52 pages • 1 hour read
Justin TorresWe The Animals
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Seven”
Ma is in bed with a swollen face. Paps has told the boys that the dentist had punched her to loosen her teeth before he pulled them out. Afraid, the boys don’t go in her room for three days, but then become too curious not to. They enter the bedroom and touch her bruises.
Manny, Joel, and the narrator stand, the curtain wrapped around them, and wait for her to wake up. When she does, she calls them her “beautiful baby boys” (13). The words out of her swollen mouth make them turn away. The narrator puts his hand on the cold window glass and notes, “That’s how it sometimes was with Ma; I needed to press myself against something cold and hard, or I’d get dizzy” (13). Their mother is a whirlwind of emotions and moods, and her injury only adds to the confusion the boys feel about how to act around her.
Manny tells Ma it’s the narrator’s seventh birthday. She responds by saying that the narrator will leave her now that he has turned 7. Manny and Joel didn’t want to be around her after they turned 7—they wanted to fight and break everything—and she assumes the narrator will be the same. The narrator promises that he will not do that. He says that he wants to “‘study God and never get married.’ ‘Good,’ Ma said, ‘Then you’ll stay six forever’” (14). The older boys laugh.
The other brothers leave the room. Ma tells the narrator that she wants to talk to him about staying 6 years old. She gets up and looks at her face in the mirror for a time, then smashes the mirror. The other brothers crane their heads into the room. She asks them whether they “think it’s funny when men beat on their mother,” and they run back out, leaving the narrator alone with their mother (16).
Ma asks the narrator to sit on her lap and she rocks back and forth, humming. She tells the narrator that he cannot be 7, only 6 years old plus one; that way, he’ll continue to be her “baby boy” and he will never leave her (16). She whispers to him that she doesn’t want any more of her boys to turn into Paps. His mother is warm and bruised and making the narrator uncomfortable; she is so damaged that he is tempted to hurt her more. He touches both sides of her face and tries to kiss her. She pulls away, obviously in pain. Cussing, she pushes him to the floor. It’s as this point that the narrator finally feels as if he is 7 years old.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Lake”
One day it’s so hot that Paps drives the whole family to the lake. Neither the narrator nor his mother know how to swim, so once in the lake, they grab onto Paps’s back. He keeps swimming out further and further, and Ma begins to get scared.
She thinks it’s strange that Paps knows how to swim, because both of them are from Brooklyn and no one knows how to swim there. Ma asks the narrator why he doesn’t know how to swim and he finds it odd that she would ask him that question, like she doesn’t know him. He’s afraid, but cannot admit his fear to his parents. Paps assures them that they will both learn how to swim.
As they watch the sun drop and the evening descend, things are calm for a while. Later, when they are in the car driving home, it’s apparent that the three of them did not continue to experience a tranquil family moment. Paps is covered in cuts and scratches that run up and down his back and neck. The narrator is also cut up. Ma is extremely angry. Paps let go of her while they were in the water in order to try to teach her how to swim, and she held on to both her husband and to the narrator, shoving the narrator under the water in her attempt to stay afloat.
Afterwards, in the car, Ma sits in the back, away from Paps. The narrator is on her left and Joel is on her right. She reaches across the narrator and opens the car door, screaming at Paps, “What? You want me to teach him how to fly? Should I teach him how to fly?” (22). This causes Paps to pull over. As their parents yell at each other, the boys joke about how they thought that the narrator really was going to fly out of the car.
Once they’re back on their way, Paps turns and jokes, asking the narrator how he liked his flying lesson. Everyone is hysterical. However, later on, when he’s trying to sleep, the narrator tosses and turns. He recalls how Paps let go of both of them in the lake, and Ma shoved him down into the spooky green depths. Just as he began to drown, his instincts kicked in and he swam. He propelled himself to the surface, “sucking air all the way down into [his] lungs, and when [he] looked up the sky had never been so vaulted, so sparkling and magnificent” (23). His parents were looking for him and he swam towards them. They were ecstatic to find him. Ma was crying while Paps was exultant, yelling, “He’s alive!” (23).
