46 pages • 1 hour read
Jessica Anya BlauMary Jane
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Mary Jane’s meatloaf dinner is a big success. She is surprised by the animated conversation during the meal compared to her silent dinners at home. During dessert, Sheba broaches the topic of some additional therapy for Jimmy: “‘Richard,’ Sheba said, ‘I just think if he’s going to eat so much sugar, which can’t be good for him, he should be allowed a little Mary Jane as well’” (82). Misunderstanding, Mary Jane thinks Sheba is suggesting a sexual encounter for her and Jimmy. She is surprised and relieved to learn that Mary Jane is a slang term for marijuana. Richard hedges and says they might try a controlled marijuana experiment at a later date.
Mary Jane takes Izzy upstairs for a bath before bed. Sheba comes along to help. She confides that if Jimmy can stay away from drugs for five years, she would like to have a baby. The two sing as they get Izzy ready for bed. The entire experience makes Mary Jane feel happy and secure. Since it’s now after dark, someone needs to drive her home. Sheba immediately volunteers, and Jimmy agrees to go along. They park a block away from Mary Jane’s house, where Jimmy produces a joint and begins to smoke. So does Sheba. They offer the marijuana to Mary Jane, but she declines, terrified of being caught with illegal drugs.
Sheba asks about Mary Jane’s family and tells Jimmy about the girl’s involvement in the church choir. He says that Mary Jane has a gorgeous voice. This compliment pleases and amazes her because her parents never give positive feedback. Then, Sheba and Jimmy start singing gospel tunes while Mary Jane harmonizes. As they sit singing in the car, they are startled by the appearance of Beanie Jones at their window. Flustered, Mary Jane says that Sheba and Jimmy are friends from out of town and they were practicing together for choir. Sheba guns the engine, and the car peels away from the curb. Everyone laughs at their near escape from Beanie, who might have recognized them.
When they arrive at Mary Jane’s house, Sheba and Jimmy are impressed and think that the girl’s family is rich. This is something Mary Jane has never considered. Jimmy came from an abusive, impoverished family in West Virginia, while Sheba was put to work as an actress at an early age. Her mother favored her two brothers and ignored Sheba. When Mary Jane gets inside her house, her mother is waiting to give her the third degree. Mary Jane lies and says that Mrs. Cone is still very sick and that the family prays before meals.
Chapter 6 Summary
The next day, Beanie arrives on the Cones’ doorstep bearing an angel food cake. She wants to deliver it personally, but Mary Jane says that nobody is home. Beanie asks if the couple she saw in the car was Sheba and Jimmy. Mary Jane denies this, saying the two are old friends of the Cones and that they’ve now departed. Izzy knows enough to keep quiet about the secret. After getting rid of Beanie, Mary Jane and Izzy head to the store. Tonight’s dinner will be orange chicken. This is Mary Jane’s most ambitious recipe, and she follows her mother’s instructions to the letter.
That evening, Bonnie breezes into the kitchen while Mary Jane cooks, and she admires the girl’s culinary skills. Somehow, the conversation turns to Richard. Bonnie says she was first attracted to him because he was in a rock band in college. Bonnie’s Presbyterian parents in Oklahoma weren’t pleased with Richard because he is Jewish, and they no longer speak to their daughter. Mary Jane wonders if her parents would find the Cones less objectionable since they are only half Jewish.
When Mary Jane serves dinner, the atmosphere seems unusually tense. Richard is scowling at Jimmy for some reason, but everyone relaxes as they eat. The entire group enthusiastically praises Mary Jane’s cooking. Jimmy waits until dessert before confessing that he used heroin that day. Sheba is furious at him. Even though he repeatedly apologizes, the two begin a screaming match. Mary Jane rushes Izzy upstairs. As the two girls listen tensely, they hear the sound of objects being thrown and glass shattering. Izzy says that she is afraid to be alone and wants Mary Jane to stay for the night.
Mary Jane goes into the Cones’ bedroom to call her mother. Lying again, she says that Mrs. Cone is very sick. Her mother concludes that it must be cancer and agrees to let Mary Jane stay. She then goes downstairs to inform everyone that she will be staying overnight. Sheba generously tells her to pick out and keep the best nightgown Mary Jane can find in her closet. Once Mary Jane retreats upstairs, the fight resumes among the adults. In Sheba’s room, she finds a luxuriously soft cotton nightgown to wear. Then, she gets Izzy settled for the night. By this time, the yelling has stopped, and the smell of marijuana drifts upstairs. The girls share a moment of closeness: “‘I love you, Mary Jane.’ Izzy scooted in closer to me [...] She breathed deeply and slowly, as if she were releasing something from far inside her body. ‘I love you too,’ I whispered” (123-24).
Chapter 7 Summary
The following morning, Mary Jane gets downstairs before anyone is awake. All the bookshelves have been emptied, with the books thrown around the living room. Since Mary Jane and Izzy were going to organize the books alphabetically anyway, this isn’t a major problem. However, the kitchen is a catastrophe. Broken plates are scattered all over the floor, and the packaged food has been pulled down from the cupboards and thrown everywhere. Mary Jane hastily cleans the floor before anybody steps on broken glass and tries to find something edible for herself and Izzy, who now has also come down.
