52 pages • 1 hour read
Justin TorresWe The Animals
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A 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 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Lina”
Paps leaves the family and Ma is despondent. She doesn’t go to work, or cook for the boys, or eat. The boys begin to eat things that have sat forgotten in the refrigerator. Ma’s supervisor at the beer factory, Lina, calls to check in. They can’t hear each other, so Lina comes over.
When Lina, a tall, stout Chinese woman, arrives at the house, the boys tell her she is too big to get in the door, but she manages to push her way inside. She brings a brown grocery bag and tells the boys not to open it yet. Manny tells her that Ma is sleeping.
The brothers grab the bag of groceries and tear it open, shoving bread into their mouths and drinking out of the milk carton. They stare at Lina while they do this, challenging her to stop the chaos. Then Ma rushes into the room and hugs her supervisor. Lina wipes Ma’s tears with a tissue. She begins to plant kisses all over Ma’s face, and then kisses and holds her lips against Ma’s. The room is silent.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Other Locusts”
Manny, Joel, and the narrator find their way to Old Man’s house. He lives down a dirt road that is almost impassable, even on bicycle, but they are able to get over the hedge and into his garden. They begin pulling the plants out of the ground. The Old Man is on the porch, and calls the boys “[a]nimals” and “[l]ocusts” (33).
Old Man comes down the porch steps and fixes the havoc the boys have wrought on his garden, pushing roots back into the ground. He takes the other vegetables that cannot be replanted and puts them on a table that sits on the porch:
Old Man spoke crooked and singsong—a Missouri accent, it turned out—and we didn’t understand half of the words he used, but locusts, the threat and possibility of locusts, seized our imaginations, and we made Old Man tell us about them over and over again until we understood (34).
The man describes locusts as dark things that swarm and eat leftover things according to their hierarchy: the great ones, the young ones, and the other ones. He talks to them about his youth in the Ozarks, and about how to treat “skeeter” bites. He calls the boys “castaways, stowaways, hideaways, fugitives, punks, city slickers, bastards” (35). Joel responds by telling Old Man that their mother is dead. Old Man doesn’t seem to register this, as he is also chopping the vegetables for what the narrator realizes will be a salad.
When Old Man goes inside to get a bowl, Joel plays with an old wiffle-ball bat they find on the porch. Manny and Joel get into an intense and physical fight over Joel’s comment about their mom, who is alive and back at work; it’s Paps who is gone. Manny says that he is with another woman. Old Man comes out in the midst of the altercation, and puts the bowl back in the house, withdrawing the offer without saying a word. He tells the boys to go.
The narrator still has questions for Old Man, including, “how come animals aren’t afraid of the dark?” (37). It seems counterintuitive to the narrator that little animals that are so scared during the day would love the night. The boys then begin their trip home.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Talk To Me”
Manny, Joel, and the narrator are at the kitchen table while Ma cooks. She cuts her finger and begins to suck on the wound as the phone rings. She tells them that it’s their father, but just continues stirring the soup. The brothers don’t know what to do. They feel very antsy. Ma puts the soup into three bowls and puts the meager portions in front of them. They’re excited by the prospect of food, but also by the ringing phone. The narrator notes that they haven’t heard from Paps in weeks. Despite their desire to answer the phone, they have a greater desire to eat. When they’re done, they ask Ma for more, but there is no more. They listen to the phone ring and scrounge their empty bowls for any missed sustenance. Regarding Paps, the narrator offers:
He was somewhere, at some phone, in a phone booth, or sitting on the edge of a someone else’s bed […] and he was alone, or there were others, but every single ring brought him home, brought him right there before us (40).
They become accustomed to the ringing, as if it is a comfortable sound that has always been there. After 45 minutes, Ma gets up from the table, picks up the receiver, and then hangs it back up again. For a minute, there is quiet. Then the phone begins to trill again. When Manny, who is worried that his father might be having a health issue, goes to get it, Ma picks his bowl up and throws it across the room. Manny sulks in his room while Joel and the narrator play in the crawlspace.
Paps does finally come home, and he and Ma have a knockdown, drag-out fight that sends the two boys deeper into the crawlspace. The two boys hear either Ma or Paps get in the car and leave. Joel and the narrator continue to play. They find an old phone and pretend to be their mother and father. One answers the phone, while the other talks on the other end of the line. Some of the short exchanges are funny, some serious. During the last one, they end up confused: “So what are we going to do,” the narrator asks (Torres leaves it ambiguous as to which parent the narrator is playing) (43). Joel responds, “Well, we’ll do whatever it takes, I guess” (43). The narrator replies by asking, “What does it take?” (43). Joel says that he isn’t sure yet. He plays with the telephone cord. Neither of them have a conclusion to a question larger than perhaps any member of the family is capable of answering.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
At the beginning of this group of chapters, Paps has left Ma. She is so despondent that she cannot get it together to go to work or feed her children. Manny, Joel, and the narrator are forced to scrounge for scraps in the refrigerator. When Lina comes to comfort Ma, they rip into the groceries she brings like hungry animals. Ma is a self-centered person who can only focus on her own feelings, which contributes to the desperation of the boys, whose hunger is driving them crazy. There is a moment of homoerotic tension between Lina and Ma in this scene, as Lina’s caring for Ma seems to morph into something more passion-driven. That the boys are silent may speak to Torres’s further zoomorphism of them, as same-sex relationships in the animal world are uncommon, and the boys, portrayed as animals, do not understand what they’re seeing.
The visit to Old Man provides the brothers with a respite from Ma’s depression. However, as they yank vegetables from the garden, try them, and then toss them aside, their hunger takes on a tone that seems more about destruction and pestilence than sating need. Old Man classifies them as locusts—insects that come in swarms and destroy vegetation. The boys lay waste to everything in their path and perhaps do so because they need an outlet for their frustrations about Paps leaving and Ma’s retreat into herself. Old Man doesn’t take kindly to Manny and Joel fighting in front of his house and asks them to leave before they get to eat the salads he’s making for them. In this way, we can perceive the boys as not being civilized enough to be offered proper, human food.
When Paps finally tries to get back in touch, Ma lets the phone ring and ring. Even if she won’t let the boys answer the phone, the narrator feels like the ringing brings him closer to Paps. Here, Paps is giving anthropomorphic traits; he effectively becomes the phone, thereby dehumanizing his character. When Paps does come home, the narrator and Joel retreat into the crawlspace, acting out what their mother and father might say in a phone conversation. This functions both as a rite of passage for coming of age and might also be seen as foreshadowing the narrator’s burgeoning sexuality, if we’re to take the narrator as playing the role of Ma and thereby being attracted to a man.
