How It All Goes Down
My Feelings
- Looks like we have another narrator, and another letter, this one dated 12 September 2003 and addressed "Dear Oskar."
- Whoever's writing this letter is an old woman talking about her childhood.
- Once, she got a letter from a man in a Turkish Labor Camp, but most of the text has been removed by the censor.
- Our writer tells us that she had everyone she knew write her a letter: her father, a prisoner, her best friend, Mary.
- She ended up with over a hundred letters.
- Seven years later, two months after moving to America, she runs into a childhood friend, a man who used to date her sister, Anna.
- This is the silent man with YES and NO tattooed on his hands.
- Her story is a little different than his. (She leaves out the "Please marry me" part.)
- She leaves the café, and he gets her attention by following her and clapping his hands.
- He asks her, through a series of elaborate hand motions, to come to his apartment so that he can sculpt her.
- She agrees, and he works on the sculpture every day, which begins to look more and more like her sister, Anna.
- They end up making love one day, as our narrator stares at the sculpture of her sister.
- After, they go to the bakery where they met. This is when, our narrator says, she writes "Please marry me" in the notebook.
- They agree to never have children. That was the first of many rules in the marriage.