Trampoline
45 pages • 1-hour read
Robert GipeTrampoline
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Act 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Act 2: “Reckoning”
Chapter 4 Summary: “Dead Cow in the Creek”
Dawn drives to Denny’s place to return his truck, but no one is home except for Mamaw’s sister, Aunt Ohio, who is drunk and lying flat on the carpet. Without anyone to take her home, she takes off in the truck again and heads back home. When she gets there, Albert, who had been in the hospital after the fight with Dawn left him injured, confronts her about stealing Hubert’s truck along with the beer. He tells her that Hubert is going to be angry with her when gets out of jail, where he has been since he got into a fight with the group of girls outside the liquor store.
Dawn enters Mamaw’s house, still upset with Albert for trying to fight her. She thinks about all the kind things Mamaw has done to care for her and that helps her to calm down. Dawn leaves again and walks out to her Papaw Houston’s house. He notices that she looks tired and tells her to go take a rest in the bedroom.
The next morning, Aunt Ohio is at Houston’s door with food. Dawn asks Papaw Houston if he loved Mamaw or Aunt Ohio more, but he won’t say anything, stating: “You are too young for us to drink enough for me to tell you of my courtship of your grandmother and her sister. There are doors through which it is not time for you to walk” (67). Dawn goes back to bed.
When she wakes up, she turns the radio on and listens to Willett Bilson’s voice. Her infatuation with him is growing, and she wonders what he’s like in person, and what it means to feel this way about him.
She goes back to Mamaw’s house. Denny is there to pick up his truck with the help of a friend, Keith Kelly, who Dawn recognizes as someone who works in the mine. Denny retrieves the keys without mentioning the conflict, and his friend questions why he doesn’t reprimand Dawn. He calls Dawn “lawless” (70), and she accuses him of illegal coal mining. Mamaw breaks up the fight, as Denny drives away, still without saying anything.
Mamaw says they are planning to go inspect the strip mine when the snow melts, but Dawn doesn’t want to think about environmental action anymore, she wants to feel clean and to have a normal life where she is loved. Dawn asks Mamaw where her Momma is, but Mamaw doesn’t know. Mamaw senses that something is wrong and asks Dawn to go for a walk with her, like they do when Dawn is feeling down, but Dawn rejects the offer. Mamaw tells Dawn she doesn’t need to be involved in the coal petition any longer, but Dawn doesn’t want to drop out. She leaves Mamaw’s to go for a walk on the ridge alone. She stops at Houston’s house to grab a jar of homemade corn liquor, which she drinks until she’s drunk. She finds a rock ledge with a 10-foot drop to the ground below. She thinks she wants to kill herself and jumps off the side to see what it feels like.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Monster Birds”
Dawn rolls down the side of the mountain until she hits something. She turns around to see her Aunt Ohio sitting on the grass. Dawn and Aunt Ohio finish the jar of corn liquor and talk.
Dawn walks back to Mamaw’s, where she finds Albert who asks her where Momma is, but Dawn still doesn’t know. They join Mamaw in her car. Mamaw says she knows where Momma is but was told to hurry. They arrive at Denny’s house, where they find a drunken Momma stuck high up in the branches of a poplar tree. Mamaw, Albert, Denny, and a crew of other cousins and family members gather around the tree and try to figure out how to help her get down. Denny climbs up to Momma, while Dawn’s cousins drag a trampoline underneath the tree. Momma slips out of the tree and lands on the trampoline.
The hospital treats Momma for a broken ankle. On the way home, Dawn asks Momma why she was in a tree, and Momma responds: “I care too...About strip jobs. About things getting torn to pieces” (89). Hubert’s house is a mess when they arrive after Dawn’s cousins tore it apart searching for food while he was in jail. Dawn helps give her mother a bath.
Albert and Dawn drive to Mamaw’s. They are stopped by a truck carrying Crater and Pickle Peters, who are both friends of Dawn’s. They invite Dawn and Albert to a party, telling Dawn that her friend Decent Ferguson will also be there. After they arrive, Cinderella and Keith Kelly walk through the door. Cinderella hits on Dawn before Decent points out that Dawn is a minor. Decent, Pickle, and Keith argue about Dawn stealing the truck, with Decent defending Dawn. They continue to fight until Dawn becomes sick and vomits into a bucket, although she isn’t sure why because she hadn’t been drinking that night.
