This Boy’s Life: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

After a while, Marian, Kathy, and Rosemary decide to rent a house together. Rosemary finds a “scabrous eyesore” of a house in West Seattle; it needs a lot of fixing up, but she convinces Marian, Kathy, and even Jack that if they work together they can make it beautiful and comfortable. Soon after moving in, Kathy gives birth to a baby boy. While Kathy and Rosemary go off to work each day, Marian stays home keeping house. Jack runs around with his friends Taylor and Silver all afternoon and comes home just before Rosemary does each evening. He lies constantly to Marian about where he’s been, and though she can tell he’s lying, she knows she cannot control him.

Rosemary never disciplines Jack. Her father, a “great believer in the rod,” had spanked her every day of her childhood because he presumed that whether he knew about it or not, she’d done something wrong each and every day. Rosemary’s mother could not defend her against her brutal father, who left his mark on Rosemary’s psyche. The older Tobias observes that his mother always had a “strange docility” about her, and was almost paralyzed by “men of the tyrant breed.”

Jack begins getting into more and more trouble at school with his friends Taylor and Silver. The boys break some windows and get away with it; their perceived invincibility emboldens them, and soon they go around town smashing windows, streetlights, breaking into cars and setting off the emergency brakes, and leaving bags of excrement blazing on neighbors’ stoops. They steal from local stores, and Jack hoards his stolen goods like treasure, though once he sees them outside the bounds of the store they mostly lose their appeal.

A few months into their new living situation, Kathy and Marian both receive offers of engagement from their beaus. They try to fix Rosemary up, too, but the many suitors they send her way aren’t right for her. They eventually fix her up with a man named Dwight—a short man with sad, restless eyes who always smells of gasoline. He dresses like a dandy, and Rosemary thinks he’s kind and considerate. Dwight, however, lives in a place called Chinook, a small town three hours north of Seattle, and has three children from a previous marriage. Jack is certain that his mother won’t “let herself get tangled up” in Dwight’s “mess” of a life.

Dwight keeps coming to call on Rosemary, though, and pays her “puppyish, fawning” attention on their dates. Jack, from what he observes of Dwight’s interactions with his mother, feels Dwight is trying way too hard. Jack begins to loathe and pity Dwight, and he perfects an impression of the man, which he performs for his mother, Kathy, and Marian each time Dwight departs. Only Rosemary asks Jack to stop mimicking Dwight, whom she defends as a "very nice” man.