Night, Mother

“We don’t have anything anybody’d want, Jessie. I mean, I don’t even want what we got, Jessie.”

Thelma is making a joke because Jessie said that she needs a gun for protection. In reality, however, Thelma is desperate to hang on to what they have, and Jessie is the one determined to escape it.

“How would you know if I didn’t say it? You want it to be a surprise? You’re lying there in your bed or maybe you’re just brushing your teeth and you hear this . . . noise down the hall?”

Jessie is describing the shock that most people experience when a loved one commits suicide. There is often no warning. Jessie seems to believe that she can prepare her mother and mitigate her stunned horror when she kills herself, but Thelma sees this only as a chance to change her daughter’s mind.

“No. This is private. Dawson is not invited.” 

In planning her suicide, Jessie has set aside an hour and a half to spend with her mother. Jessie’s relationship with Dawson is strained because she’s uncomfortable with the familiarity that he presumes because they are family. Despite their flawed relationship, Jessie and her mother have lived together for most of her life, and they’re close. Jessie doesn’t want Dawson invading the intimate moment that she has chosen for her death.

“Jesus was a suicide, if you ask me.” 

Jessie is lashing back at her mother for claiming that Jessie will go to hell if she kills herself. She surprises herself with this statement, realizing that deliberately sacrificing oneself is an act of suicide. However, Jessie doesn’t seem to have any pretensions that her death will benefit the greater good.

“There’s just no point in fighting me over it, that’s all.” 

By telling her mother that she plans to kill herself, Jessie opens herself up to her mother’s desperate tactics to convince her to live. The dramatic tension in the play rises with the question as to whether Thelma will succeed. However, as Jessie states at the beginning, the matter is closed, and the decision is made. Her suicide is inevitable, and her mother cannot save her.

“Whatever else you find to do you’re still mainly waiting. The waiting’s the worst part of it. The waiting’s what you pay somebody else to do, if you can.” 

Thelma is talking about her impatience with the laundry, but what she describes reflects the way Jessie views life. Thelma tries to distract herself with hobbies and family and tries to convince Jessie to do the same. Jessie, however, can see only the waiting and the monotony.

“Family is just an accident, Jessie. It’s nothing personal, hon. They don’t mean to get on your nerves. They don’t even mean to be your family, they just are.” 

To Jessie’s annoyance about Dalton, Thelma explains that family is just something inherited. People who are related to each other might clash, but that’s because their proximity is an accident of birth. However, as the play explores, family involves inheritance. It’s more than a group of strangers who find themselves connected. It’s made up of people who share familial traits, inheriting issues and virtues because they are made of the same genetic material. Thus, familiarity and conflict arise.

“The know things about you, and they learned it before you had a chance to say whether you wanted them to know it or not. They were there when it happened and it don’t belong to them, it belongs to you, only they got it.” 

Jessie seems to long for privacy, which she never truly had because she never lived alone. Family enters your life before you can consent to their presence. Jessie never had the chance to define her identity as an individual without the comparison to her father, the intrusion of her brother, or the interference of her mother.

“I read the paper. I don’t like how things are. And they’re not any better out there than they are in here.” 

Jessie tells her mother that she’s saddened by “everything from you and me to Red China” (23). Her depression is both personal and exacerbated by the existential despair of increasing Cold War tensions in the early 1980s. The arms race and the stockpiling of nuclear weapons created widespread fear along with the knowledge that life could be wiped out in an instant.

“Mama, I know you used to ride the bus. Riding the bus and it’s hot and bumpy and crowded and too noisy and more than anything in the world you want to get off and the only reason in the world you don’t get off is it’s still 50 blocks from where you’re going? Well, I can get off right now if I want to, because even if I ride 50 more years and get off then, it’s the same place when I step down to it. Whenever I feel like it, I can get off. As soon as I’ve had enough, it’s my stop. I’ve had enough.” 

Jessie’s metaphor for life demonstrates her inability to experience pleasure. Her perspective of the world differs dramatically from her mother’s. Like most people who don’t consider suicide an option, Thelma wants to live out of a combination of enjoyment (even alongside suffering) and a fear of death. However, depression has changed Jessie’s view of life. For Jessie, life isn’t a rewarding journey in and of itself until it ends in death. It’s simply a journey toward death, and no matter how long one travels, they always end up at the same stop.

“And it’s time I did something about it.” 

Thelma berates Jessie and accuses her of self-pity, of blaming others rather than taking responsibility for her own life. However, Jessie tries to explain that killing herself is her way of taking control of her suffering.

“That’s right. It’s what I think is true.” 

Jessie’s despair has become her entire life. She sees no hope for herself and believes that nothing could possibly make her life better. When Thelma argues, “It’s what you think is true!” (26), Jessie agrees, surprised by the simple accuracy of this statement. Jessie’s perception is her reality. It’s how she experiences the world, so to her, it’s as unshakeable and real as anything else.

“The salt is the trick.” 

Thelma agrees to make hot cocoa for Jessie even though they realize that they don’t want it because they both hate milk. Before she heats it up, Thelma describes her cocoa as unique. In something that’s primarily sweet, the addition of salt makes the flavor more complex. This metaphor for life suggests that a little sadness and suffering enhance the happy moments. Despite not liking milk, Thelma enjoys chocolate; however, Jessie doesn’t find pleasure in any of the ingredients.

