56 pages • 1 hour read
Judy BlumeSummer Sisters
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “We Are the World (1983-1987)”
Part 3, Chapter 26 Summary
At Harvard, Vix calls herself Victoria and feels that every person knows more than her. She shares a room with Maia, who annoys Vix by biting her fingernails and talking too much. Maia thinks Vix is too quiet and refers to Vix as a “creature.” A picture of Caitlin intrigues Maia, and she asks about NBO, but Vix is elusive.
Caitlin calls in the middle of the night: She’s in Rome. Vix likes having independence from Caitlin, but she misses her. Caitlin claims she’s learning to “manage” her money.
Lanie has her baby, and Maia calls her a statistic. Bru visits, but Vix is sick, and they quarrel about Harvard. Bru sends her vitamins from Vineyard Health; there’s a note from the owner, Star.
Part 3, Chapter 27 Summary
Maia and Vix discuss sex with Paisley (who’s from the South) and Paisley’s roommate Debra (who’s from Korea), and Paisley suggests finding a “warm body” for the winter. Maia finds a guy in her justice class, and Debra and Paisley show her a how-to tape. After Maia has sex with the guy, she reports: It’s “wildly funny.” Sometimes, Vix wishes she could flirt with someone. Caitlin calls at four o’clock in the morning from Paris to say that she had an “affair” with a woman like Vix. The woman claims Caitlin is a “political lesbian,” not a “biological lesbian,” and she cut up Caitlin’s underwear.
Paisley likes that Vix is a careful listener, and Vix invites Paisley to have dinner at Abby and Lamb’s Cambridge house. Paisley sits next to the Democratic state chair and criticizes First Lady Nancy Reagan and her anti-drug campaign Just Say No. The man thinks Paisley has a future in politics, and she thinks he’s touching her thigh.
Part 3, Chapter 28 Summary
Vix becomes friendly with Maia and roommates with Paisley. Paisley and Vix work for the 1984 Democratic presidential ticket—Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro—but Mondale loses to Reagan. Paisley wonders if Nancy Reagan “goes down” on the president. Caitlin doesn’t vote. Bru votes for Mondale, but he thinks Reagan has sound economic policies. Vix spends Christmas with Bru’s family at the Vineyard. She likes how they complain less than Harvard students.
Caitlin and her mom go skiing together, and Phoebe tries to talk to her about men, but Caitlin finds a guy at a bar, so Phoebe looks for “some action.” Vix wants Caitlin to come back. She claims Caitlin stays aways due to Abby. To get Caitlin back, Abby plans a surprise 50th birthday for Lamb.
Part 3, Chapter 29 Summary
Caitlin returns for Lamb’s birthday, and she makes an embarrassing toast about men, and her brother makes an awkward toast about Lamb’s hands-off approach to parenting. Gus looks after his sick grandma, but he calls during the party and speaks to Vix.
Caitlin mentions that she had an abortion, and she wants Vix to travel with her. Vix turns down the offer, and Caitlin attributes her rejection to Harvard and Bru. Vix claims Caitlin has never been in love. Caitlin doesn’t want love if it means losing freedom.
Part 3, Chapter 30 Summary
For Christmas during Vix’s junior year, she and Bru drive to Santa Fe to visit her family. She admits Bru is sweet and loving, but the lack of excitement in their relationship worries her.
Tawny is in Key West, Florida, with the Countess, who has emphysema. Tawny says her marriage is over: She and Ed should create “new lives.” Ed has a romantic interest from work, Frankie—Lanie refers to her as a “cow.” Lanie has two babies and a toxic marriage. Vix pushes her to change her life, and Lanie scolds Vix for returning after three years and presuming she has all the answers. Nevertheless, Lanie asks for money, and Vix gives her $50.
Vix visits Nathan’s grave––she feels like she doesn’t know her family, and they don’t know her. On the drive back, Vix cries and upsets Bru. He doesn’t know Vix anymore and suggests a break. Back at the Vineyard, Bru has sex with Star, and after, he dreams about Vix.
Part 3, Chapter 31 Summary
Vix’s breakup shocks Maia, and Maia worries that a spot on her foot portends cancer. Maia sees a doctor, who assures her she’s fine—she’s likely just under too much stress.
In Los Angeles, Caitlin runs into Tim Castellano and has a two-week affair with him. Vix remembers People running a cover story on Tim a few months after she and Caitlin babysat his kid: He had an affair and left his wife the day the new baby came home. Tawny thought the scandal would destroy his career, but it didn’t: He went from TV to movies while his wife’s acting career dissipated.
Caitlin and Sharkey have dinner in Los Angeles. Sharkey spends 18 hours a day in “the lab,” and he lectures Caitlin about money and doing something with her life.
