43 pages • 1 hour read
So B. It
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Chapters 21-23
Chapter 21 Summary: “Ow”
Ruby calls Bernie and Heidi listens as Bernie tells her that Mama died in her sleep after a particularly bad headache. Heidi feels intense guilt as well as shock for not having listened or taken Bernie seriously on the earlier call when Bernie told Heidi to come home. Ruby takes Heidi to her home again to let her bathe and go to bed. When Heidi wakes, she tears the pages from her notebook, no longer caring about what she knows and does not know. She says Mama’s words to herself: “Done, done, done” (227).
Chapter 22 Summary: “Done”
Heidi spends the next several days at Ruby’s and Roy’s house, not wanting to talk or care about the funeral arrangements for Mama. Roy and Bernie decide to send Mama’s body to Liberty for burial there. Heidi comforts herself by wrapping up in a quilt and lying in the hammock in her nightgown.
The day before the casket arrives, Ruby suggests that Heidi clean up and offers to cut her hair for the service. Heidi goes to the mirror and begins to chop at her own hair, angry and upset. She cries. Ruby hears and finishes the haircut on the porch. She tells Heidi to leave the quilt behind to see the result; in the mirror, Heidi is “some other girl. […] Some girl with a new haircut and no mama” (233). Ruby tells Heidi that it is okay to not know if she likes the new haircut or not.
Chapter 23 Summary: “So Be It”
Heidi speaks at Mama’s brief graveside service instead of a minister. She plans to read a brief list entitled “Who She Was” but spontaneously speaks instead about Mama’s several names and on the word soof. Soof was more than Elliot’s name for Mama; when Mama said it, she was referring to love. Heidi places Mama’s teacup and a pack of her favorite candy, Jujyfruits—green ones removed—on the casket before it is lowered. Heidi recalls how Mama always offered tea.
Roy and Ruby offer to allow Heidi to live with them after Mama dies, but Heidi opts to return to Reno and Bernie. She starts school at the junior high and continues friendship with Zander. Bernie tries giving up coffee and learning to cook better meals. Heidi’s ability with lucky guesses and chance disappears. She returns to Liberty for the placing of a headstone at Mama’s grave. Ruby has a successful pregnancy and gives birth to a little girl; Heidi suggests the name Aurora. Back home in Reno, when Heidi buys a box of Jujyfruits on a trip to the market, she discovers how Mama probably decided to name her: “The name of the company that makes Jujyfruits is written on the in small black letters indie a red diamond. Heide. It’s not spelled the same, ending with an e instead of an I, but even so I’m pretty sure it would sound the same if you said it out loud” (242). Though Heidi realizes that she will never prove this speculation, it no longer bothers her to not know, and she goes to help Bernie with Ruby’s pot roast recipe.
Chapters 21-23 Analysis
The novel’s conflicts resolve in these three concluding chapters. Heidi moves through stages of grief in the days after Mama dies, and Roy and Ruby support her as best they can. Heidi tries to make a sheltering cocoon of the quilt and hammock, but eventually Ruby gently pulls her out of it to prepare for Mama’s graveside service. The symbol of the protective cocoon complements the transformation Heidi makes as she chops off her own hair, changing her appearance in an attempt to feel different from the girl with ever-tangled hair that she used to be. Indeed, Roy and others emphasize this coming-of-age moment by commenting on Heidi’s changed appearance, saying that she looks older.
The cutting of the hair prepares Heidi symbolically to attend the rite of burial for her mother and to speak in her honor. Now changed and mature, Heidi grasps for the first time what soof meant to her mother: love. She talks about others’ names for her mother and the way that all the names befit Mama. The teacup, a symbol of soothing throughout the book, goes into Mama’s grave with her; now roles and reversed and Heidi places it there in a symbolic attempt to soothe Mama and be her caretaker.
Heidi’s maturity leads her to return to Bernie instead of staying with Roy and Ruby. The author alludes to hope in everyone’s future when Ruby has a healthy little girl, “a baby they name Aurora at [Heidi’s] suggestion” (241). Finally, Heidi’s coming-of-age leads her to choose against perseverating on questions to which she may never learn the answer, unlike her character earlier in the novel. When faced with the new questions about her name possibly being inspired by the Jujyfruits label, Heidi decides to let the questions go in favor of spending time helping Bernie: “I tossed the yellow box aside” (242).
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