Summary
With Denny away at the Watkins Glen race and Eve at her parents’ house with Zoë, Enzo finds himself all alone in the house for three whole days, living off kitchen crumbs and toilet water, and trying his best to contain his bodily waste to the welcome mat. Despite his grim circumstance, he finds inspiration by applying Denny’s philosophy of racing in the rain. He tries not to overcorrect or freak out and simply makes the best of the resources within his reach.
He insists that his canine biology has evolved to help him survive in situations such as these. He reasons that wild dogs are accustomed to fasting during periods when prey is scarce, so he should be fine. Still, he remains bitter about his lack of thumbs, especially given how useful a thumb would be to him at the moment—if he had thumbs, he could just turn a doorknob and escape. But since that isn’t the case, he is forced to wait. On the second night of his solitude, Enzo begins to hallucinate. When he wanders into Zoë’s room, he sees that her favorite toy, a stuffed Zebra, has come to life and is terrorizing the rest of her dolls and stuffed animals by waving his genitalia in their faces and shouting “Yee-haw!” Enzo has the urge to attack the stuffed zebra and put an end to the assault, but before he can, the zebra bursts its own seam and explodes its stuffing all over the room.
The following day, Denny returns to find Enzo still alone, fending for himself. Denny is furious with Eve for leaving Enzo. He calls and yells at her over the phone, and when she and Zoë return, he continues his angry tirade. But his rage is redirected when Zoë discovers that all of her dolls and stuffed animals have been torn to shreds. Denny does something he has never before; he strikes Enzo across the face, knocking him to the floor. He calls him a stupid dog. Enzo is terrified and slinks to Zoë’s side, and Zoë, still in tears over the loss of all her toys, lays her hand gently upon Enzo’s head in a gesture of forgiveness.
When Denny manages to calm down with a few hard liquor drinks, he apologizes to Enzo for losing his temper and promises it will never happen again. Then he tells Enzo that he placed first overall in the Watkins Glen race, which presents a dilemma. Because while this is great news and could easily lead to sponsorships and an opportunity to race on tour, it also means that Denny would have to spend the better part of six months away from his family, and he is not sure he can do that.
Meanwhile, Eve’s condition worsens. She refuses to go to the hospital or see a doctor because she is certain that they would not be capable of helping her, so she continues to suffer from unpredictable symptoms. She experiences pain, mood swings, depression, and weight loss, alternating with periods of feeling fine, which, while providing her with some relief, also give her an excuse to continue ignoring her symptoms. At this point, Zoë is in preschool. Denny takes fewer hours at work in order to pick up the slack at home when Eve is sick. He drives Zoë to school, makes dinner, and cleans. In this way, he manages his feelings of helplessness, being totally unable to convince Eve to see a doctor. With Denny so busy managing Zoë and the household, he relies more on Enzo to provide Eve with affection.
Then one night, when things are particularly bad with Eve’s illness, Enzo has a nightmare about crows. Enzo tells the story of why he has been haunted by crows ever since they moved to their house in the Central District. The story begins with the fact that when Denny picks up after Enzo, he puts the biodegradable bags of feces together in a larger grocery bag until the larger bag is full, and then he disposes of the bag in a public dumpster or a trash can in the park. But as it happens, the crows in the Swifts' neighborhood are always looking for stray groceries to feast on. So one day, a murder of crows spies Eve taking groceries into the house. They notice one bag of groceries that was left in the alley and lay low, waiting for her to finish unloading. Then the crows swoop down and eat the contents of the forgotten grocery bag, not realizing until it is too late that they are eating dog feces. Ever since that afternoon, Enzo is convinced that the crows are holding a grudge against him.
That winter, Denny spends a lot of time playing racing video games and exercising. Enzo does not put it together right away, but eventually, he realizes that Denny has accepted a seat in a touring car after all. Eve insisted that he take the spot. She had been feeling better, and she felt bad that she was standing in the way of his dream. But now that the time has come for Denny to hit the road, Eve is clearly afraid that they might lose each other somehow. She is afraid of her condition and the dangers he will face on the track.
But Denny leaves, and Eve, Enzo, and Zoë manage to get by without him. Denny’s races, however, do not go as well as he would like. His driving is great, but his pit crew keeps making mistakes that cost the team the race. This leads to him having to spend his week off away from home, practicing with the pit crew. When he tells Eve about the impromptu practice sessions, they are sitting at their dining table with Zoë, having dinner. Eve becomes visibly upset as soon as Denny tells her he has to spend more time away—Denny's touring is more difficult than she bargained for—but she tries to maintain her composure through dinner. Meanwhile, Zoë refuses to eat her chicken nuggets, despite the fact that she asked for chicken nuggets for dinner. This infuriates Eve and also serves as a convenient lightning rod to redirect the anger she is feeling towards Denny. She yells at Zoë to eat her nuggets and Zoë still refuses. Denny offers to make Zoë a hotdog, but Eve forbids it. The exchange turns into an angry standoff. Eventually, Eve capitulates and grabs the hot dogs from the freezer, but when she tries cutting the package, the knife slips and slices her hand. The cut clearly needs stitches, but Eve is still scared to go to the hospital, so Denny tends to the wound with basic first aid.
