Brawler: Stories
48 pages • 1-hour read
Lauren GroffBrawler: Stories
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Stories 3-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes depictions of discrimination, ableism, illness, death, child abuse, child sexual abuse, sexual harassment, mental illness, substance use, and addiction.
Story 3 Summary: “To Sunland”
Buddy wakes up to find that his aunt Maisie has his suitcase packed by the door. She says an angry goodbye, frustrated that his sister Joanie will soon arrive to take him away. An unfazed Buddy eats his breakfast and waits for Joanie.
Joanie shows up with her suitcase, and the siblings head to the bus station. They hitch a ride with an acquaintance, who gives them his condolences—their mother just died. The siblings are going to Gainesville, where Joanie plans to leave Buddy at Sunland, a mental health institution that has recently been renamed. She promised her mother she would care for Buddy (who has an unspecified cognitive atypicality) should anything happen to her, but Joanie was recently accepted into college in Maine. Desperate to leave town, she’s made arrangements for Buddy at Sunland.
Before boarding the bus, the siblings stop at a diner where Buddy and their mother used to go. The server flirts with Joanie, who barely eats and gives her leftovers to a hungry Buddy. Afterwards, they head to the station and board the bus. They sit near a middle-aged woman carrying a cage with two cockatiels. She interrupts the siblings’ conversation when she overhears Joanie mention Maine, asserting that she guessed they were lovers running away together but then deduced they were siblings and something was “wrong” with Buddy. A protective Joanie tells the woman there is nothing “wrong” with him and gets defensive when she accuses Joanie of depositing Buddy at Sunland.
The woman goes on to say she has “the power of perception” (66), able to tell who a person is just by studying them. She challenges Joanie to do the same with her. Joanie makes accurate assertions about the woman’s identity, family, and itinerary, which unnerve the woman. Laughing, Joanie admits her late mother used to know the woman’s sister. Offended, the woman accuses Joanie of being un-Christian and underscores her wickedness for unfairly abandoning Buddy. Joanie tells the woman off and falls asleep on Buddy’s shoulder.
Buddy studies the scenery through the bus window. Then he notices the woman digging through Joanie’s purse and extracting her roll of cash, which she got from selling off their mother’s things. The woman notices Buddy watching her and gives him a bag of food to buy his silence. Buddy tries to wake Joanie, but by the time she stirs, he can’t remember what he wanted to tell her.
When Buddy and Joanie reach Gainesville, Joanie is horrified to discover that her $100 bill is missing and the woman with the birds is gone. Joanie convinces Buddy to give her the food from the woman for her trip to Maine. Then, they walk to Sunland. When Joanie sees the sign, gates, and attending nurses, she is overcome by guilt. However, Buddy feels peaceful seeing the property and lets the nurses lead him in. Joanie promises she’ll return for him, and turns away without looking back.
Story 4 Summary: “Brawler”
Sara Brawler is a talented diver. At a competition one day, her coach yells at her for being late, but she ignores him and gets ready to dive. She used to be a swimmer but got in trouble for sexually harassing her male teammates and had to switch to diving. The diving coach likes her even if none of her new teammates do.
Sara goes up to the board and performs her dive. She feels herself move up into the air and down towards the water. However, she hits the board, cuts her leg, and gets disqualified.
After practice, Sara stops in at the bodega where the cashier allows her to take two frozen dinners and some popsicles without paying. Afterwards, she heads home and finds her mom lying in a haze on the couch. On the table is a glass of vodka and a cup of pills her mom hasn’t taken. Sara gives her mom a popsicle and sits beside her in front of the television, thinking about her life.
Sara’s mom has been sick for some time. After she collapsed one day, Sara took her to the ER, but the doctors wouldn’t admit her. Sara begged the doctor to find a reason to keep her there, knowing something more was wrong with her mental health. The doctor insisted he couldn’t do anything until her mom actively harmed herself or someone else. Her mom has had increasingly debilitating paranoia and delusions, and Sara hasn’t been able to help her. She won’t eat—afraid the food is contaminated—drinks only vodka, and won’t take her medication.
