Summary
Hagar is in Doctor Corby’s waiting room examining his walls and lack of decor, which sends her into a train of thought about the paintings in the Shipley house and Bram’s love of horses. After much argument between the couple, Bram bought a stallion and a few mares. One time, the stallion went missing on a cold winter’s night, and Bram was unable to find it. At that moment, Hagar sympathizes with him and there is a rare moment of emotional tenderness between them, where Hagar finally feels open to engaging in sex with him. But after that, their relationship goes back to its normal coldness.
Back in the present, Doris scolds Hagar for gawking at a painting and speaking loudly in the waiting room. Hagar remembers being at church with Bram and Bram’s loud derision of the new reverend, which embarrassed Hagar. The doctor sees Hagar and she is annoyed with the way in which Doris lists all her symptoms to him. She is also annoyed at the doctor’s fake show of niceness. Doctor Corby examines her, a process which Hagar finds humiliating. He suggests she gets some X-rays.
On the bus ride home, Hagar is near tears. Doris suggests to her that they take a car ride out into the country after supper. On the drive, Hagar is nestled in the backseat; she would be happy if it were not for Doris’s frequent explanation of the sights around them. It turns out that Marvin and Doris are driving Hagar to the Silver Threads nursing home. Hagar goes into a panic and tells them she refuses to go inside, believing they have brought her there to stay. They reassure her that it is just to have a visit with the matron.
The matron gives the three of them a tour through the nursing home, and Hagar is unimpressed. The matron suggests that Hagar have tea with other elderly people while Marvin and Doris speak with her. Being at the nursing home reminds Hagar of being in the hospital to give birth to Marvin. She had believed she was going to die in childbirth like her own mother. Hagar is approached by another old woman who complains about someone in the nursing home who fakes illness to get extra food. Next, another lady comes by named Mrs. Steiner, whom Hagar immediately likes.
Mrs. Steiner tells Hagar about her daughters and how she was also made to come to Silver Threads against her wishes. Hagar tells her she has two sons, one of whom was killed in the war—which is a lie. Mrs. Steiner tells her that she will see her there in the nursing home soon; Hagar, offended, gets up and wanders into the garden, where she sees an old man. Doris comes chasing after her, and Hagar demands to go home.
In the next chapter, Hagar is getting her stomach X-rayed at the hospital; this is an excruciating experience for her. She feels that the technicians are disembodied presences who regard her with boredom. As she is getting the X-rays, she thinks about how she has often waited for something in life that never came. She remembers when Marvin was a child and how impatient she would be with him. Eventually, he would spend less time inside and more time outside working with Bram. Hagar remembers how Bram changed after ten years of marriage, starting to become more boastful to the workers on their land.
Hagar describes what she perceived to be the shabby and neglected quality of their property, and how Bram would sometimes disappear after the harvest to hunt and drink with his friends. His antics frequently led to arguments between the couple, although once they were in bed together, they would engage in a routine sort of sexual encounter that Hagar never protested.
Hagar’s X-rays are finished. Later, they get the results; Marvin and Doris tell her that the doctor has recommended she be put in the nursing home so she can get the proper care. Once again, Hagar resists, and Doris sets up another meeting with Mr. Troy. During their conversation, Mr. Troy encourages Hagar to be open to the new possibility of the nursing home and to pray to God for strength, but Hagar is skeptical of having faith in anything.
Hagar recalls giving birth to her son John, who was much younger than Marvin. John was the child whom she favored. He was very curious and strong. She would often tell John about his grandfather, her father Jason, and how he would have been proud of him. Hagar starts to sell eggs from the farm so she can earn cash independently of her husband—an idea she gets from Bram’s daughter, Jess. One day, she delivers eggs with John to Lottie’s house and feels ashamed that she is called the “egg woman” by Lottie’s child. After that, Hagar speaks badly of Lottie and her husband; John tells her to “shut up.” Hagar later sells her mother’s valuable dishes to Lottie to earn some money and to be able to escape from Bram’s house.
Back in the present, Hagar is awoken by Doris for dinner. After dinner, she goes with her to the corner shop and is outraged to see a young woman with black nail polish. When they return home, Marvin tells Hagar that he has already arranged for her to stay at the nursing home and that she will be going in a week’s time.
Analysis
Chapters 3 and 4 fully flesh out Hagar’s deepest regrets and fears as she faces her own death. The visit to the nursing home and her steady realization that she has little power to resist what are the natural changes of life and her body’s decline bring a flood of old memories related to other moments when she felt powerless in her life. For Hagar, the nursing home symbolizes the stage of life—death—which she is not yet ready to acknowledge, let alone confront head-on.
On Page 112, Hagar speaks of how she was always waiting for something to happen in her life, and how this is something that has not changed in her old age. Whether under the control of her father or her husband Bram, Hagar has often felt like she was restricted, unable to have much of her own money, and resigned to a woman’s role. Rather than inspiring Hagar to change her life, this repression has only made her more bitter and closed off to others.
Hagar’s attitude towards her own children—such as her apathy upon learning she is pregnant—paints Hagar to be a woman alienated from her own motherly instinct. Feeling trapped with Bram, Hagar takes to the selling of chicken’s eggs to make extra money and liberate herself from her role as his wife. The eggs here could be seen as a representation of the fertility and feminine nature that Hagar has felt incapable of embodying throughout her life. This is perhaps rooted in her mother’s death, which occurred during Hagar’s birth. Because of this, Hagar has always distrusted the feminine and equated the mothering, nurturing impulse with loss of life.
We see throughout these pages Hagar attempting to hide her own vulnerability, such as when she hides her emotions as Marvin goes off to war as a young man. Even now in her old age, she feels she is not able to express herself clearly to anyone, instead reacting almost like a child in anger and frustration towards her family and the hospital staff. Hagar, unable to speak her mind, resorts to name-calling and petty insults as a sort of shield that appears to protect her from her own chaotic feelings.
In some regards, Hagar is aware of how emotionally shut-off she has become. On Page 92, she internally points out the irony in her shedding tears in the doctor’s office, yet never crying when tragedy hit her family—such as following the death of her brothers or father. It is as if she had stored up this pain throughout her life and now was seeking to find an outlet for it. This is also, perhaps, why she frequently retreats into her memories: through reflecting, she is able to make sense out of the many pivotal and often painful events of her life.
Yet she is still human, as we see on Page 111 when she momentarily recognizes the humanity of the doctors and nurses in the hospital. Although fed-up with the invasive procedure of the X-rays, for a split second Hagar is able to come out of her self-created bubble and feel for another, realizing that the nurses are merely doing their job and do not mean to harm her. However, Hagar is not able to maintain this empathy for long, returning once again to her habitual judgment.
On Page 118, Hagar uses an extended metaphor of the unused closest in her bedroom to convey strong emotions. Hagar is wondering what else was contained in her doctor’s report, but she realizes it is something she does not actually want to know—a shadowy reality that better be kept in the dark. She expresses this through a comparison to a “chipped chamber pot nested in by small and frantic spiders,” concluding that it is better to know that something is there, yet it is often more terrible than imagined. This is a good illustration of how Hagar fears her own darkness.