Dawn spends the night at Decent’s. When she wakes up, Decent tells her she should talk to somebody about everything that’s going on in her life. Dawn has no one to talk to, so she asks Decent if she can talk to her. Decent agrees, but Dawn knows she doesn’t mean it. Decent encourages Dawn to talk to Aunt June. Dawn leaves and walks back to Mamaw’s in the rain, wearing a sweater that Decent gave her.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Waterlight”
Dawn heads home and checks in on Mamaw before going to bed. She listens to the radio and hears Willett Bilson invite listeners to send him mail. Dawn draws some pictures and writes a short note to Willett before falling asleep. When she wakes up, it is the Sunday after Thanksgiving. The house is clean, and no one is around. Mamaw’s house is normally a mess, but Dawn figures she must have cleaned up last night in a fit of worry over Dawn’s whereabouts. Dawn sits in the window soaking up the warm sun and thinks about Willett Bilson, Albert, and her momma.
Momma opens the door on Dawn while she’s laid out on the carpet. Dawn isn’t ready to go back to school, and Momma suggests she dye her hair green to “show them...they ain’t broke you” (112). Momma takes Dawn to Hubert’s, because Jan, Hubert’s girlfriend, has a bunch of dye and hair products lying around the house they can use. Jan joins them and says they should cut Dawn’s hair as well because there’s not enough bleach for her whole head. They both cut Dawn’s hair super short before putting the dye in her hair. Momma and Jan smoke weed and talk about climbing up the tree, although Momma won’t say exactly why, but she tries to convey it was something of a spiritual experience for her. Jan asks if Momma has patched things up with Mamaw, and Momma says, “my mother [...] is too hard [...] she makes everything too complicated” (118). When Dawn stands up to leave, Jan tells her she looks like a guy. When she closes the door behind her, she hears the two of them laughing.
Dawn starts walking, unsure of where she is going and what she wants to see. She just wants to walk until her hair grows back. She walks through the snow and stops by a ridge overlooking some of the last land untouched by mining in the county, and she contemplates what it would have been like to be the first white people to arrive on the land or to be one of the native people who lived on the land before them. She eventually arrives at her high school and falls asleep face down on the pavement in the parking lot.
Act 2 Analysis
At the heart of the story, underneath the tension between the coal companies and anti-coal activists, is a family entrenched in pain and generations of struggle. This is most evident in the relationships between Mamaw, Dawn, and Momma. Dawn respects her grandmother but resents her own mother. However, the novel implies that Mamaw’s wisdom is the result of more years on earth and the lessons learned from her own bad habits and decisions, not unlike the ones Momma is currently making. In this sense, there is a cyclical nature to the struggles of the women in Dawn’s family, with the older generation foreshadowing the future of the younger. Even Dawn, who is deeply hurt by her mother’s bad decisions, seems destined to make the same mistakes her mother does, as we see Dawn frequently turn to alcohol when she needs to escape. Dawn also has trouble controlling her temper, which leads to her suspension from school. However, there is hope for both Momma and Dawn, as Mamaw seems to have found peace and stability later in life. When Momma talks about wanting to support the anti-coal efforts, she is trying to explain that she has feelings and ideas too, but she, like her daughter, often feels like she is invisible.
Dawn doesn’t feel like she is worthy, which is why she struggles to untangle her feelings for Willett as they deepen. She seems afraid to confess how she really feels, even just to herself, as if she doesn’t believe she deserves love. Furthermore, with so few positive examples of healthy relationships in her life, it's no wonder that Dawn struggles to accept her own emotions; none of the adults in Dawn’s life know what they are doing. She finds a role model in Decent, but even Decent knows she doesn’t have the answers to help Dawn, further compounding Dawn’s sense of aimlessness.
When Dawn attends the party at Crater’s house, it seems everyone she has ever met is also in attendance, and they all seem to know about the latest drama in her life. Similarly, Jan heard about Momma climbing up the tree. We get the sense that it’s hard to feel like you can be your own person when everyone knows your family story already. Dawn wants to write her own story, not the one other people see for her. However, she struggles to find a sense of agency to take control of her life. When Dawn lets Momma and Jan cut and dye her hair, it seems like it’s a new start for Dawn, a time for her to assert her identity, but her look is in the hands of someone else, and she ends up being dissatisfied and feeling less like herself than before.
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