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Summary
Chapters 3-4
Chapter 3
In Edgartown, Maren goes to a grocery store, where she assists an elderly woman named Lydia Harmon in carrying her groceries. Together, they take the bus to Mrs. Harmon’s home. From the bus, Maren views an old man who seems to be looking for someone. When he spots Maren, he smiles knowingly before disappearing from view. Maren and Mrs. Harmon then arrive at Mrs. Harmon’s house, and Maren brings the groceries inside. Mrs. Harmon’s home is warm, pleasant, and comfortable, full of souvenirs and photographs that attest to a long and fulfilling life. An 88-year-old widow, Mrs. Harmon treats Maren with a kindness to which she is unaccustomed. After preparing breakfast for them both, Mrs. Harmon offers to teach Maren how to knit. However, she begins to feel tired and takes a nap in the living room, offering Maren a spare room. When Maren awakens from her own nap, she goes to the living room and sees that Mrs. Harmon has passed away peacefully in her sleep. Unsure of what to do, but having no other place to go, Maren returns to the spare room and falls asleep.
She awakens to the sound of movement coming from the living room. There, she sees the same elderly man whom she earlier spotted from the bus. He consumes Mrs. Harmon’s remains. Though scared, Maren is shocked to discover that there are other “eaters” like her, and she engages the old man in conversation, hoping to learn more. The man, who is missing part of his ear and most of his left index finger, introduces himself as Sully, an elderly eater who has crossed paths with many other eaters in the course of his long and eventful life. Eaters, he notes, can also be a danger to other eaters, and so most afflicted by the condition do not stick together for long. Maren is equally surprised to discover that Sully’s condition is different than her own, as he can sense when people are close to death and only consumes those who have already died. Sully prepares a large meal from the contents of Mrs. Harmon’s fridge, and after eating, Maren returns to the spare room to sleep for the night. When she awakens, Sully is gone, but he leaves her a note offering his assistance to her in the future, and a gift: a “flip book” depicting acrobats in a circus. Maren takes a bus to a Greyhound station, where an attendant recommends that she takes a bus to St. Louis as the first step of her voyage to her father in Minnesota.
Chapter 4
On the bus to St. Louis, Maren daydreams about her father, whom she imagines in an idealized fashion. Once she arrives, she realizes that she doesn’t have enough money to get a bus ticket to Minnesota, as she has used too much of her money taking the unnecessary trip to Pennsylvania to see her mother. Following the advice of a taxi driver, she walks up to a local college campus and attempts to hitchhike. Samantha, a college student driving to Minnesota, offers Maren a ride in exchange for gas money. They have a silent, awkward journey, and the girl is frustrated to discover that Maren only has $15. When Maren needs to use the restroom, they stop at a Walmart along the highway. When Maren returns to the parking lot, she sees that the girl has left without her, leaving her rucksack behind. With nowhere else to go, she returns to Walmart, where she sees a belligerently drunk man wearing boxers and a cowboy hat harass a woman. A young man in green who works in the store intervenes, inviting the man to take their fight outside and escorting him to the back of the store. Maren is surprised, as there is no exit in the back of a Walmart store. Hungry and without money, she shoplifts a can of chickpeas and a sandwich. As she exits the store, her shoplifting is noticed by another employee, a young man named Andy who promises not to report Maren for her theft. Noticing that she is on her own and has no place to stay, Andy tells her to wait for him until the end of his shift. Wandering the aisles to kill time, she sees the boy in green again and notices that he is wearing a Stetson cowboy hat, which he didn’t have before.
At the end of Andy’s shift, they sit in his car, and he gives her a bag of snacks. As they chat, she learns that Andy attends a local community college and lives by himself in a small apartment in order to escape his abusive father. Aware of the danger that she poses to him, Maren grows apprehensive as Andy gets closer to her, and after he leans in to kiss her, she eats him. Stumbling out of the car, she feels both guilt for her actions and terror that someone might have observed them. Distraught and suicidal, she runs into the highway and is almost killed by an oncoming truck until she is pushed out of the way by Lee, the young Walmart employee wearing green. Another “eater,” Lee admits to Maren that he killed and ate the drunk man in the cowboy hat. After assuring her that he was the only witness of her consumption of Andy, they leave together in the drunk man’s car.
Analysis
Maren’s trip to reunite with Janelle is a failure, as she cannot bring herself to confront her mother and upend her life any further. Shortly after, however, she meets the kind Mrs. Harmon, who for a very brief but happy moment becomes something of a surrogate grandmother for Maren. In the few hours they spend together, each offers something valuable to the other: Maren keeps the lonely Mrs. Harmon company, and Mrs. Harmon, in turn, gives Maren a feeling of security and comfort which she cannot receive from her own family. Mrs. Harmon’s home represents, for Maren, a pleasant ordinariness which her cannibalistic tendencies have prevented her from experiencing. Maren has spent her whole life moving from place to place, never setting down roots or growing too attached to any home that she will likely have to quickly leave someday. Maren and Janelle have learned to live sparse lives, as both are accustomed to rapidly packing up all their belongings into a single suitcase within an hour and moving on as a result of Maren’s cannibalism. Mrs. Harmon, in contrast, has lived in her home for many decades, filling it with cherished mementos, nostalgic souvenirs, and photographs of her loved ones. Maren examines, for example, a trophy granted to the late Mr. Harmon by the Classical Society of the University of Pennsylvania for his writing, and she is overcome by a strong desire to similarly “earn something beautiful” that she could hold onto for the rest of her life. Walking around Mrs. Harmon’s home, Maren catches a glimpse of a long, happy, and fulfilled life that she believes is out of reach for her. Further, Mrs. Harmon gives Maren a taste of what it is to have a family, treating her with great warmth, cooking for her, and offering to teach her how to knit.
Unfortunately for Maren, this pleasant escape from the realities of her own difficult life is brief, as Mrs. Harmon passes away in her sleep, leaving her alone yet again. Shortly after, Maren is introduced to Sully, an elderly man who serves as a stark contrast to Mrs. Harmon. While Mrs. Harmon has spent her twilight years in the comfort and warmth of a long and happy life, Sully lives on the periphery of society, using his wiles and street-smarts to stay alive in a hostile world. Maren compares him to an alley cat, bearing the scars of a tough life spent on the streets, quite unlike Mrs. Harmon’s pampered indoor cat, Puss. Though Sully has little in common with Mrs. Harmon other than age, he also serves, at this point in the story, as something of a surrogate family for Maren. Experienced in rough living and escaping detection, he offers to help Maren develop the skills she will need to survive as an “eater” who cannot expect to enjoy either professional or social stability. While Mrs. Harmon represents, for Maren, an idyllic vision of ordinary life that seems inaccessible to her, Sully represents a more realistic, if less appealing, vision of what Maren can expect to face in life.
In these chapters, Maren learns a good deal about what it means to be an eater. Previously, she thought she was the only eater in the world. After meeting Sully, she learns that there are many others who share her condition, including both men and women. While she is relieved to learn that she is not alone, Maren also learns that there are important differences between eaters. While her cannibalistic urges are compulsive and uncontrollable, possessing her almost unconsciously, Sully claims that he has the additional ability to detect people who are close to death and therefore only consumes the deceased. After meeting Lee in a remote Walmart on her journey to Minnesota, Maren realizes that there are more eaters in the world than she had previously imagined, and she even begins to wonder if she has known other eaters in the past and failed to detect them, like a former teacher who gave her a funny feeling one day when they were alone together in a classroom.
