53 pages • 1-hour read
Hot Milk
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Chapters 10-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, sexual content, emotional abuse, animal cruelty and death, mental illness, and ableism.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Bling”
Rose drives Sofia to a marketplace, and Sofia notices how giving Julieta case histories has softened Rose. Rose drives fast, moving her feet across the three pedals of the car. Rose cannot imagine Sofia driving, which makes Sofia wonder what it means to not imagine something. Rose respects Julieta, but she does not think Gomez’s clinic is helping her.
At the market, Sofia buys Rose some churros, and Rose insists on buying a watch. The salesman shows Rose a large watch that Rose likes, but Sofia interrogates the salesman on the price. Sofia buys an air freshener shaped like a fertility idol, which makes her think about how much of gender and attitude is only performance. Rose buys the watch, and Sofia notices how Rose swats at flies that land on her feet, meaning she is not numb. They realize they parked in front of a damaged house with a family living inside, which Sofia compares to her own broken family. She remembers having free lunch at school and being ashamed of it.
Rose tells Sofia to drive because she had too much to drink in the market, and Sofia accidentally runs over a child’s doll. Sofia drives slowly and struggles with the gears, but Rose coaches her, acting as Sofia’s eyes the same way Sofia acts as Rose’s legs. Rose tells Sofia about her father’s hair, which Sofia does not want to know about. When they park, Sofia finds a can of spray paint matching the graffiti from the clinic in the trunk of the car.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Horseplay”
Sofia and Ingrid make coconut ice cream, but they do not discuss the kiss. Sofia imagines that Ingrid is a bridge that gets slightly dismantled whenever Sofia tries to cross.
They drink lemonade with Matthew, who tells Sofia that Gomez is a quack. Sofia suspects Matthew wrote the graffiti and may not be in love with Ingrid. Matthew is a life coach, and Tony James, a pharmaceutical executive, is one of his clients. Sofia compliments Matthew’s belt, which is an anthropological technique to get people to talk.
Matthew explains his method of coaching executives to open up and exude confidence. Ingrid cautions Matthew against talking around an anthropologist. Matthew asks about Sofia’s life. She explains her job as a barista, and Ingrid insists that Sofia does not want anything. Sofia jumps onto the beach and hits a volleyball to a group of four men, including Juan. She sees a woman on a horse who fires an arrow into Sofia’s heart. She thinks about Juan and Ingrid’s genders and her attraction to them.
The other narrator discusses how the Greek girl brings watermelon rinds to feed chickens, and her medusa stings are fading.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Human Shields”
Gomez tells Rose that her bones are losing density, which is normal for her age. He takes her off all her remaining medication, and Rose does not mind. Gomez confronts Sofia about driving without a license, and his beeper goes off. He says Sofia uses her mother as a shield against life, so it is like Sofia is being taken off medication as well. Jodo is pregnant, and Gomez is excited. The beeper alerts Gomez to a patient having a heart attack, but Gomez is not a cardiologist.
The other narrator watches the Greek girl jump nude in her bedroom and admires her body, noting that she does not shave her armpits. The girl sees the other narrator and covers her mouth.
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Artist”
Sofia is nervous about driving without a license and wonders if she could bribe the police. She goes to Julieta’s studio, where Julieta offers her beer. There is a self-portrait in Julieta’s studio of Julieta with a chameleon’s eyes, and Sofia wonders if they are imitating each other. Sofia tries to ask about Julieta’s interviewing techniques, but Julieta focuses on Rose’s case before asking Sofia about herself.
Time passes, and Sofia talks about herself a lot, which makes her nervous. She notices that Julieta drinks a lot of beer. Julieta says her childhood dog was kidnapped, then her mother was killed in a helicopter accident. Sofia feels like they are twins.
Matthew shows up with a bottle of wine, and Julieta chastises him for walking in without knocking and for spraying graffiti on the clinic.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Ingrid the Warrior”
Sofia and Ingrid have sex in the apartment Ingrid rents attached to a stable. Sofia loves Ingrid’s body and confidence even though she is frightened by her strength. They drink wine that Ingrid stole from Matthew. Sofia thinks about Margaret Mead, who had a female lover, and notes that she did not need to travel like Mead to learn about sexuality.