While preparing the frozen dinners, Sara listens to the animal documentary on TV. She wishes she could close herself in the bathroom for a bath. Instead, she brings the food to her mom and sits back down beside her. With her mom’s body weighing on her lap, Sara feels immobilized by an unnameable weight, imagining her life getting steadily smaller, lonelier, and darker.
Story 5 Summary: “Birdie”
On her deathbed, Birdie calls her three former best friends to her side in the hospital. Melodie, Sammie, and Nic fly into town, reuniting for the first time in years. They drink schnapps and reminisce about the past, each sharing the worst thing they’ve ever done. When it’s Nic’s turn, she starts telling the story of the summer she babysat for the new couple in town. Melodie and Sammie interrupt, insisting they knew she’d had an affair with the father, which is why they refused to hang out with her that summer. A surprised Nic admits she’d genuinely believed they were too busy to see her. Privately, she recalls the summer as one of the happiest in her life.
When it’s Bridie’s turn, she admits she was mean to a classmate in middle school whom she “both liked and didn’t like” (98). Birdie and the girl often had sleepovers. One such night, the girl shared a secret about herself with Birdie. About a year later, Birdie wrote a note to the girl’s parents, revealing her secret and condemning her. (She was irritated with the girl for keeping her from attending another party.) When the parents learned the truth about their daughter, her father beat her and Birdie soon saw “the light inside [of her] had dimmed” (99). Ever since, Birdie has blamed herself for hurting the girl.
Melodie and Sammie dismiss the situation, insisting Birdie let it go. Then a nurse enters, announcing that the friends have to leave until the next day. In the lobby, Nic reluctantly offers Melodie and Sammie a ride to the hotel in her rental car. At the hotel, Nic retreats to her room and showers. Uninterested in spending more time with Melodie and Sammie, she tries ordering room service. The concierge, Dagmar, informs her there is only a restaurant downstairs. When Dagmar learns that Nic is avoiding her friends, she urges Nic to sneak into a shadowy corner of the restaurant to eat.
Dressed in all black, Nic sits in the dark restaurant corner waiting for her takeout and eavesdropping on her friends. She is horrified when she realizes they are talking about her, remarking on how unhappy Nic seems. She grabs her takeout and wine and flees to her room, where she cries herself to sleep. In the morning, she rejoins her friends for breakfast. Melodie gives her a long look and clasps her hand until Sammie shows up. She breaks away from Nic, remarking on Melodie’s hickey—she spent the night with a man from the hotel bar.
The friends return to the hospital to say goodbye to Birdie. After Melodie and Sammie leave for the airport, Nic climbs into bed beside Birdie. Birdie apologizes for interrupting her story yesterday and asks her to tell her version of that summer.
Nic explains her fascination with the new couple, Richard and Deanna, when she first met them at the farmers market where she was working after graduating high school. She was thrilled, too, when they asked her to babysit their son. She describes their beautiful property and home, and how she felt caring for the boy in that space alone.
Then one night, Richard drove her home and asked her intimate questions about herself. When she teared up, he kissed her. In retrospect, Nic admits she shouldn’t have let him, as she is trying to teach her daughter to set boundaries with men. Back then, however, she was flattered by Richard’s attention and became swept up in an affair. He would come home in the middle of the day so they could have sex. Nic often felt guilty for betraying Deanna, because she liked her, too. Then one day, Deanna came home early instead of Richard and invited Nic out for a swim. Nic feared she would either drown her or confront her about sleeping with Richard. Instead, when they’d swum far out into the water, Deanna kissed Nic. Over the following months, Nic moved into the house and kept up affairs with both the spouses. Sometimes she feels guilty (the couple divorced later on), but this was one of the happiest times for her.
Birdie then apologizes to Nic for betraying her all those years ago, and telling her parents she was gay. Birdie and Nic would kiss and touch each other in their sleeping bags when they were kids. Nic insists she forgave Birdie years ago.
Birdie’s parents’ arrival ends the friends’ visit. Nic says goodbye and heads to the airport. The following week, Birdie’s mom calls to say Birdie passed away. Nic is overcome with sadness, which gradually turns to anger. She realizes that although she forgave two versions of her late friend, there are many other, hateable versions of Birdie she can’t forgive.
The day Nic returned from her visit with Birdie, she’d come home to an empty house. The disarray in her space reminded her of all her responsibilities. Instead of attending to them, she sat at her desk while the cat brushed itself against her and contemplated the burden of love.