Shortly afterward, Jimmy arrives and apologizes for the previous night’s scene. He breaks down in tears as Mary Jane and Izzy both try to comfort him. Mary Jane has never seen a man cry before and is very uncomfortable. Mary Jane is speechless, but Izzy says, “JIMMY! We’re not mad! We love you. We’re not angry” (133). Eventually, the rest of the adults drift downstairs, and everyone apologizes for the mess. Sheba offers to replace the broken dishes. Bonnies says that the set was foisted on her by her mother to force her values on her daughter. She doesn’t regret that they are broken.
Later, Jimmy helps the girls with their alphabetical book project. They make a game of it. For each letter of the alphabet, someone has to name a song beginning with the same letter. Bonnie joins in. When they get to the letter V, Mary Jane teaches the group a Camp Fire Girl song called “Kumala Vista.” That night, the entire group goes out to eat at a fancy restaurant, with Sheba and Jimmy wearing disguises. Just as they enter, they find Beanie and her husband walking out. Sheba puts on an act, pretending that she and Jimmy are a rich couple from Newport, Rhode Island. After the Joneses leave, Sheba keeps up her act, making everybody laugh at her snobbish accent. Afterward, the group drops Mary Jane off at her home. She says, “I thought I might weep. I wanted to stay with everyone [...] I wanted to wake up in that house, where I felt like I existed as a real person with thoughts and feelings and abilities” (145).
Chapters 5-7 Analysis
In this segment, the focus shifts away from Mary Jane to the other people in the Cone house as she continues to absorb impressions about them. She is again struck by the contrast between their eccentricities and the strict, orderly life of the Dillards. As Mary Jane learns the backstory of each person, she begins to see the issues that all of them have had to face. In these chapters, the emphasis shifts to the theme of Journeys of Self-Discovery. Theoretically, Jimmy is the only person facing such a journey as he tries to get past his addictive behavior. However, Bonnie, Sheba, and Jimmy all have demons to fight.
Mary Jane gets a brief sense of what Bonnie’s life might have been like while growing up in a narrow-minded family in Oklahoma. In some ways, her experience parallels Mary Jane’s relationship with her parents. Both families consist of religiously intolerant Presbyterians. Mr. Dillard has already made derogatory comments about Richard’s religion. Bonnie says that her parents disowned her outright for daring to marry a Jewish man.
Later, Mary Jane learns about Sheba’s childhood difficulties as well. Her mother pushed her into show business at an early age but criticized her constantly. Sheba’s brothers received preferential treatment simply because they were boys. Although she never had to face any financial difficulties, Sheba was prevented from making her own choices in life. Jimmy also struggled through a difficult upbringing. He was raised by an emotionally abusive mother and grandmother in a dirt-poor community in West Virginia.
As Mary Jane observes early in the novel, being the spouse of an addict can be just as stressful as being an addict oneself. Sheba is constantly afraid that Jimmy will relapse, so she carries a heavy load of emotional tension. When he inevitably falls off the wagon, she explodes. Her emotional outburst is fueled by the belief that she is going to lose the man she loves to drugs. Despite the upheaval that Sheba and Jimmy cause to dishes, pantry goods, and shelved books, they manage to recognize the value they both place on saving their relationship.
Mary Jane is not a party to these epiphanies. She has retreated upstairs to hide with Izzy. From her perspective, all she knows is that the noise has stopped and the smell of marijuana has drifted upstairs. During this overnight lull, Mary Jane has yet another chance to consider the contrast between the expressive power couple and her emotionally repressed parents. The implication is that negative emotions may be frightening, but they are sometimes a necessary escape valve.
In the aftermath of the fight, the book shifts its emphasis back to how Mary Jane is Choosing an Identity for herself. She doesn’t condemn Jimmy and Sheba for their behavior as her mother might do. She simply goes downstairs the following morning to pick up the pieces. Once everyone assembles again and patches up their differences, they seem to forge a closer bond with each other, which marks the first appearance of the theme of Found Family. As has been true throughout the novel, emotional ties are strengthened through sharing food and song. When Mary Jane cooks breakfast, everyone is grateful for her care. She again receives praise for something that comes naturally to her. In the process, she begins to see her cooking as an expression of love.
In Mrs. Dillard’s kitchen, the emphasis is always placed on precision in getting a recipe right. Love never becomes the magic ingredient. Similarly, she plays guitar at church because this is expected, not because she derives joy from singing. Unlike her mother, Mary Jane loves to sing, and she is fortunate enough to have landed in a house with two professional singers who do too. Once harmony is restored in the Cone house, harmony quite literally comes to the fore in the songs everyone sings while organizing the disheveled bookshelves. Mary Jane frequently mentions that she sings harmonies in counterpoint to everybody else. She is, in fact, the essential element that restores the house’s harmony during the stressful months of Jimmy’s recovery.
