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 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 5 Summary: “Just Wait”
“Just Wait” opens at Addie and her husband Rex’s baby shower, where she has just been gifted a video camera by her three brothers: Billy, Mark, and Ned. Addie pans the camera over the shower, and the narrator describes those in attendance (as well as those who are absent—Ned, whom we learn has spent time in a psychiatric hospital, and her stepfather, Reynolds) and the gifts that they have brought. Addie’s mother, Regina, is a grim presence; she is described as “ambivalent at best about pitching in American-style at events like these. She took offense at the idea that anyone would expect her to help like a servant” (96). She is set in opposition to Rex’s mother, who is delighted to be cleaning up wrapping paper and taking notes of the gifts for thank you cards.
When Regina, or “Madame Lee'' as Rex calls her, presents her gift of a stuffed sailfish, she also proclaims that Addie’s stepfather is leaving her and she has nowhere to go. Addie tries to comfort her mother while everyone at the baby shower decides that Regina can move in with Addie and Rex.
Addie and Rex concede that Regina should move in with them and begin discussing renovations to their small condo to ensure that Addie can still have an office space for her garden design work. When Addie’s brother Mark hears of this proposed project, he offers to renovate the space for them and also offers Billy’s labor. In the kitchen looking over Mark’s drawings for the closet-turned-office, Addie goes into labor, although she does not tell anyone. She thinks about Ned, recalling “Neddie the Absent” who used to “look around at them all and announce, You see me not, to which Regina would reply, What you talking about? and You must be crazy!” (104). Addie then imagines Ned holding her child and exclaiming, “How nice to have a new stranger in the family” (104).
Story 5 Analysis
“Just Wait” is divided into five sections: “Those Absent,” “The Shower Proper,” “Pillow Talk,” “The Problem,” and “Addie’s Room Becomes Regina’s Room.” These headers mirror the structure of a story—the characters, the setting, the plot, the conflict, and the resolution—and thus make the reader conscious of the story as it is unfolding.
The presence of the camera in the story works both as a symbol and as a device to further push the concept of watching a narrative play out as Addie herself becomes the one viewing the scenes from behind the camera. The camera is symbolic of the readers—who are always somewhat voyeuristic in their viewing of stories, characters, and actions. Those in attendance at the baby shower become a type of chorus; when they are comforting Regina and telling her to stay with Addie and Rex, they are described as one voice. When Regina resigns to move in, “the crowd burst into applause, as if on a TV show” (99). Here the story plays into the trope of the sitcom, making the tale that is unfolding feel both familiar and almost fated.
Jen introduces the theme of tension in cultural generational expectations first by depicting Regina as both unhappy in her attendance and unwilling to help, and she further establishes it when is the crowd suggests that Regina move in with Addie and Rex to help with the baby and Regina repeatedly replies, “No help.” Regina will not play the American mother for her daughter and her family.
Addie’s brother Ned, who we learn has been institutionalized, calls in the theme of seeing and therefore being understood. In the final scene, when Addie goes into labor while they are looking over the plans for her new room and her future, she recalls “Neddie the Absent” saying, “You see me not,” and her mother replying, “What you talking about? and You must be crazy!” (104). As Addie is alone in her labor at this moment, she is able to distance herself from the present drama and move, like she was able to with the camera in her hand, through her family like an observer, like the stranger that they all sometimes are to one another.
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By Gish Jen
