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Summary
Chapters 27-29
Chapter 27, All About Me
During a kindergarten class, Mad’s teacher Mrs. Mudford introduces a family tree project titled "All About Me.” The children are supposed to have their parents help them make detailed family trees. Mudford tries to get the children to guess who the project will be about. During the guessing, Mad contradicts Miss Mudford and tells the other children that people are animals. Miss Mudford furiously tells the class that this isn’t true, but Mad’s statement has already caused chaos. Back at home, Mad talks to Harriet about the incident, but Harriet deflects Mad’s scientific accuracy by telling her about diplomacy and respect for authority. The fact that Mad doesn’t believe in God makes Harriet uncomfortable, though she isn’t sure why. Harriet’s similarly uncomfortable with the family tree project, finding it invasive. She thinks about Elizabeth angrily saying she won’t play along with what Lebensmal wants from her, even if her ratings are bad.
Chapter 28, Saints
Mad goes to the library and looks for information about Calvin’s past, but doesn’t find much. A Reverend, whom we later discover is Calvin’s Reverend Wakely, overhears and suggests looking for a boy’s home named after a saint if Mad wants to find out about Calvin. He talks to Mad about the family tree project, and they discuss fairy godmothers, Catholics being unable to divorce, leaving the past in the past, and the idea that it might be better if the Reverend calls the boys’ home instead of Mad. When she shows him Calvin’s name, he’s startled, realizing she’s the daughter of Elizabeth and Calvin. The narrative flashes back to their academic past, where Evans and Wakely began a correspondence that started as an argument but became a friendship. He remembers Calvin’s funeral, and Mad shows him a photo of herself, Elizabeth, and Six-Thirty. It makes him terribly sad. Before she leaves, she whispers something mysterious in his ear.
Chapter 29, Bonding
Here we find Elizabeth hosting her cooking show, ostensibly talking about cakes but really using the platform to teach about chemical bonds. She explains the atomic model through metaphors relating to marriage, and uses these metaphors to remind women of their value and educate them about the chemistry of cooking. During the live Q and A, an audience member called Mrs. Fillis works up the confidence to ask a question that shows she has a medical background. Elizabeth figures this out and tells her that it isn’t too late for her to go back to school. The room bursts into applause when someone calls out “Dr. Fillis, heart surgeon.” The narrator describes Mrs. Fillis’s sons sprawled in front of the TV at home, seeing their mother in a totally new light.
Analysis
Mad Zott is very precocious, and sometimes her unusual repository of knowledge and reasoning creates awkward situations. When Mad goes to kindergarten she’s already a lot more advanced than lots of other children her age. Socially she is somewhat behind, however, struggling to read cues that come from adults who don’t think like her mother and Harriet. When Mrs. Mudford explains the concept of the family tree project to her class, she isn’t expecting to have a debate about whether or not humans evolved from animals. Mad, however, is used to being able to ask explicitly what causes phenomena to happen, and when she insists that humans are animals it causes chaos. Mad's scientific understanding of the world clashes with Miss Mudford's traditional views. This is one of the few topics that Elizabeth finds challenging to talk about with Mad, as explaining faith doesn’t come naturally to her. Harriet struggles too, but her concerns come from her own vaguely religious upbringing. She’s flustered when Mad tells her that this event “wasn’t the first time Mrs. Mudford had given them bad information” at school. Mad solemnly informs Harriet that her teacher thinks “God created the earth.” Harriet doesn’t know what to say: she’s caught between Elizabeth’s unconventional views and her own knowledge of what children should know and believe.
Harriet's ruminations about Elizabeth's stance against the network's demands also point to a place where the themes of and gendered discrimination and the vital importance of learning bleed into one another. Harriet is worried that Elizabeth’s refusal to cooperate with Lebensmal will mean she gets fired, or hurt. She tells Elizabeth to “meet them halfway,” suggesting that she “maybe just try to smile” when she’s on air. Harriet is missing the point of Elizabeth’s choices, here, and perpetuating a problematic attitude. If Elizabeth were to put on a sweet face and speak patronizingly to the women in her audience, it would disrupt and undermine the lessons she was trying to impart. She says outright that she “won’t perpetuate the myth that women are incompetent.” Harriet’s suggestion to “play along” with the men here is a product of her time, when there was very little that women could do to protect themselves from gendered violence.
Father figures also become a focal point of this section, as Reverend Wakely quietly enters the narrative, offering Mad guidance on her personal mission to learn more about Calvin’s past. When he initially begins speaking to Mad, he has no idea that she’s Calvin’s daughter. He takes her ideas seriously because he doesn’t assume they will be nonsense. This places him in opposition to many of the novel’s other men, who treat even the speech of grown women like toddler babble. Wakely is the first friend of Calvin’s aside from Dr. Mason whom the reader meets in Lessons in Chemistry. Their relationship, like Calvin’s relationship with Elizabeth and later Wakely’s with Mad, is based on mutual respect for the other’s intelligence and judgement. Although Calvin dies before he and Wakely can meet, Wakely’s relationship with Calvin is what draws him into the family unit. Their letters become artifacts that let Calvin live again, however briefly, for both Elizabeth and Mad. They also provide context for a relationship that Elizabeth only knows about peripherally, allowing her to feel immediately closer to Wakely.