Part 3, Chapter 32 Summary
For spring break, Vix stays with Maia at her home in New Jersey. There’s a tennis court and a pool, and Vix thinks Maia’s family is intelligent, but Maia labels them “controlling.” At the beach, Vix meets a Penn medical student, and they have sex, but much to the chagrin of Maia and Paisley, Vix still plans to spend her summer at the Vineyard. Abby is glad Vix will come back, but she hopes Vix and Bru don’t get back together.
Part 3, Chapter 33 Summary
At the Vineyard, Vix works for the cleaning company. She trains other cleaners, and her boss offers to make her a partner, but Vix doesn’t want that—she doesn’t know what she wants. Bru stops by her work, and they have sex, but when she tries to have sex with him in the room she shared with Caitlin, he feels weird.
Abby’s parents visit, and her mom thinks having a “beautiful young girl” around spells trouble. They remind her of what happened when the actress Mia Farrow befriended the singer Dory Previn and her musician husband André Previn—André left Dory for Mia. Abby assures her mom that Vix is the daughter she never had.
Part 3, Chapter 34 Summary
Caitlin is in Argentina, studying dance, but she’s not going to become another Evita—an actress who became the First Lady of Argentina (1946-52). She wants Vix to visit her, but Vix can’t. She’s working on her thesis, Five Minutes in Heaven, a video where kids with physical conditions discuss their conceptions of heaven. She adores editing—it reminds her of solving jigsaw puzzles. The video is a hit, and it gets her a job at Squire-Oates—a big New York City PR firm. Dinah, her boss, says she’ll be working with important people.
Paisley meets Bru, and she has a tiny crush on him—though she’d never try to make her fantasies a reality. Bru asks Vix to marry him, but Vix isn’t sure. Maybe Bru and the island aren’t enough for her.
Part 3 Analysis
Blume names each of the book’s five parts after a song, and she names Part 3 “We Are the World” (1985)—a social-justice song by USA for Africa, a supergroup featuring Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Ray Charles, Diana Ross, and Bob Dylan, among others. The title is ironic, subverting or poking fun at Part 3’s politics. While Vix and her friends are in the world, they remain in a privileged space—Harvard. There’s little reason to doubt the sincerity of Vix, Paisley, and their politics, but they’re not selflessly devoting themselves to the cause of justice. They’re upset about the election of Reagan, but their main focus is on themselves and each other. Thus, the irony or twist is that they are the world—they’re the central concern, and they’re not in a life-or-death situation.
The Elusive Power of Sex advances in several ways in these chapters. Paisley experiences a sexual situation in a professional setting when she sits beside the Democratic state chair and wonders, “[W]as that his hand on [my] thigh or was it just [my] imagination?” (232). Her question turns nonconsensual touch into a flippant, lighthearted moment. The tone and diction—specifically the word “imagination”—suggests that Paisley doesn’t mind that his hand is on her thigh, though such behavior violates contemporary professional norms.
Meanwhile, Caitlin continues to join the elusive power of sex with Innocence Versus Experience. She bluntly tells Vix, “I had an affair with a woman. She reminded me of you” (230). The affair turns into another accomplishment, and the woman’s link to Vix suggests there’s a sexual attraction between Caitlin and Vix. Sex arises again when Caitlin returns to Massachusetts after a long absence to attend Lamb’s surprise 50th birthday. Her toast—“To Lamb…the best man I’ve ever known. And I’ve known more than my share” (243)—reinforces her pride in her sexual experiences. Caitlin’s character combats the phenomenon of “slut-shaming”––the notion that women with several sexual partners should feel disreputable.
In this section, Maia reflects a tentative and careful attitude toward sex: She and her boyfriend explore sex by “spending hours analyzing their situation” before Maia watches an “explicit how-to video” (229), as if the pair are preparing for a test or an athletic event. The formal groundwork doesn’t stop sex from being “wildly funny”—it remains difficult to manage.
The motif of money appears when Vix spends Christmas with Bru’s family and notes, “They weren’t all in therapy, they weren’t all trying to find the meaning of life. They didn’t sit around comparing their dysfunctional families, blaming their parents for all their problems like her friends at Harvard” (236). Vix juxtaposes the privileged Harvard students with the much less affluent people in Bru’s circle. She fetishizes the latter, turning them into salt-of-the-earth symbols when they’re people, just like the Harvard students. A lack of money doesn’t necessarily make a person virtuous or authentic.
The Fluidity of Family advances within Vix’s family, as her mom prefers the Countess over her family and Ed gets a new romantic interest. Lanie also has two kids. Thus, Vix’s family is now both contracting and expanding. Lanie casts Vix as a snob when she says, “You come back here once in three years and think you can fix everything just like that? You don’t know shit about any of us” (251). Though Vix is physically present, she remains intangibly estranged from her family. Her family isn’t a part of her privileged world, and she’s not regularly a part of their less privileged universe.
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