How It All Goes Down
- Our narrator, Dolores tells us her earliest memory: Two men deliver a brand new television. Her earliest memory is one of our recurring fantasies.
- It's her first time watching TV, and she cries, not because she missed the finale of Breaking Bad, but because she thinks the women on the screen have been shrunk and put inside it.
- She gets over this and starts watching TV all the time while her dad works and her mom keeps house. It's 1956, so that's the way things go.
- One day, Dolores's parents fight while watching a game show and her Ma sits in the tub crying.
- Sometimes Dolores's dad brings Dolores along on his Saturday errands and she entertains him by mimicking TV jingles.
- When Daddy visits his boss, Mrs. Masciotte, he spends a long time with her, doing their "weekly business" (1.1.36) while Dolores shoves cookies in her mouth. On the days where they spend an extra long time together, Dolores vandalizes her storybooks and torments her dog.
- The year Dolores enters second grade, her Ma is supposed to have a baby, but when he's born, the umbilical cord is wrapped around his neck. Ma was going to call him Anthony Jr.
- Grandma comes to stay with Dolores while her mom recovers.
- The day before Ma returns from the hospital, Dolores and her dad drive to the dump; he tells her about the time he saw a whale stuck in shallow water. (Symbol alert.)
- Ma arrives home, deeply depressed. Dad gets sick of it pretty quickly, while Dolores starts having nightmares, although she starts screaming more for attention than out of fear.
- She tells her dad that she hates Grandma and wants her gone, and he drives her back to Rhode Island.
- But she can't banish Mrs. Masciotte, Daddy's boss, no matter how hard she tries.