Summary
Eve and Denny’s relationship escalates quickly. They are spending all their free time together, which cuts into Enzo’s quality time with Denny. At first, Enzo is jealous of how put-together Eve is compared to him—for example, her nails are always trimmed and his are long and scratch up the wood floors, and her flowing blonde hair is kept expertly groomed while his is often a matted, scruffy mess—and it becomes clearer to Enzo that Eve occupies a place in Denny’s life to which he simply does not have access. A big clue that Eve and Denny plan to start a family together comes when Enzo recalls one of the first times they have sex and Eve says, “The field is fertile—beware!” and Denny replies, “I embrace the fertility” (16).
Eve moves in with Denny and Enzo, and before long, they get married in a small beach ceremony on Whidbey Island in Washington state. The luxurious beach house where the reception is held is owned by friends of Eve’s parents, and most of the guests are connected to Eve. Denny’s parents are not in attendance. Enzo refers to Eve’s parents, Maxwell and Trish, as “The Twins” because they look similar and wear matching stuffy, upper-middle-class outfits that often consist of khakis and sweater vests. They reluctantly allow Enzo to attend the wedding on the condition that he is kept away from the guests and defecates behind the trash cans.
When Eve and Denny return to Seattle as Mr. and Mrs. Swift, Eve takes noticeably more liberties with the living space. She replaces the furniture, moves everything around, and decorates to suit her tastes. Enzo and Denny make frequent trips to home improvement stores with assignments and shopping lists from Eve. But despite all of the sudden changes, Enzo grows protective of Eve. His instincts tell him that she is carrying Denny’s child, and Enzo has a great deal of respect for the ability of women to make life and the endurance required by childbearing. He sees how completely Eve devotes herself to the child before it is even born and concludes that Eve is now someone to whom he owes loyalty.
During the course of Eve’s pregnancy, Denny manages to raise the sponsorship funds to buy himself a seat in the 24 Hours of Daytona endurance race in Florida. It is a major opportunity for Denny to showcase his talents on a national stage. The timing is unfortunate though, because Eve is far along in her pregnancy by the time the race rolls around. On the day of the race, Eve gives birth to a baby named Zoë. It is a home birth, per Eve’s preference, facilitated by a team of midwives. She felt more comfortable having the baby outside of a harsh, hospital setting, but is still deeply upset by her husband’s absence.
Eve’s parents arrive before Denny and admonish their daughter for having a home birth. They are clearly disappointed in her choice of husband and don’t understand how Denny could allow himself to be on the opposite end of the country while his wife is giving birth. Denny returns the next day, upset because not only did he miss his daughter’s birth, but it was all for nothing because he wasn’t even able to race. One of the other drivers on his team crashed their car into a wall before he got his chance. Maxwell and Trish do not miss the opportunity to rub salt in his wound and communicate their disappointment. They ask him if he gets his money back because he couldn’t race. (He does not.) But Denny’s sour mood about the race immediately turns around when he holds his daughter for the first time. At this point, Denny asks Enzo to promise he will always protect Zoë, and Enzo considers this promise his new purpose in life.
Enzo enjoys Zoë’s infant days. It is a time when he feels especially needed, like he is living up to his promise to the best of his ability. He entertains the baby, plays with her, and is always watching over her. But once she starts going to daycare, Enzo finds himself spending a lot of time alone in the house, watching more television. One day, Denny accidentally leaves the television on the weather channel, and Enzo is surprised by how amazing the weather is. He is convinced by the end of the day that weather is one of the most important driving forces in the world, influencing the economy, food supply, and culture of people everywhere.
We fast-forward to Zoë’s second birthday, which is an especially joyous event in Enzo’s eyes. Things that would normally upset Eve become fun activities; for example, when lemon cake falls on the floor and makes a huge mess, Eve and Enzo have a great time together cleaning it up (she uses a vacuum cleaner, Enzo uses his snout). As the festivities wind down, Denny shows Zoë her last present, and it is a big one. He shows her a picture of a house with a yard in Seattle’s Central District. Zoë is not old enough to understand, but Eve is overcome with joy. Yet, in the midst of all the celebration and happiness, Enzo senses a dark force growing inside of Eve. He is not sure what it is, and even if he was, he couldn’t communicate it anyways.
