Summary
Walk Two Moons begins with the narrator, Sal, briefly describing the circumstances which lead her and her Gram and Gramps Hiddle to set out on a cross-country road trip from Euclid, Ohio to Lewiston, Idaho. Salamanca Tree Hiddle is a thirteen-year-old girl who has just moved to Euclid, Ohio from her beloved hometown of Bybanks, Kentucky. In Bybanks, the Hiddles lived on a farm with wide pastures, livestock, and a swimming hole. Sal struggles to adjust to the suburban lifestyle of Euclid. The sudden change of environment is made even more difficult by the fresh loss of her mother, who left Sal and her father in April and isn't coming back.
Gram and Gramps Hiddle propose a road trip after Sal and her father have been living in Euclid for a few months. Sal starts at a new school there, where she meets a girl named Phoebe Winterbottom. Sal finds Phoebe's story and life experience somewhat similar to her own. When Sal's father asks her to join Gram and Gramps on the road trip to Lewiston, he frames it as if she'd be doing him a favor by going. He tries to convince Sal that her grandparents need a responsible chaperone like herself to keep them out of trouble, but Sal knows that "the real reasons were buried beneath piles and piles of unsaid things" (5). She knows her grandparents want to visit her mother in Lewiston; she knows that both her grandparents and her father know that she's scared to go see her mother, and that she needs some extrinsic motivation to do so; and she also thinks her dad wants alone time with their neighbor, Margaret Cadaver.
So, Sal and her grandparents set out toward Lewiston from Euclid, and Sal spends the first thirty minutes of the ride praying to the trees, because she's so afraid of cars and car accidents. To distract her, Gram asks for her to tell them a story while they drive, so Sal starts to tell them the story of Phoebe Winterbottom. From this point on, the novel operates as a framed narrative, shuttling between the more recent past of the road trip and the more distant past of Sal's time adjusting to Euclid.
The first interaction Sal has with Phoebe occurs as soon as she and her Dad arrive in Euclid and move into their new house. Sal sees a round face in the window of a neighboring house. She doesn't know it at the time, but it is Phoebe's face. Then, the first time they speak at school, Phoebe sits down next to Sal at lunch at tells her she is so brave. Sal is surprised by this, because she doesn't see herself as being particularly brave. She rattles off a non-exhaustive list of things she's afraid of: "car accidents, death, cancer, brain tumors, nuclear war, pregnant women, loud noises, strict teachers, elevators, and scads of other things" (13–14).
Sal and Phoebe quickly become friends, walking home from school together and spending time at each other's homes. One day while walking back to Phoebe's house, Mrs. Partridge calls them over to her porch. She feels Phoebe's face and guesses her age. Phoebe is generally disturbed by Mrs. Partridge, especially after she guesses her age. Phoebe tells Sal a story about when her family went to the state fair, and a man who worked at the fair claimed to be able to guess anyone's age, and he was doing it pretty successfully until he guessed her dad's age wrong by fourteen years. And Mr. Winterbottom is very proud of his youthful appearance.
When they arrive at Phoebe's house, Mrs. Winterbottom is baking a blackberry pie. Sal politely declines a piece, and Mrs. Winterbottom offers to make something else, but Sal just lies and says she does like blackberries, but she has an allergy. The truth is, blackberries remind her of her mother. Sal thinks Mrs. Partridge is quite fascinating, but Phoebe is creeped out by Partridge and her daughter, Margaret Cadaver. Margaret is a nurse, and Phoebe points out the frightening irony of her last name being Cadaver. Phoebe also alludes to Sal that Margaret's husband is dead, suggesting that Margaret had something to do with it. Sal is skeptical of Phoebe's active imagination, but she accepts any reason to dislike Margaret, no matter how far-fetched it may seem.
At dinner at the Winterbottoms', Sal notices the strained way Mr. and Mrs. Winterbottom interact. She senses that Mrs. Winterbottom is unhappy in her role as a housewife. Sal says, "I'm not quite sure why I had that feeling because if you just listened to the words she said, it sounded as if she was Mrs. Supreme Housewife" (30). After she leaves the Winterbottoms', she reflects on her associations with blackberries. She remembers a morning when she and her mom were picking blackberries on their farm in Bybanks. Then she remembers one morning when her mother was pregnant, she and her mother went downstairs and found that her father had breakfast and left a flower in front of each of their place settings. Then, they went out to find him in the fields and surprise him, but when they did, Sal's mother just started crying. "'Oh, you're too good, John,' she said. 'You're too good. All you Hiddles are too good. I'll never be so good" (34). The next morning, Sal's mother left little plates of blackberries out on the breakfast table, and Sal remembers feeling betrayed by her mother's belief that somehow she didn't measure up to Sal's father.
