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Chapter 7: May 1965
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Secrets and Lies
Memory and the Past
Difference and Prejudice
Families Born and Made
Summary
Analysis
As Norah drops Paul off for his first day of school, she watches him on the playground with the other children—and warns his teacher that he’s terribly allergic to bees, and had a bad reaction recently after simply picking a dead bee up off the windowsill. The allergy is hereditary, Norah explains—her husband is allergic, too. Paul’s teacher assures Norah she’ll keep a watchful eye on him.
Norah’s revelation that Paul is allergic to bees signals to the reader that Phoebe is, too, and foreshadows the disadvantages children like Phoebe face. Norah and David knew to expect an allergy from Paul—but Caroline and Phoebe have no idea about the hereditary allergy.
Themes
Norah runs into Kay Marshall, a beautiful and wealthy acquaintance whose oldest daughter is Paul’s age. Kay greets Norah happily and introduces her to her baby daughter, whom she’s pushing in a fashionable stroller. Norah suddenly feels dowdy and vulnerable, but makes small talk with Kay and coos over her baby anyway. The women discuss the violence happening at Kent State university, and Kay tells Norah that she’s excited for an upcoming party Norah is throwing. Norah says she’s excited, too, and the women discuss their children’s friendship and Paul’s musical talent. Norah can’t stop thinking, all through the normal conversation, about the reckless behavior she’s engaging in lately—she’s drinking more often, and sometimes goes on long, spontaneous drives to nowhere in the middle of the day.
Norah is falling apart at the seams. When she sees Kay Marshall, Kay’s polished persona—and two healthy children—remind Norah of all the ways in which her own life is rapidly falling apart, and how she is, in many ways, complicit in extending and deepening her own pain.
Themes
Norah walks back to her car and starts driving home. On her way through town, she passes a travel agency—yesterday, she had a job interview there, and though she didn’t really feel passionate about it when applying, she now wants the job very badly. Norah drives out towards the university, parks her car, and walks through the throngs of protestors—some of whom are burning American flags. She spots Bree, dressed like a hippie and passing out flyers, and feels a deep envy of Bree’s “sureness and freedom.”
Things in Lexington are changing rapidly. The protests at the university demonstrate the social unrest boiling to the surface of society, and Norah’s decision to try to get a job further shows how social roles and responsibilities are changing even in the home.
Themes
Norah approaches Bree, who’s startled to see her. Bree introduces Norah to a man named Mark, a Vietnam veteran who was injured in the war. Norah realizes that Mark is the boyfriend Bree has been talking about lately, and when Bree takes Norah aside, Norah congratulates her sister on being in love. Bree says she wants to bring Mark to the party, and Norah says she should. The two of them talk about the violence on campus—as well as Norah’s job interview—and Bree encourages Norah to accept that times are changing and demand more from her life. As Bree returns to her friends, Norah wonders how it’s possible that she envies both the refined Kay Marshall and the wild-child Bree.
Bree’s wild, free, open nature has always inspired envy in Norah. Her decision to apply for a job of her own is sparked in part by her desire to emulate Bree, and to experience the same sense of freedom her sister has. At the same time, Norah admits that she’s torn between her own desires and society’s expectations of what a wife and mother should be.
Themes
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Back at home, Norah makes herself a gin and tonic and steels herself for the task ahead of her this afternoon—dismantling a wasp’s nest hanging off the front porch. After swallowing the drink, Norah puts on her garden gloves and a large hat and goes outside to confront the nest, determined to get rid of the insects herself.
Norah is now drinking in the middle of the day, showing that her dependence on alcohol to numb her feelings has escalated. She’s still drinking before doing dangerous tasks, demonstrating the reckless side of her personality.
Themes
Using a garden hoe, Norah begins attacking the nest. She gets a couple of stings, and, realizing she has agitated the wasps, heads back in for another drink. The alcohol galvanizes her, and she gathers up a can of insect repellent and a brand-new vacuum cleaner, hoping she can suck the wasps into the hose. Outside, the wasps have calmed down, and Norah seizes the opportunity to stick the vacuum nozzle directly into the nest—the wasps grow angry again, but Norah succeeds in sucking them all up. She is afraid that when she turns the vacuum off, though, they’ll all escape, and so she drunkenly attaches the vacuum hose to the tailpipe of her car while she looks for something more permanent to stuff it with. Norah turns the machine off and goes inside to clean up.
Norah wants to achieve perfection in her house, and keep Paul and David safe. Her attack on the wasp’s nest is a desperate attempt to secure both of these things—but her untraditional and unsafe methods of doing so show that she’s unable to shoulder the burden of being the only person engaged in protecting her family.
Themes
Soon, Norah realizes that it is already time to pick Paul up from school. She gathers up her house keys and heads outside—only to watch in horror as the vacuum explodes and smokes on the front lawn, the gasoline fumes from the car ignited by the vacuum’s hot but dormant engine. A few wasps drift out of the tailpipe and fly away. Furious, Norah goes over to what’s left of the vacuum, opens it up, and begins stomping on the bag in order to obliterate what’s left of the nest, thinking all the while of all the things that have been expected of her all her life. When her tantrum is finished, Norah calmly gets into the car and drives off to collect her son from school.
The vacuum explodes, symbolizing the boiling point Norah is reaching in her own life. She needs change, and cannot go on with things as they are—otherwise she, too, might “explode.”
Themes
