79 pages • 2 hours read
Milkman
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Chapter 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
While middle sister was still in bed recovering, ma received three significant phone calls. Two were inquiries about middle sister: one from third brother-in-law wanting to know when she would return to running, and the other from maybe-boyfriend, whom ma mistook for milkman and upbraided. The other call was from a friend of ma’s telling her that state forces had mistaken real milkman for milkman and shot him. After checking to make sure middle sister would be alright without her, ma rushed to the hospital where real milkman had been taken. She returned later that night having ascertained that real milkman was stable, and confessed her decades-long love for him to middle sister. In fact, she said, many women in the community had at one point hoped to marry real milkman, but he refused to marry anyone after the girl he himself loved decided to become a nun. This was why people began referring to him as “the man who didn’t love anybody.”
Since the shooting, ma has continued to visit real milkman in the hospital, leaving middle sister to care for wee sisters. Now, as she’s returning home from the chips shop, she stumbles upon tablets girl’s shiny sister. The sister’s illness was severe, and she is still struggling to walk or even see clearly. Middle sister goes to help her home, and the shiny sister explains that her family found a letter written by tablets girl: in it, she revealed that she poisoned her sister because she saw her optimism and hopefulness as dangerous.
While the two women are talking, they’re approached by middle sister’s twin brother (“third brother”), who also happens to be the shiny sister’s ex-boyfriend. He has heard about her illness and now realizes how mistaken he was ever to have married anyone else; following a brief argument, the two share a passionate, “Christmas French perfume advertisements” (273) kiss. Third brother then takes the shiny sister to the hospital.
When middle sister returns home, she learns from wee sisters that maybe-boyfriend called twice while she was gone. He calls again soon after, wanting to know why middle sister has missed all their recent dates. Middle sister tells him that real milkman has been shot, and maybe-boyfriend offers to come over. At this point, middle sister hesitates as she considers revealing the truth about everything. Unfortunately, maybe-boyfriend takes this hesitation as evidence that she’s ashamed of him, and the conversation devolves into an argument: maybe-boyfriend reveals he’s heard the rumors about middle sister and milkman, middle sister suspiciously asks how maybe-boyfriend got her phone number, etc.
As soon as she hangs up, middle sister feels guilty and decides to apologize to maybe-boyfriend in person. However, when she arrives at his house later that evening, she finds the front door broken. Without revealing her presence, she approaches the kitchen, where she sees chef tending to maybe-boyfriend’s bloody nose and injured eyes: He was attacked by paramilitaries but saved by the arrival of chef brandishing a knife. As middle sister watches in shock, chef caresses middle-boyfriend’s face, and the latter admits he should have been with chef all along.
Middle sister leaves as the two men are kissing and making plans to run away together. As she’s walking home, milkman’s van pulls up alongside her, and she gets in: “It was that there was no more alternative. Ill-equipped I’d been to take in what everybody else from the outset easily had taken in: I was Milkman’s fait accompli all along” (299). Milkman drives her home, assuring her that maybe-boyfriend is now safe and telling her to wear something nice the following night; he plans to take her on a date.
Chapter 6 Analysis
In this section, Burns takes a step back from middle sister to focus on another way in which ongoing trauma shapes the mindsets of those it touches: “[The] business of people marrying people they didn’t love and didn’t want and where someone from the outside might look in and shake their head” (255). Milkman offers three examples of this in Chapter 6 alone: ma, third brother, and maybe-boyfriend all reveal themselves to be in love with someone other than the person they’ve settled for. Although their motives for doing so vary, one key factor is a tendency Burns has previously outlined in her discussion of sunsets and the sky. In essence, people in middle sister’s community are so inured to suffering that the very idea of happiness strikes them as dangerous. It isn’t simply that they fear losing a partner that they love, but rather that they’re afraid of giving up even an objectively awful status quo, simply because its familiarity is one of the few stable aspects of their lives:
[W]hat if this wonderful spouse didn’t fall out of love with you, or you with them, and neither of you either, got killed in the political problems? All those joyful evers and infinites? Are you sure, really, really sure, you could cope with the prospect of that? The community decided that no, it couldn’t (256).
A similar (if more extreme) rationale is at the core of tablets girl’s actions. In the papers her family discovers after her death, it emerges that tablets girl was poisoning people not out of hatred but rather out of fear: One sheet begins, “It is incumbent upon us to list you your fears lest you forget them” (263), details a long list of anxieties, and then concludes that “the biggest worry” involves “Lightness and Niceness” (264). In other words, “war-thinking” (265) has so shaped tablets girl’s worldview that she not only views hope and happiness as dangerous, but she sees them as a part of herself that must be killed off. This is why she repeatedly tries to poison her sister, who in her mind represents that hopeful side of her own personality. In a sense, then, the civil war that is taking place on a national level comes to replicate itself within the minds of individual citizens; just as the country itself is divided, so too are people like tablets girl, who develops a split personality as a result of the many contradictions of her life.
For chef and maybe-boyfriend, of course, the reluctance to commit to a relationship with one another isn’t solely the result of war-related anxiety. The same patriarchal norms that facilitate milkman’s harassment of middle sister also allow homophobia to flourish. Middle sister has alluded to this before, typically by drawing attention to the strict rules surrounding masculinity. Chef is the constant target of homophobic bullying not because anything is known about his sexuality, but because his interest in cooking is seen as effeminate:
[T]here existed in maybe-boyfriend’s area, also in my area, a sense that male chefs—especially of little pastries and petit fours and fancies and dainties to which one could level the criticism ‘desserts’ and which chef here was a maker of—were not in demand and not socially acceptable. Contrary to other chef parts of the world, a man here could be a cook, though even then he’d better work on the boats, or in a man’s internment camp or in some other full-on male environment (31–32).
This toxic masculinity is the implicit link between the homophobia that keeps chef and maybe-boyfriend closeted and the misogyny that characterizes so many of middle sister’s experiences.
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