“Things don’t have to be true to talk about ‘em, you know.” 

Thelma has been telling outlandish stories about Agnes to make Jessie laugh, but Jessie figures out that she’s exaggerating. Unlike Jessie, Thelma isn’t focused on truth. She prefers the version of reality that brings her the most enjoyment.

“That’s Agnes. ‘Jessie’s shook the hand of death and I can’t take the chance it’s catching, Thelma, so I ain’t comin’ over and you can understand or not, but I ain’t comin. I’ll come up the driveway, but that’s as far as I go.’”

As Thelma describes, her friend Agnes stopped coming over because she found Jessie unsettling. Thelma says that Agnes blamed her discomfort on Jessie’s cold hands. However, as wildly superstitious as this claim seems to be, Jessie has in fact been hyper-focused on death for a long time. Of course, what Thelma doesn’t mention in this moment is that the reason for some of the unease might be that Jessie’s ex-husband had an affair with Agnes’s daughter.

“Why do you have to know so much about things, Jessie? There’s just not that much to things that I could ever see.” 

Thelma made herself happy by avoiding the truth when it was bleak. Thinking too deeply opens her up to unhappiness. Jessie is asking questions, forcing Thelma to look at truths that she prefers to forget.

“He felt sorry for me. He wanted a plain country woman and that’s what he married and then he held it against me the rest of my life like I was supposed to change and surprise him somehow.” 

When Jessie pushes Thelma to unpack the sealed boxes of her marriage, Thelma’s bitterness and anger surface. She married at 15, and as much as she enjoys embellishing the truth herself, she resents the way her husband exaggerated to describe their marriage as yanking her out of the dirt and pushing her into domestic life. Perhaps he judged her for being too simple or difficult to mold—or perhaps Thelma only felt judged because she didn’t understand a man who rarely used words.

“Well, I wasn’t here for his entertainment and I’m not here for yours either, Jessie. I don’t know what I’m here for, but then I don’t think about it.” 

When Jessie suggests that she thought Thelma would change when she became a widow, Thelma insists that she didn’t want to change. Like Jessie, before Thelma married, she never lived alone. Unlike her daughter, however, Thelma experienced an unspecified period after her husband’s death (and while Jessie was married) when she lived alone and could define herself outside of her marriage and family. Thelma loves her children, but she also loves her own contentment. She doesn’t feel the need to know her purpose; she just needs to know how to enjoy her life.

“I told them I was taking a little holiday and to look after you. […] They said it was about time, but why didn’t I take you with me. And I said I didn’t think you’d want to go and they said, ‘Yeah, everybody’s got their own idea of vacation.’” 

Jessie has given all the delivery service people instructions under the guise that she’ll be away on vacation. Her mother finds her joke unsettling, even laughable, but Jessie is again highlighting their different perspectives on life. For Thelma, life is worth living until death forces you to leave the party. To Jessie, life is exhausting and painful, and death is a permanent vacation.

“Mama, you don’t pack your garbage when you move.” 

Although Jessie insists that it’s just a metaphor, Thelma bristles at her daughter for referring to herself as garbage. However, Jessie’s statement gives insight into the way she views herself. She believes that Cecil is better off without her because everything she touches falls apart. Instead of blaming Cecil for giving up and having an affair, as Thelma does, Jessie sees herself as dead weight that he was wise to shed.

“It does not. It’s just a sickness, not a curse. Epilepsy doesn’t mean anything. It just is.”

Jessie is reassuring her mother that her epilepsy wasn’t a punishment for Thelma’s mistakes. However, Thelma’s real concern is her daughter’s suicidal depression and whether she caused it somehow. Nevertheless, Jessie’s statement applies to her mental illness as well. While Thelma may have made parenting errors that were detrimental to both conditions, Jessie’s depression is just a sickness; it has no moral or punitive value.

“You make me feel like a fool for being alive, child and you are so wrong! I like it here, and I will stay here until they make me go, until thy drag me screaming and I mean screeching into my grave and you’re real smart to get away before then because, I mean, honey, you’ve never heard noise like that in your life.” 

Throughout the play, Thelma, who is starting to feel the infirmities of age, runs the gamut in her emotional response to Jessie’s desire to die. Thelma doesn’t like to be forced to contemplate larger questions about life. She prefers to remain certain that life is better than death. Confronted with Jessie’s unemotional determination to kill herself, Thelma becomes angry at her for deciding to waste her life and throw away the time she has.

“Those are just little presents. For whenever you need one. They’re not bought presents, just things I thought you might like to look at, pictures, or things you think you’ve lost. Things you didn’t know you had, even. You’ll see.” 

Jessie focuses on making sure that her mother can carry on with little change to her life after Jessie dies. Much of what Jessie has done is practical. This gesture offers Thelma a shadow of the emotional experience of having Jessie with her. Like real life moments, many of the gifts are unremarkable. Sometimes, however, they show Thelma what she has or give her back things she’s lost. A few are intensely personal, and at least one is both sentimental and valuable. With these gifts and her gift list for Dawson, Jessie infuses herself in her mother’s life as much as possible after she’s gone.