After the bleeding stops and everyone calms down, Eve apologizes to Denny and Zoë and explains that she does not understand the cause of her mood swings but that she definitely has not been feeling like herself. She offers to make Zoë a hot dog, but at this point, everyone has lost their appetite, and they have a big group hug before bedtime. In the midst of everyone making up, Enzo wanders into the kitchen to scavenge for some crumbs of dinner and finds a whole chicken nugget on the floor, but when he bends down to eat it, he immediately realizes that the chicken nuggets were spoiled the whole time.
Denny hits the road again to continue on his racing tour, so Eve, Zoë, and Enzo go to stay at Eve’s parents' fancy house on Mercer Island. Maxwell and Trish have nothing positive to say about Denny. They strongly disapprove of his racing, and they accuse him of being an absentee father and leaving Eve to be the sole provider for the family. Eve defends him, trying to explain that these races could be a lifechanging opportunity for Denny’s career, but The Twins are unconvinced. When Eve and Zoë go to bed, The Twins continue to disparage Denny in private, wondering how their daughter could have ever married a customer-service technician, the implication being that such a man is beneath her. As Enzo sits and listens to what they are saying about Denny, Maxwell feeds him a pepperoncini pepper, which tears up his stomach and throat. Enzo comes to the conclusion that from that moment on, he will only accept food from people he trusts.
Analysis
In these chapters, Eve’s mysterious illness begins to manifest itself in her behavior, which has real situational and emotional consequences for the Swift family. The first example of this is when she leaves Enzo alone in the house for three days without contacting Denny or anyone who could check in on him. Enzo describes his time alone in the house as a sort of spiritual journey, where he must rely on his innate survival skills. This chapter is an opportunity for Enzo to apply Denny’s philosophy of racing in the rain to an actual life-or-death situation of his own. In fact, the first lines of the chapter quote directly from Denny’s earlier statements about racing: “When I was locked in the house suddenly and firmly, I did not panic. I did not overcorrect or freeze,” (51). And yet, this chapter also demonstrates how, even with the best intentions and the illusion of total control, one can still lose control without even realizing it. This is exemplified in Enzo’s episode with Zoë’s stuffed zebra.
By having Enzo imagine Zoë’s stuffed zebra lewdly violating her other toys, Stein is both reinforcing the unreliability of Enzo’s perspective and, in a way, affirming Eve’s experience as someone suffering from a brain-related illness. If we as readers were to take everything Enzo tells us as complete truth, then we would be missing out on a major component of this novel, which is figuring out what truths about life shine through Enzo’s flawed, canine perspective. Part of the charm of Enzo’s voice is how confident he is about theories we, as humans, might find ridiculous or downright false. We are not meant to believe everything he says, but rather, we are meant to understand that Enzo’s interpretation of the world is earnest, optimistic, and full of faith, and even if some of his theories are unfounded, we can still learn something from how he arrived at them.
The episode with the zebra confirms that Enzo’s perspective is flawed because we readers understand that Enzo must have chewed up all of Zoë’s toys and hallucinated the zebra’s strange actions as a result of malnourishment and exhaustion; we also understand that Enzo is entirely unable to arrive at that conclusion, so he continues to believe that he didn’t chew the toys, the zebra actually did come alive, and that everyone else is wrong about it. And from this misconception, a motif is born; the zebra symbolizes insidious, chaotic forces that constantly threaten to throw life out of balance and take control away from the “driver” of any given situation.
Enzo’s zebra episode also obliquely addresses Eve’s behavior. If Eve suffers from a brain disease, then she has no control over some of her actions. It may be easy to forgive a dog for chewing up a room full of toys when he has been locked in a house for three days; but a human being like Eve is expected to think rationally. But, just like how Enzo’s rational mind was sent into hallucinations and visions of an alternate reality, so too could Eve be imagining things that are not there, or forgetting responsibilities that seem obvious to everyone else—like taking care of Enzo. By including Enzo’s hallucinatory episode in the same chapter as Eve’s first big breakdown, Stein offers his readers a parallel example of someone’s brain failing them, thus generating empathy for Eve’s character.
The chicken-nugget incident provides another example of mental slippage on Eve’s part. She is so preoccupied by the stress of missing Denny, working, taking care of Eve and Enzo, and dealing with the symptoms of her unknown illness, that she fails to realize the chicken nuggets she serves to Zoë are spoiled. This scene returns to the aforementioned theme of the limits of communication. Zoë is too young to understand that the nuggets have gone bad—she can only refuse to eat them and say that she does not like them. She lacks the language and comprehension skills to communicate why she does not want them, which causes the situation to spiral into frustration, shouting, and eventually Eve injuring herself trying to cut open the hot-dog package. When Enzo discovers that the nuggets are spoiled, he is able to empathize with Zoë because he knows how it feels to not be able to express himself with language.
When Eve, Zoë, and Enzo go to Mercer Island to stay with Maxwell and Trish, food continues to be an important symbol of care and communication. Maxwell and Trish are not fond of Enzo—they think he is dirty and treat him like a nuisance. So when Maxwell offers Enzo a pepperoncini pepper, he fails to consider that the pepper might hurt Enzo, which it does. Maxwell’s carelessness causes Enzo stomach pain and makes him sick for the rest of the night. This also teaches Enzo a lesson, which is not to accept food from anyone he does not trust. In this way, Enzo explicitly ties food to care, trust, and relationships.
