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Chapter Three
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Mothers, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Secrecy, Gossip, and Storytelling
Caretaking and Responsibility
Internalization vs. Externalization
Religion and Judgment
Identity
Summary
Analysis
The Mothers recount the last time they saw Elise Turner (they were apparently the last ones to see her alive). Entering the church one morning, they found her kneeling in front of the altar, “slumped forward” as if sleeping. Accustomed to shooing away drunks and homeless people, they told her to leave, that they wouldn’t call the police if she got up and went on her way. When she didn’t move, though, they advanced closer and realized she wasn’t homeless. “Elise!” exclaimed one of the Mothers. “What you doin’ in here?” In response, Elise stammered something about having come to the church the previous night, but she doesn’t finish her sentence, instead stumbling down the hallway and out the door. And though the Mothers didn’t know it at the time, she was on her way toward death.
The fact that the Mothers are the last ones to see Elise Turner alive is in keeping with the novel’s interest in gossip and storytelling—having seen Elise in her final moments, the Mothers have a certain authority over her story, since they possess details to which nobody else has access. As such, they find themselves in a somewhat authorial position, a notion that perhaps explains why their collective voice figures so prominently into this narrative.
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Nadia spends the summer thinking about her mother’s final days—wondering what she must have been experiencing—and feeling lonely herself. One day, though, Aubrey sits and has lunch with her at Upper Room. At first, Nadia wants to be left alone, but soon they get to talking, and Aubrey tells her that she lives with her sister and her sister’s girlfriend. “At Upper Room,” Bennett writes, “a gay sister was a big deal.” As such, Nadia wonders about Aubrey’s life, suddenly fascinated and drawn to her. “Why did Aubrey live with her sister, not her parents?” Bennett muses. “[Nadia] felt a sudden kinship with a girl who didn’t live with her mother either. A girl who was also a keeper of secrets.”
The kinship Nadia feels in this moment with Aubrey is predicated on the fact that both girls have “secret” pasts kept hidden from the public eye. What’s more, that Aubrey lives with her sisters suggests that she too lives a motherless life, something that naturally sparks Nadia’s interest, since she is grappling with the reality that she no longer has a dependable caretaker. In this way, Nadia finds herself drawn to Aubrey, a girl she used to think of as boring and unremarkable. In turn, Bennett shows that once somebody puts in the effort to learn about another person, it’s easy to move past preconceived notions regarding that person’s identity. Although at first, Nadia carelessly categorized Aubrey as an uninteresting and unrelatable Christian girl, now Nadia sees that Aubrey is just as complex as she is herself.
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Nadia and Aubrey start having lunch together every day. In this way, Nadia slowly learns more about her new friend, who discovered Upper Room when she was sixteen and new to California—she attended a Sunday service one morning and, after listening to the sermon, cried as she walked up to the altar to be saved. Aubrey has moved many times throughout her life, due to the fact that her mother leads an unstable love life and follows men all over the country. One of these boyfriends, Paul, used to sneak into Aubrey’s room and rape her, though she doesn’t tell Nadia this in their conversation about her past.
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When Nadia asks if Aubrey’s mother is dead, Aubrey says, “No, no, nothing like that. I just—we don’t get along, that’s all.” This shocks Nadia, who wonders if this is something somebody can actually do—simply leave a mother behind. Later, when the girls have started spending every evening together, Aubrey and Nadia swing in the hammock in Nadia’s backyard. As they do so, Aubrey reveals that she hasn’t spoken to her mother in almost a year, and Nadia wonders what it must feel like “to be the one who left.”
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Nadia starts spending all of her time at Aubrey’s house, where Aubrey lives with her sister, Monique, and Monique’s girlfriend, Kasey. When Aubrey first moved in, she tells Nadia, she had trouble sleeping, so she and Monique decorated her room together, making it into her ideal bedroom. “Mo thought we needed to do something together,” Aubrey says to Nadia, explaining that they hadn’t seen each other in several years because Monique never visited home because she didn’t like Paul, her mother’s abusive boyfriend. In this moment, Aubrey reveals to Nadia that Paul used to hit both her and her mother sometimes, though she still doesn’t reveal that he also used to rape her.
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Bennett notes that Latrice Sheppard—with her unique eyes, one of which is blue and one of which is brown—has a certain ability to “look at a girl and tell if she [has] been hit before.” She told Aubrey this the third time they had tea together, and since then Aubrey has wondered what the first lady knows about her own life, asking herself whether “her entire past [is] written on her skin.” Over tea one afternoon, Aubrey asks her what happened to Elise Turner. She asks this because the pastor never mentioned a cause of death, a fact that caused “lurid speculation” from the congregation. Although Aubrey now knows that Elise shot herself, she wants to know why she did so. “The devil attacks all of us,” Mrs. Sheppard says. “Some folks just aren’t strong enough to fend him off.”
Mrs. Sheppard is highly perceptive, but she still doesn’t know that Paul used to get drunk and hit Aubrey and her mother. “He’d moved in a year before [Aubrey had] left,” Bennett explains, “and for a year, he had made nightly trips to her room, pushing her door open, then her legs, and for a year, she had told almost no one. Almost, because she’d told her mother after the first time it happened and her mother had shook her head tightly and said ‘No,’ as if she could will it to be untrue.” As Aubrey sits on Mrs. Sheppard’s couch asking about Elise Turner, the first lady asks why the girl wants to know so much about the incident. “Nadia never talks about it,” Aubrey says, but Mrs. Sheppard only warns Aubrey about getting too close to Nadia, who will be leaving soon for college.
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