The Swifts move into their new home and life is fairly normal for a while. Denny intermittently participates in endurance races when he can. He performs particularly well in the rain. One Saturday afternoon after spending a family day at the beach, Denny puts in a videotape of one of his recent races in Portland. It was raining on the track, but the tape shows him driving as if it were not raining at all. Enzo and Eve watch the tape with him; Enzo watches with admiration, and Eve watches in thinly veiled horror at the risks her husband takes on a regular basis. She asks Denny how he is able to drive so fast in the rain, and he tells her a story from when he was in driving school. The instructors were sharing their secrets on how to drive in the rain, and none of it was landing with Denny until a fellow student, a kid named Gabriel Flouret from France, turned to him and said, “That which you manifest is before you,” (41). This little mantra inexplicably makes all the lessons click and sticks in Denny’s mind forever. Denny tries to explain to Eve how a driver must not react to his car but must instead possess the car. He must anticipate its movements and move along with it.
A few years after they settle into their home, Denny is offered a seat in the Watkins Glen race with a prestigious team of racers. It is a major opportunity for Denny, and for the first time, it is clear that Eve is excited about his racing. If this race goes well, he can consider himself a true professional. But on the day of the race, the darkness that had been lying dormant in Eve flares up again. She experiences an immense pressure in her skull so unbearable that she has to pack up her things and take Zoë to her parents’ house. The only problem is, she forgets Enzo at home.
Analysis
The site of Eve’s body is almost instantly established as a symbol of fertility and motherhood. Strangely enough, based on Enzo’s account, it seems that as soon as Denny and Eve start having sex, they are seriously considering having a child. It is important to note what they say to each other in that first reported encounter—Eve: “The field is fertile—beware!” and Denny: “I embrace the fertility,” (16)—because it comes back later in the novel. Enzo extends the metaphor of the field when he describes Denny as “plowing” Eve’s field. The agricultural metaphors relate back to Enzo’s earliest memories of living on a farm with shepherding dogs. The fact that Denny later enlists Enzo as the protector of his metaphorical “crop,” aka Zoë, demonstrates how Enzo has somewhat fulfilled his desire to be related to the strong terrier that watched over the barn.
The introduction of Eve’s parents at their wedding clearly establishes a foil to Denny’s own mysterious family relationships, to which at this point in the novel we are not yet privy. But simply by being absent, Denny’s family contrasts with Eve’s parents, who are over-involved and over-critical in her personal decisions, Denny being the main decision they choose to criticize. Denny holds a blue-collar job at an auto body shop and works customer service. Eve went to college and majored in art history. Eve’s parents obviously don’t understand why Eve chooses to be with Denny. They barely try to hide the fact that they think she is too cultured for him. “The Twins” very much embody the idea of “keeping up with the Joneses.” They appear to harbor thinly veiled contempt for Denny because by marrying their daughter, he becomes a part of their family, and thus reflects on their status and values.
These chapters contain two major instances of foreshadowing, one of which is more obvious than the other. The obvious one occurs when Enzo explicitly says, at the end of Chapter 7, that he “could smell the disease in Eve’s brain long before even she know it was there” (37). Considering Eve’s conspicuous absence from the “present time” narration in Chapter 1, evidence is mounting that she will likely, at some point in the novel, succumb to an illness.
Now for the less-obvious foreshadowing: Denny’s long and reverent descriptions of driving in the rain speak to an impending loss of control that he and Enzo will inevitably have to conquer together. We can read “racing in the rain” as an extended metaphor for self-possession and moving through life with an unblinking mindfulness that allows a person to accelerate into the unknown, so to speak, without completely losing control.
This is also the first time in the novel that we experience a scene where Eve is actively contending with the dangers that Denny faces when he is on the track. Before, we have a vague idea that Eve wishes Denny had a less dangerous passion, but Chapter 8 really sits Eve down with Denny and forces her to watch an entire race from his perspective—a camera mounted in the cockpit. Every slippery turn is captured from the perspective of the driver. Of course, she knows that Denny has made it through the race unscathed, but the very idea that her husband brushes up against death on a regular basis is an understandably distressing reality for a new mother. The dramatic irony that we, the reader, know that Eve has a life-threatening disease growing in her brain adds to the tension of this scene. With two parents living in constant danger, little Zoë is at high risk of possibly losing both of her parents.
