How It All Goes Down
- Dante nicknames Dolores "Home Ec" (3.21.2) because she does all the vacuuming, laundry, and ironing.
- She gets a job at a local grocery store while he continues teaching school and things are going well between them, though Dolores is having trouble making female friends.
- She often writes letters to Grandma about how wonderful life is and how she and Dante are in love, and she asks how Grandma and Grandpa fell in love, but Grandma doesn't write back.
- One day Dolores calls her. Grandma won't tell Dolores how she fell in love—she doesn't want to talk about it at all, especially since Dolores is just "shacking up" (3.21.54) with a man.
- They bicker for a bit, before Grandma gets truly upset. She says that she's buried two children, and if Dolores wants to love someone, that's great, but "love only gets you so far" (3.21.93).
- That night, Dolores decides to tell Dante everything—about her parents, Jack, Kippy, Dr. Shaw, but when Dante gets home, he's angry at work.
- He received three "needs improvements" on his evaluation, and he yells at Dolores a bit.
- She spends two days alone in her own apartment, then he sends her some pretty roses at work and a card that says "LOVE/US" (3.21.112).
- They make love that night, "rough and urgent" (3.21.113), but Dolores will take whatever she can get; she's starting to feel like a liar for keeping things from Dante.
- He volunteers them to chaperone a school dance, and Dolores, excited to go to her first high-school dance (now that she's in her twenties) goes to try on dresses.
- She finds a pretty dress… and she finds out that she's pregnant because her breasts are super sensitive.
- She hides it from Dante, saying the nausea is the result of a stomach flu.
- At the dance, the other faculty wives are glad that Dolores isn't as scantily clad as Dante's last girlfriend used to be.
- Dolores follows Eddie Ann, the girl who took all the pictures of Dante in the first place, into the bathroom, where she's talking to her friends about how hot Dante is.
- Dolores decides to tell her, "High school is like a sickness. Trust me, the fever breaks. Then you get over it" (3.21.170).
- That night, Dolores tells Dante she's pregnant. He's not having it, though, and he bounces in the middle of the night, then avoids Dolores for a week.
- He eventually brings Dolores a poem called "Love/Us." She reads it and cries, not because it's so beautiful, but because it doesn't mention the baby.