Stories 3-5 Analysis
The short stories “To Sunland,” “Brawler,” and “Birdie” trace the lives of three main characters who struggle to reconcile their personal desires and identities with those of their family or community. Their overlapping and distinct internal conflicts further the theme of Care as an Act of Love and an Emotional Burden.
In “To Sunland,” Joanie refuses to put off her dreams of escaping her hometown to attend college just because her mother died and there is no longer anyone to care for her mentally atypical brother, Buddy. In “Brawler,” Sara’s young adult aspirations of becoming a diver and escaping her claustrophobic home life are actively thwarted by her mother’s inability to care for herself and manage her own mental illness. Finally, in “Birdie,” Nic struggles to reconcile the hurt she has suffered at the hands of her dying best friend with her love for this same friend. In all three stories, the main characters genuinely care for their loved ones, yet their sense of duty to their loved ones compromises their ability to pursue their own dreams, identities, and happiness.
Both “To Sunland” and “Brawler” have feminist undertones, which expound upon the opening story’s central theme: That suffering is passed down from one woman to the next and might inhibit women from creating independent lives for themselves. In “To Sunland,” Joanie’s brother Buddy becomes the loved one whose need for specialized care is a challenge for Joanie and threatens to keep her from the life she wants. Joanie has been raised in much the same way as the woman on the bus, who chastises her for putting her interests before her brother’s. She tells Joanie how much harder women had it when she was young—herself unable to attend college or “even a home economics course” as her father believed that “no amount of book reading can make a woman a better housekeeper” (68).
Joanie lives with the gendered burden of her sex: To remain in the home, caring for others with her allegedly innate maternal inclinations. She also made a vow to her mother to protect Buddy. In bringing him to Sunland, Joanie worries (as shown via the wave of guilt she experiences when they arrive there) that she is forsaking both her familial and her social responsibility. Caring for her brother is something she wishes she could do out of the goodness of her own heart, but it is also a task she feels unable to bear given her own longing for freedom.
These same thematic strands recur in “Brawler,” where teenage Sara Brawler is overcome by the same internal darkness that Michelle and Eliza feel in the collection’s first two stories. The flashbacks to Sara bringing her mom to the hospital and begging the doctor for help convey her genuine desire to care for her mom by securing clinical attention for her. However, when these efforts prove all for naught, Sara is left to shoulder her mother’s care alone.
The closing image of Sara’s mother’s head “pressed heavy, cooling, into the flesh of [Sara’s] leg” (90) conveys her physical immobility—trapped in a life she cannot change and has not chosen. However, she does choose to bear the literal and figurative weight of her mother’s body because she can feel “the future rising and rising ever upward,” becoming “denser and darker and far lonelier” (91) and fears it. Much like Joanie feels for Buddy, Sara feels an obligation to care for her mother (particularly as her only daughter). The women in these stories are burdened by social and familial caretaking expectations.
In “Birdie,” Nic feels similarly weighed by her friends’ judgment of her, thus struggling with The Conflict Between Personal Desires and Moral Responsibility, another of the collection’s main themes. Throughout her visit with Birdie, Melodie, and Sammie, Nic finds herself either agreeing with her friends, remaining silent, or accepting their interruptions and assertions. However, when the topic of that post-high school summer arises, Nic cannot “remember feeling left out and lonely” (97). She was experiencing her own version of happiness and self-discovery despite her friends’ disapproval of her alleged affair. Her friends were “pretty morally rigid” (97) as teenagers, but seem to hold her to a similar standard in the narrative present, casting judgment on her life without showing any genuine curiosity about her circumstances.
In all of these scenarios, Nic is caught between how her friends see the world and how she is experiencing the world. On the one hand, she is protective of her personal experience—she doesn’t share the true story of that summer with anyone but Birdie—but on the other hand, she is eager to satisfy her perceived moral obligations, as she forgives Birdie on her deathbed despite her sustained anger towards other, more hateful versions of her friend. After Birdie’s death, Nic is left to contemplate “the terrible depths of love” (122), which implies that she is still wrestling with who she wants to be for other people and who she wants to be for herself.
Unlock all 48 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs