56 pages • 1 hour read
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Alice and John are ordering ice cream; Alice tries to order vanilla, like John, but he tells her that she likes chocolate, so she says that’s fine, she’ll have something chocolate. John is annoyed by this, but Alice doesn’t understand why.
They sit by the river and eat their ice cream. John asks Alice what month it is; Alice knows it’s spring, but she is unable to tell him precisely. He asks when Anna’s birthday is; she tells him that Anna’s birthday is in the spring, but when he corrects her, she goes back to watching the geese. John continues asking her questions; unable to answer them, she asks why they don’t “focus on the things that really matter” (267), and he responds that he is trying. He asks if she still wants to be “here”; Alice tells him that she likes sitting there with him, and she isn’t done yet, showing him the ice cream cone that has “started to drip down the sides…onto her hand” (268). He tells her to take her time.
Alice’s support group is growing, but she is no longer involved or in touch, which worries the other members of the group. She is beginning to lose her language, unable to comprehend more than small amounts of text, and unable to type using the computer keyboard.
Looking at the folders on the screen, she opens up one titled “Butterfly.” In it is a letter with her “Butterfly” questions. The letter informs her that if she is unable to answer those questions, she is to take the “dignified” route, find her bottle of pills, swallow all of them, and go to sleep. She doesn’t remember writing it, but she reads it over and over again, fascinated by the letter. Finally, she heads upstairs to follow the instructions. However, when she gets upstairs, she is unable to remember what she was going to do; she goes back downstairs, reads the letter again, then returns upstairs to find the pills. However, as she’s looking for them John returns and asks what she’s doing. She cannot remember. John has her take her medication, then tells her to wait for him. She lays “down on the bed next to the former contents of the drawer and [closes] her eyes, feeling sad and proud, powerful and relieved” as she waits (273).
Some time later, John asks Alice to put on her robe, hood, and cap, as they need to leave for commencement, a word Alice doesn’t recognize. At first, she doesn’t trust John’s instructions, but when they encounter more people also dressed in commencement gowns, she remembers that she’s done this before. She vaguely recalls previous commencement ceremonies and listens patiently to the speakers. They then move to another building, where she is told that they are there to see Dan earn his Ph.D. She recognizes the energy of the students, but not Dan. Alice applauds him anyway, proud of the student she cannot remember.
Following the ceremony, Dan thanks her for coming, first in a short speech, then in a letter on which he has written the speech so that Alice can remember it. As Alice and John leave, at one point, John stops to say “Hi” to someone while Alice continues walking. For a moment, she becomes transfixed with a woman driving a car. Suddenly, she is yanked back and hits her head on the ground; a man has pulled her out of the way of the car. The woman in the car is shocked, apologetic, and thankful that Alice was pulled out of the way. The man, John, tells the woman they’re okay, and Alice walks “home with the kind stranger who [has] saved her life” (279).
Alice and John are on the Cape; Alice no longer recognizes either John or their house on the Cape, and she tells John that she wants to go home. John tells her they are home and continues drinking his drink and reading his book. She again tells him she wants to go home, and he again tells her that they are home. She gives up but continues to wish that someone would take her home.
Later, “the man who [owns] the house” (282) tells her that he’s found her butterfly necklace. She tells him that it’s her mothers, and that they’re not supposed to play with it. He tells her that he talked to her mother, and that her mother is giving it to her; at first Alice doesn’t trust him, but then feels “a smug thrill rush through her” (282), thinking to herself that her sister Anne is going to be jealous.
On another day, Alice sits in front of the mirror in the bedroom and decides that the woman in the mirror is “ugly and old” and determines that the woman can’t be her (283). She concludes that something must be wrong with the mirrors. She finds paint in the bathroom and uses it to paint over all the mirrors in the house.
Still later, she and John sit together while he reads a book and drinks a drink. She picks up a book that she recognizes and says that she thinks she’s read the book before; John tells her that he and she actually wrote that book together. She looks at the cover, reads the names of the authors, and realizes that the man is John. For a moment, she remembers John, writing the book, and that she “used to be very smart” (284). She remembers all about her life and wants to tell him, but she is unable to find the words, so she simply says that she misses herself and “never planned to get like this,” to which he replies that he knows (285).
Alice is more gone than not by now, and the narrative style reflects this new perspective: with the exception of commencement, we primarily get small snippets of her life, reflecting both her voluntary and involuntary decisions to live in the moment (e.g., in May, she asks John to focus on the things that matter, such as their being together; it is unclear if she is deliberately avoiding discussing New York or if she is unaware that’s his intent, but context suggests the latter). Her thoughts flitter from one to the next, like a butterfly. Her primary concern seems to be enjoying things in the moment, such as the geese in the park, which recalls Eric’s holiday party more than one year prior, when she had meant to ask John why everyone grew silent but was distracted by the beauty of the night.
The scene in the park recalls two separate events. First, Alice tries to order vanilla ice cream, but John corrects her and tells her she likes chocolate; this recalls the scene at Jerri’s when she insisted on ordering coffee. One might argue that she was trying to order coffee in an attempt to be closer to John, and his reaction represented his pushing her away, which would make her insistence representative of her desire to hold on; if that’s the case, then her acquiescence at the ice cream shop could be viewed as her acceptance of not only her fate but John’s decision to leave. Second, her inability to eat her ice cream without dripping suggests not only that she has lost things that were once second-nature to her—the previous spring, she was proud of her ability to eat a large cone without dripping using her own technique—but, because that technique was something she learned as a child, it also reflects her reversion to a childlike state of being.
In June, we get the anticlimactic culmination of the sleeping pills. Despite losing her BlackBerry, she stumbles upon the “Butterfly” letter and seems prepared to follow through with it. However, regardless of her willingness to do so, she is, at this point, wholly incapable, as she cannot hold the instructions long enough to carry through with the act. Her inability to remember what she was searching for when John comes in recalls several other similar moments earlier in the novel, one of which had remained unexplained; it also suggests that it is possible someone else found and hid her pills, perhaps simply afraid that she would take too many. Interestingly, she is given her medication by John, which satisfies the urge she could not remember. (It could be interpreted that John was aware of the letter or the pills, and his handing her medication is designed to serve that purpose.)
By now, Alice no longer remembers anyone’s name and often forgets a person’s connection to her, with the exception of John. Following commencement, though, and after nearly being hit by a car (and being yanked to the pavement instead), she loses this, as well. Alice now lives in a world where everything is entirely new, and each moment she must decide whether or not to trust the person trying to help her. Following commencement, she trusts John; on the Cape, however, she does not, presuming him to be just a strange man who owns a house in which she is being made to stay. It’s worth remembering that Alice is just fifty-one years old at this point; as she realized earlier in the novel, she could very well end up living in such a state for decades.
She does retain some connections, though. Continuing the theme of her reversion to childhood, she recognizes that the butterfly pendant is connected to her mother, but she does not know that her mother or sister have died. Like Lydia, though, John now feeds into Alice’s chosen reality: rather than reminding her that her mother is dead, a fact that would bring her pain each time it had to be repeated, John simply tells her that her mother is giving it to her. It is significant that he uses the present progressive tense, as well, indicative of the fact that her mother will likely be “giving it to her” for many years to come.
Similarly, Alice has a moment of lucidity when she recognizes the book that she wrote with John. She cannot understand the book, of course, but she still recognizes it, at first believing only that she’s read it before. This totem is enough to bring her back into the moment slightly, though, so that she can remember not only who her husband is, but who she used to be.
Plus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: