How It All Goes Down
- Looks like Dolores is going to Cape Cod; she lies and tells the cab driver she's meeting friends there.
- The driver stops for gas and a nap in Jersey, and Dolores buys coffee and a dozen yummy donuts.
- She grabs a newspaper and hunts for stories about whales beaching themselves on the Cape.
- Because her nose didn't grow with the first lie, she tries another: She tells the waitress in the café that the cab driver is her boyfriend.
- When she gets back to the cab, she finally introduces herself to him: She's Dolores, he's Domingos.
- They continue driving, and Dolores falls asleep in the back of the cab as they go through Connecticut, near where she grew up.
- She wakes up in the middle of a story Domingos is telling, a story about him delivering a baby in the back of the cab.
- She asks him if he's ever seen a whale, but he hasn't, so she goes back to sleep.
- When she wakes up, they've arrived in Wellfleet, where a whale is beached.
- Dolores and Domingos head out to take a closer look.
- Dolores wonders why no one is doing anything about it, like pushing it back in the water, but Domingos says the whale is dead.
- But it's not dead—it starts flailing and thrashing around.
- Dolores freak out, and she starts flailing and thrashing around, too.
- Domingos leaves Dolores at a motel, where she considers writing suicide notes and killing herself, but instead calls her mother's childhood friend, Geneva Sweet.
- She tells Geneva that she's in Cape Cod, looking at whales, thinking about death—you know, like you do.
- Geneva tells Dolores a bit about her mother, then asks Dolores if her grandmother knows where she is.
- Dolores hangs up on her, dismissing her as a "rich bitch" (2.16.256) in that endearing Dolores way, and goes to look at the whale again.
- She walks right up to the whale, and even dips below the water to look at the whale's eye, "a cataract full of death" (2.16.271).
- Dolores considers drowning herself, one beached whale next to another, but she surfaces and lies next to the whale, shivering.
- A cop discovers her the next morning and wraps a blanket around her.