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Summary
Chapters 15-18
Chapter 15, Unsolicited Advice
As she goes about her daily tasks, it seems like everyone she runs into has comments to make about Elizabeth’s pregnancy: people stop her at the bank, at the grocery store, at the gas station, and the library. A priest congratulates her on her pregnancy as a gift from God, but Elizabeth flatly tells him it was a gift from Calvin. She chooses a new inscription for Calvin’s damaged tombstone and wishes things had turned out differently. At Dr. Mason’s office, the receptionist insists on husband-related paperwork which Elizabeth can’t produce. After this ordeal she has her first prenatal checkup with Dr. Mason, who remembers her and speaks kindly to her about Calvin’s death. Dr. Mason understands Elizabeth’s reluctance to become a mother, and is very surprised when she tells him she’s been erging during her pregnancy. Despite her protestations, he insists she returns to rowing with him after she gives birth.
Chapter 16, Labor
Elizabeth has been reading to Six-Thirty and is excited he can understand 391 words. This chapter is written from the dog’s perspective, who’s amused that Elizabeth thinks 391 words are all he knows. As they walk together to the library, Elizabeth discusses how she’s monitoring her urine and her hair protein with Six-Thirty. The dog is already agitated because, unbeknownst to Elizabeth, her water has broken. What Elizabeth mistakes for hunger pains are actually pre-labor contractions. The narrative jumps forward in time, as Dr. Mason hands Elizabeth a baby girl and tells her she’ll make a fine rower someday. Elizabeth checks herself out of hospital the next morning, despite the nurses’ horrified reactions. She tells them to tell Dr. Mason that she needed to erg, and quickly heads home. When she gets there, Six-Thirty is extremely relieved to see her and to meet the baby. Elizabeth tells him it’s 9:22AM, so he assumes the child’s name is Nine-Twenty-Two.
Chapter 17, Harriet Sloane
The baby won’t stop crying no matter what Elizabeth does, and she’s exhausted. She’s getting no sleep, and former colleagues like Boryweitz are still showing up and asking for her help revising their work for Hastings. Harriet Sloane discovers Elizabeth asleep on her laboratory floor when she passes out from exhaustion. She’s startled by the lab equipment Elizabeth has all around her, and is even more alarmed when Elizabeth makes them coffee using a series of beakers and tubes. The coffee, however, is surprisingly delicious, and the two women begin to chat. Harriet listens as Elizabeth confesses her feelings of inadequacy as a mother and her fears that she might be terrible at it. She reassures her that when she had her first child she felt very similarly, and tells Elizabeth that she needs to make sure to take some time for herself every day.
Chapter 18, Legally Mad
This chapter begins from Harriet’s perspective, as she reflects on the fact that she’d never been very pretty. She thinks, sadly, that her own relationship with her husband is not nearly as pleasant or as loving as Elizabeth’s was with Calvin: in fact, she finds Mr. Sloane revolting. She’s particularly horrified by his casual sexual commentary about every woman he sees. She’s desperate to help her new friend, but Elizabeth is too shy and introverted to call her. Back at the Zott household, Elizabeth reflects that telling the nurse she wanted to name her newborn daughter “Mad” might have been a bad idea. However, changing Mad's legal name to Madeline requires Elizabeth to provide a marriage certificate between her and Calvin to the people at City Hall. Deciding against it, she tells Six-Thirty that the baby can stay “legally Mad” but that they’ll call her “Madeline.” True to her name, the baby cries every time Elizabeth gets a visitor from Hastings. Desperate, she calls Harriet for help, and Harriet leaps into action immediately.
Analysis
This section spends a lot of time on the idea of appearances being deceiving and reflects on the difficulty many people have in accepting that things might be more complex than face value suggests. For example, one of the most important events in this section is the change Elizabeth makes to Calvin’s gravestone. Rather than the more conventional epitaph she’s chosen before, she asks to have a diagram of the oxytocin molecule engraved on it when the church replaces the damaged stone. Oxytocin is a hormone and neuropeptide produced in the brains of mammals. It plays a significant role in social bonding, sexual reproduction, childbirth, and the period after childbirth; so much so that it’s often referred to as the "love hormone." People who see the engraving and who aren’t familiar with how chemicals are represented would have difficulty understanding what it means. They might not understand why Elizabeth had chosen it, and might even dismiss the choice as unfeeling or strange. However, choosing the “love hormone’s” chemical diagram as Calvin’s epitaph reflects how Elizabeth saw their relationship. She and Calvin understood what lay between them, even if other people looked at them and saw something completely different. In Calvin’s death, as during his life, Elizabeth refuses to make conventional choices when unconventional ones are more meaningful and appropriate.
It’s not just Elizabeth's unkind colleagues at Hastings who make assumptions about people based on surface-level assessments. Before she gets to know Elizabeth, Harriet Sloane is sure that the reason she and Calvin fell in love was because of Elizabeth's beauty and Calvin’s fame. It took her a long time to see that they were, in fact, almost freakishly similar people, like “identical twins separated at birth who accidentally stumble upon each other in a foxhole.” Even though Harriet and her own husband seemed to be much better physically matched than Calvin and Elizabeth, their relationship is actively unpleasant. Harriet hasn’t ever been considered a beauty herself, and her husband’s insistence on making sexual comments about every woman he sees infuriates her. Harriet feels the lack of beauty keenly in her own life, and is at first irritated that Elizabeth seems not to notice her own good looks. Although Harriet is respectably married, her love life is miserably empty. Because of this, her perception of beauty is also laced with a sense of practical cynicism. Unlike everyone else in her immediate vicinity, she doesn’t believe beauty is the most important thing a woman can possess. She sees that Elizabeth’s looks are actually quite burdensome to her, and that people treat her unkindly because they assume others treat her disproportionately well.
For Elizabeth, beauty is the backdrop against which her intellect and character are measured. Everything she does is filtered through the lens of being a young attractive woman. Because of how she looks, her colleagues at Hastings, the nurses at Dr. Mason’s office, and even strangers on the street make assumptions about her that have nothing to do with reality. Being an attractive woman exposes her to objectification and makes everyone around her take her intellect less seriously. For Harriet, a lack of beauty reinforces a sense of invisibility and underappreciation, whereas for Elizabeth, beauty can sometimes hinder her scientific career.
The other physical obstacle to Elizabeth’s career as a scientist also plays an important part in this section. Mad's birth is a major shift for Elizabeth, as it thrusts her into motherhood—quite literally—before she feels ready for it. Her daughter’s birth is as unexpected as her conception, as labor begins early when Six-Thirty and Elizabeth are out for a walk. After this unwanted and disruptive beginning, Elizabeth also has to endure the whole procedure of birth without anaesthesia, as she can’t afford painkillers. This detail is an unpleasant moment of foreshadowing for the hardships she’ll face as a single mother. There’s no way she can escape the reality of her situation, whether it’s during Mad’s birth or when she gets home with her constantly screaming daughter. She simply can’t afford to do anything but try and hang on. She quickly begins to feel trapped by her newborn daughter, especially when she returns home from the hospital and Mad begins to cry unendingly. Although their relationship begins as a painful, stressful rush, it quickly becomes loving; however, it takes a lot of bolstering from Harriet and Six-Thirty for Elizabeth to regain some sanity (and get some sleep).
