Summary

Two men transport Tennessee from her room to a hallway congested with other people. The men do little to comfort Tennessee despite her expressions of pain, which she feels in her stomach. When a woman approaches her table she asks Tennessee if she has had any ice, and Tennessee drops off into a sleep. When she awakens she is in another room where a woman in a pumpkin-colored dress is sitting in a chair. Tennessee recognizes her as a friend who had died at age twenty-five, ten years earlier. Her name is Tennessee Alice Moser, a woman Tennessee knew from her childhood. Tennessee asks her if she is dead or alive, and Tennessee Alice Moser tells her that she is “neither one exactly. Sort of in between the two. Or you can think of it as anesthesia” (195). As Tennessee and Tennessee Alice converse the...