They shower, and a blue snake comes out of a basket. Ingrid kills it with an axe and beckons Sofia. As they leave, the riding instructor, Leonardo, greets Ingrid and stares at Sofia, who stares back. Ingrid kisses Leonardo and tells him about the snake, and Leonardo offers to give Ingrid his boots to ride an Andalusian horse. Sofia predicts that Ingrid will ride the horse and shoot her heart with an arrow. Ingrid excuses Sofia’s comment by telling Leonardo that Sofia is half-Greek.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Lame”
Sofia stays in the house for days, refusing to answer the knocking at the door except for Juan. She is still frightened by Ingrid and the snake, and she sees Leonardo as Ingrid’s shield. Sofia starts limping again, and she and Rose seem to be waiting for something that will not come. Rose eats bread rolled into little pills and tells Sofia to get painkillers from the pharmacy. Sofia sings a lamentation while looking at the cracked screensaver on her laptop.
Rose calls her, and Sofia smashes an imitation Grecian urn on the floor. The medusa stings make her feel like she is floating, and she thinks about how Rose would not have any rights in ancient Greece. When Sofia’s father was around, Rose cooked for him, but she had to get a job in a library when he left. Sofia compares her love for Rose to an axe that cuts deep. Rose asks what is wrong with Sofia, who is distracted by children playing in the street.
Chapters 10-15 Analysis
This section of the text presents a series of important comparisons between Sofia and three other female characters: Rose, Ingrid, and Julieta. The critical term that links these characters is the title of Chapter 12, “Human Shields,” in which Gomez tells Sofia, “You are using your mother like a shield to protect yourself from making a life” (111). Gomez’s conception of a “human shield” invokes The Blurred Line Between Physical and Psychological Suffering, exposing the psychological suffering of these characters and how they use each other to mask their loneliness or insecurities. Gomez’s comment is specifically directed at Sofia, but it applies similarly to Rose, Julieta, and Ingrid.
Rose uses illness as a shield against loneliness, as her illnesses force Sofia to remain by her side. They also allow her to garner sympathy from others. In her discussion with the watch salesman, Rose says, “I can feel the ticking because my arms are not numb like my feet,” adding, “I have difficulty walking,” to earn a shake of his head in “commercial sympathy” (97). In this scene, Rose’s illness appears as a tool with which she can demand sympathy from others, but Sofia makes it clear that this tool is not necessary, comparing Rose to an anagram of her name, Eros, because of her skill in flirting with the salesman. Rose does not need the illnesses to get attention, just as she does not need them to secure Sofia’s love, and yet she persists in pretending that she is paralyzed to avoid change.
Julieta, on the other hand, is more similar to Sofia, and her shield is alcohol. When Sofia visits Julieta in her studio, she discovers that Julieta likes to paint and drink. She thinks: “We were sort of twins. One of us motherless, the other fatherless” (117), and that they have the added similarity of being bound to their surviving parent. Julieta explains how her mother died, and the clinic is a kind of memorial to her, at which her father wants her to work as Nurse Sunshine. Julieta obliges Gomez, but drinking and painting are her small forms of rebellion that keep her from feeling like she is entirely subjugated to her father’s wishes.
Julieta paints herself as a chameleon, which stands in contrast to Sofia’s transformation into the Medusa, suggesting that Julieta has chosen to become what others want her to be. Matthew’s arrival suggests that Julieta is sleeping with Matthew, who is trying to get Gomez’s clinic shut down—another sign that Julieta might be seeking ways of freeing herself from her father’s heavy influence.
Ingrid, like Julieta, is on a similar path to Sofia, but Ingrid uses men as a shield against the attraction she feels to Sofia, reflecting The Complexities of Sexual Desire and Identity. After Ingrid and Sofia have sex, Ingrid sends Sofia away to be alone with Leonardo, with whom Ingrid openly flirts. This decision depresses Sofia, during which she realizes, “Leonardo has become her new shield” (125, emphasis added), suggesting that Ingrid uses Leonardo’s presence to avoid getting any closer to Sofia. The title of Chapter 14, “Ingrid the Warrior,” paints Ingrid as a powerful woman, as she is armed with her axe and figurative shield. She uses the axe to kill a snake and Leonardo as the shield to protect herself from Sofia. In each instance, Ingrid is trying to avoid her desire for Sofia.
Thus, in these ways, Rose is trying to shield herself from losing her daughter, Sofia is trying to shield herself from growth, Julieta is trying to shield herself from subjugation to Gomez, and Ingrid is trying to shield herself from her own sexuality. The novel therefore implies that while these women appear very different from one another on the surface, deep down they all have more in common than they realize.
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