34 pages • 1 hour read
Gish JenWho's Irish?
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 3 Summary: “The Water Faucet Vision”
In “The Water Faucet Vision,” the narrator and protagonist tells the story of when she finally gave up her “saintly ambitions” in the fifth grade. The telling of this story is prompted by the narrator hearing from her father the night before, four months after her mother died, letting her know he has decided he cannot live in their childhood home anymore.
This phone call causes the adult narrator to reflect on the time in her life when “the world was a place that could be set right” (46). The narrator tells the story of the year she decided she wanted to be able to do miracles. This was also the year her parents were fighting so badly that her father pushed her mother out the window. The violence in her parents’ fighting is heightened after the narrator and her friend Patty Creamer do everything they can to work a miracle for Pattie’s family: to get her father to come back. The narrator’s mother survives with minimal injuries, which the doctors call a “miracle.” The narrator comments on the miracle that she really wanted at the time, the miracle that would have prevented her mother from being pushed out of the window in the first place. This night, the night in the hospital, is followed by the narrator accidentally swinging her precious malachite beads into the gutter, where they are lost forever.
The narrator has a meltdown about her malachite beads and later that evening has a vision that tells her to turn on all the water faucets in the house and her beads will return to her through the sewer system. This doesn’t work, and when she confesses this vision to her family, everyone mocks her. It is at this point that we return to the present day, where the narrator has lost her mother and has been on the phone with her father and is grieving the loss of her parents and her own childhood and innocence.
Story 3 Analysis
“The Water Faucet Vision” functions as a coming-of-age story as it is about the narrator’s loss of religious faith and therefore her youthful innocence. The memoir narration of this story enables the protagonist to assign meaning to this moment in her life as she is moving through another loss of childhood: the loss of her parents.
The theme of having a hedge against life or warding off life emerges in this story as the narrator identifies the miracles that she wanted to acquire as a “means of defense” (39). In the dramatic present of the story, the narrator has recently rented out her apartment to a young couple who left behind their list of prayers, both answered and not, in her house. Upon finding this list, she says that it is both strange and familiar to her, like it was written by a cousin of hers who had “stayed home to grow up, say, while I went abroad and learned painful things. […] I did my growing up at home, like anybody else” (42). This statement shows that the narrator views her beliefs as what she grew out of—that she too grew up at home, home being the place where she learned that people cannot always protect themselves from life, even when they believe they might have special powers.
The malachite beads ending up in the sewer is symbolic of the sacred veering into the realm of the profane. This transgressive thread is also present in the hospital when the doctor calls the mother’s lack of serious injury from the fall a “miracle” and the narrator, hearing this, wishes for a different kind of miracle, a different kind of reality, one that can only be held by a strong commitment to belief.
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By Gish Jen