One afternoon, while Sal and Phoebe are hanging out alone at the Winterbottom's, someone knocks at the door. They answer, and at the door stands a young man who appears to be around eighteen years old. He asks to speak with Mrs. Winterbottom. When Phoebe tells him that she isn't available to speak, the boy blushes. Phoebe assumes he is a lunatic, but Sal just sees a nervous young man. He asks Phoebe her name, and then he asks Sal if she is a Winterbottom too. She tells him she's just a guest. Phoebe asks if he'd like to leave a message for Mrs. Winterbottom, and the question seems to send him into a slight panic. He declines the offer to leave a message and disappears down the street without leaving so much as a name. When Phoebe tells Mrs. Winterbottom about the young man, she becomes flustered and extremely worried. She tells Phoebe not to tell her father, which upsets Phoebe, because they are not a family that keeps secrets from each other. Then, later that afternoon, Phoebe and Sal find an envelope on the porch with no name or address on it. Inside, there is a blue slip of paper that says, "Don't judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins" (51). Phoebe shows the message to her mother, who flies into a tizzy over who it could be for, and from whom, but Sal is pretty confident that the message is from the so-called "lunatic."
Sal takes a break from her story when she and her grandparents get to Wisconsin Dells. Gramps rests while Sal and Gram roam through an old fort where a group of Native American dancers are dancing. There's a crowd formed around them, and they're beating drums and getting the crowd to clap and dance along. Sal can't stop thinking that they're dawdling, that they should be on the road, covering more ground. She gets lost in her own thoughts for a moment, and when she finally returns to the present moment, she feels literally lost. She can't see Gram. She thinks she's been left behind. But as she walks around, she catches sight of a woman at the center of the dance; the woman's clothes don't match the clothes of the performers, and the headdress on her head is so big it's slipping down past her eyes. Sal hears a few triumphant "Huzza, huzza!"s emanate from the center of the dance, and that's when she knows that the dancing stranger is her own Gram.
Analysis
Walk Two Moons is a frame narrative that deftly establishes two separate timelines, both occurring in the past tense and both narrated by the novel's thirteen-year-old protagonist, Salamanca Tree Hiddle. A frame narrative, or frame tale, is a literary technique that includes at least one "story-within-a-story." Sometimes, frame tales include multilayered, nested stories; other frame tales string together a series of stories along one overarching narrative, a classic example being A Thousand and One Nights. Other famous examples include Boccaccio's Decameron and Pachisi's Vikram and the Vampire. Frame narratives appear across genres and movements and are not confined to any one culture or tradition, though they do often appear in the bedrock and folk origins of many different literary traditions. Creech establishes the frame in a way that demonstrates the value of storytelling as a generative and therapeutic practice. The whole reason Sal's grandparents suggest she tell a story is to distract her from her anxiety about taking a long roadtrip (one of her greatest fears is getting in a car accident).
Through Sal, Creech also immediately alerts the reader to the presence of parallelism between the frame and framed narratives; commentary and thematic enrichment often circulate between the multiple narratives in frame tales, resulting in symbiotic narratives that are strengthened or somehow bolstered by the presence of the other narratives. In Chapter One, Sal recalls her father "chipping away at a plaster wall in the living room" after her mother leaves. "The reason that Phoebe's story reminds me of that plaster wall and the hidden fireplace is that beneath Phoebe's story was another one. Mine" (3). Thus, Creech kicks off a classic framing technique that follows the story to its eventual conclusion.
Walk Two Moons is, in part, a story about the things that go unsaid. Sal often comments on the subtext of people's words, especially the words of adults, and she also often reflects on why their meaning is relegated to subtext. When Sal recalls the reasons her father uses to persuade her to go on the road trip, she says, "the real reasons were buried beneath piles and piles of unsaid things" (5). Later, in a chapter entitled "Blackberries," Sal observes Phoebe's mother, Mrs. Winterbottom. She says, "I had a funny feeling that Mrs. Winterbottom did not actually like all this baking and cleaning and laundry and shopping, and I'm not quite sure why I had that feeling because if you just listened to the words she said, it sounded as if she was Mrs. Supreme Housewife" (30). The valley of unspoken sentiments between adults and young people in Walk Two Moons is a place where Creech makes a lot of her meaning. Mrs. Winterbottom's tortured silence suggests a critique of suburban American gender roles and domesticity; Sal's father's reticence reveals the delicate and often uncharted nature of grief; and, as a function both of the framed quality of the text, and the fact that the story is being told from the limited perspective of Sal, the reader naturally finds meaning in what Sal herself leaves unsaid.
Sal happens to leave a few important points unsaid, the main one being why her mother left, and why she's unable to communicate with her mother. Creech's framing allows the reader to go on this journey with Sal, picking up fragments of the missing story as they go along. For example, in the memory from "Blackberries," Sal's mother is pregnant; but Sal doesn't have any siblings. Sal remembers her father exclaiming that he wanted to fill their house in Bybanks with children, but Sal is an only child. And it's clear that Sal's mother, Chanhassen, never felt like an adequate addition to the Hiddle clan. Creech leads the reader to multiple possible conclusions about why Chanhassen might have left, but in these early chapters, a lot of the major questions remain mysteries. A frame narrative is an effective way of keeping certain things concealed, giving the author the ability to draw the reader's eye elsewhere when the glare of certain omissions grows too strong to ignore.
