Chapter 56 Summary and Analysis

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Summary

Chapter 56 is a quiet, introspective chapter that departs from the novel's present-day action to focus entirely on Julia's memories of her childhood with her mother, Anita. The chapter opens with Julia's blunt acknowledgment that not everything about her upbringing was horrible—a statement that carries weight given the difficult relationship depicted elsewhere in the novel. She then catalogs the small, shared rituals that made up their daily life together.

Julia recalls watching television programs with her mother, including Fantasy Island, Emergency!, and late-night local access shows featuring troubled people performing karaoke. They would walk to Symphony Lake to feed stale brioche to the ducks. At home, they would heat olive oil in the microwave and comb it through their hair to prevent split ends, and they would flip through the Sears catalog together, choosing the most desirable objects on every page. They shared rolls of Life Savers, winter jackets, and hair conditioner. They also shared a mutual obsession with a woman who lived in the third-floor apartment across the street—a woman who had furnished her living room with a full set of inflatable pool furniture instead of a regular sofa and chairs.

The chapter's emotional center is the ritual of kitchen dancing. When Anita came home from work, Julia could feel something good in the air her mother brought with her from outside. They would begin preparing a recipe together—brownies or banana pudding—because, as Julia reflects, there always needed to be a context to get them in the same room. The cooking would quickly fall by the wayside as her mother, nerves stripped from a day at work and an evening of looking after a child, would begin singing along to the music. Julia would join in, and if the right song came on—a song that had to fit an inarticulable formula, the right balance of whimsy and heartbreak, earnestness and stamina, passion in the vocals but not so much that it was unseemly—they would both begin to dance.

They danced to full albums, including The Supremes A' Go-Go, Runaround Sue, and Hunky Dory. When Julia was small, Anita would lift her into her arms, and Julia remembers the hollow of her mother's collarbones smelling like sweat and sugar and something else—something she would never find again. They would shimmy, twirl, and lunge across the kitchen, sometimes laughing uncontrollably but just as often with studied, sacrosanct seriousness. Her mother moved with an athletic grace, as if it were her job, as if there were nobody else in the room, as if all this movement were going to get her somewhere. It was never clear to Julia whether she was welcome to come along or not, so she danced just as hard regardless, eyes squeezed shut, her tiny toddler body doing the Twist and waving her arms.

The chapter's pivotal memory comes when Anita, on one occasion, lifted Julia into the air and buried her face in Julia's belly. Julia remembers feeling loved then, wholeheartedly, loved just for existing.

The chapter closes with Julia's reflection that they had stopped dancing together at some point, but she could not remember which time was the last time. She kept doing it herself for a while, after they had gone their separate ways, and she has always wondered—and will always wonder—if her mother did the same.

Key Events

• Julia reflects that not everything about her childhood with her mother was horrible, framing the chapter as a counterweight to the novel's more difficult depictions of their relationship.

• She enumerates the shared domestic rituals: watching television together, feeding ducks at Symphony Lake, olive oil hair treatments, and browsing the Sears catalog.

• She describes their shared possessions and their mutual obsession with a neighbor's inflatable pool furniture.

• The chapter details the kitchen dancing ritual, including the specific albums they danced to and the inarticulable criteria for the