her only responsibility was seeing him twice per month. However, he recently died, and Jane changed cities, realizing that she ultimately wanted to become a mother.

Clove leads Jane to her basement and fixes her a spot to sleep until Tootsie vacates their home. Clove heads to the kitchen for water and, on the way, sees Tootsie sitting on her bed, reading the letters from Clove’s purse. Clove tries to snatch the letters back from Tootsie, but Tootsie yanks them away and accuses Clove of lying to her family.

Jane steps into the room and puts herself between the fighting women. She has Tootsie hand the letters over to Clove, who claims that they’re a creative-writing exercise. Tootsie doesn’t believe this excuse and insists on revealing Clove’s secret. Jane threatens her by saying that if she doesn’t forget what she saw, she’ll never see her grandchildren again. Clove’s husband comes into the room, and Tootsie leaves the house in a huff, making vague accusations but keeping the specifics to herself.

The next morning, Clove tells her husband that she’s hired Jane to be the nanny, but he’s turned off by her strange behavior. He agrees to let her nanny for a week on a trial basis, but he continues to feel skeptical of Clove’s mental state. Clove, too, realizes something strange: When Jane drove her home the night before, she’d seemingly somehow known where to take her, despite never having been to Clove’s house before.

Jane and Clove drive over to Mike’s so that Jane can retrieve her belongings from the old Chevy in Mike’s yard, where Jane has been living. After Jane steps out to get her things, Nova casually remarks that she saw Jane remove her wig earlier. This startles Clove, as she had no idea that Jane wore a wig.

Clove spends the next week adjusting to Jane’s presence in her home. On the morning when Clove receives a response from her mother, Jane is out doing errands. Clove locks herself in the bathroom to read the letter. The letter is difficult for her to read, as it alternates between deep empathy, self-awareness, pity, and selfishness. Finally, her mother concludes by telling Clove that she won’t stop pursuing her testimony, as it has a real chance of freeing her from prison.

The anxiety that Clove has lived with ever since she went on the run fades from her for the rest of the summer, as she loves her life “wholly and freely now that it [i]s ending” (223). Clove doesn’t tell Jane anything about the most recent letter, as she’s worried that it will cause Jane to abandon her. Instead, she tries to enjoy the time that Jane’s presence has finally allowed her to have.

One day, Clove, Jane, and the children head to a music class that Clove had booked earlier in the summer. While they’re there, Clove shows the butcher’s photo to Jane and tells her that since he’s the only other person who can confirm who she truly is, she needs to go find him and see what it is that he wants to talk to her about. Afterward, Clove wonders if things really will work out in the end, as she has more now than she ever had before: a loving family, a best friend, and contact with her mother and her first love.