Chapter 6 Summary: “Us Proper”
The narrator speaks of himself and his brothers as one entity. They are the three Musketeers, the Three Billy Goats Gruff, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. They make up stories together, and speak as if they are one person. “Us hungry,” they tell their mother (25). “Us burglars,” they say to Paps when he catches them trying to rappel off of the roof (25). “Us fucked,” Joel says, when Paps takes his belt off to beat Manny after the incident (25).
The brothers learn about sex from Ma. She didn’t know about sex and wants to tell them while they are young. Ma got pregnant with Manny when she was 14 and Paps was 16, and they both had to drop out of the 9th grade. When Manny was in her stomach, Ma says that his “heart [was] ticking like a bomb” (26). They went to Texas to marry because Ma was too young to get married in any other state. All of the boys were born when she was in her teens.
After they find out about sex, the boys’ play takes a more lascivious turn. They pretend to be trolls who “trick sex on the goats” and have half-troll, half-goat babies (27). They are also curious about pregnancy in the real world. When they are near the drugstore asking for change to buy beer (or “troll things”), Manny asks a pregnant woman who happens to be walking by if she is carrying a bomb in her stomach. The boys burst into laughter. She stops and tells them that she’s carrying a baby. She puts their hands against her stomach. After a few moments, the baby kicks. The boys ask whether the man tricked her, whether she is 14, and whether being pregnant hurts. One of the brothers says, “It’ll hurt your vagina”; shocked, the woman admonishes them (28). The boys give her the change they made panhandling in front of the store as a gift for her baby: “Tell him it’s from us […] Us Musketeers” (28).
The brothers go home and make Ma lay on the sofa while they pull up her shirt, trying to figure out how they came from such a flat stomach, and yet at one point they were all inside there. They ask if “Us hurt you” (29). She just lets them give her attention, lying back and laughing.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
In these chapters, we learn more about the character dynamics between both Ma and Paps and Ma and the boys, as well as the narrator’s fears and curiosities. In “Seven,” though Paps tells the boys that the dentist hit Ma to loosen her teeth, it becomes apparent that she was beaten by Paps. Their curiosity about what happened to her overtakes them, and they must come into her room and observe her, like an animal in a zoo. This act of observing can be seen as another mode of objectifying women, and speaks, too, to cycles of abuse: the father hits the mother, and the boys learn, even if subconsciously, from this behavior.
It turns out to be the narrator’s seventh birthday, and Ma's immediate plea is that he stay 6 years old. She doesn’t want him to become destructive like his older brothers. When the narrator is alone with Ma, she asks him, “What did he do to me?” (15). When he tells her, she smashes the mirror, as if that will change who hit her or what happened to her. The older brothers poke their heads back in the room and she asks them if they “think it’s funny when men beat on [their] mother” (15). Ma’s desire for the narrator to remain an innocent boy, and her reaction to the narrator’s explanation of why she was beaten, show that her notions of what it means to become a man would seem to necessarily include that such a coming of age will elicit violence against women. She continues to wish that the narrator will remain hers forever; when he can’t help but touch her swollen face, causing her pain, it denotes his passage into full boyhood.
“The Lake” showcases Paps’s adage of sink or swim. He thinks that Ma and the narrator should be able to learn to swim if he just lets go of them while they are in the lake (as some species of animals do with their young). Ma struggles, grabbing onto Paps and the narrator for dear life and nearly drowning her son in the process. This is symbolic of how her personality is all-consuming; she is so fearful of her own life that she is willing to drown her child to keep it. The narrator does figure out how to surmount his fears of the unknown depths of the water and learns how to paddle. His parents are relieved that he is alive. However, Ma is still livid at Paps for putting their lives in danger, and demonstrates this by putting the narrator in danger again while they’re in a moving car, asking to see if the narrator can fly. This is another way in which Torres zoomorphizes the boys; further, it would seem to show Ma’s jealousy towards the narrator, in his act of learning how to swim, showing how young and immature she remains.
“Us Proper” describes how the brothers are one unit. When they make up stories, they are always three characters who are joined together, like the Three Musketeers. Ma tells them about sex, and how she didn’t know what it was when she was young. She just had Manny in her belly with “a heart ticking like a bomb” (26). Suddenly, the boys’ games involve them becoming half-billy goat, half troll babies after “the trolls tricked sex on the goats” (27). The boys realize that being half white and half Puerto Rican makes them different, so when they are born again in these stories, they are born as a strange mixture of two things that would seem to be very much at odds with one another.
