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This chapter-by-chapter summary contains plot spoilers!
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Summary of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz
Pages 51-75:
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Chapter 2. Wildwood 1982 – 1985. (Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com) Lola remembers being twelve and getting called into the bathroom by her mother and ordered to feel a lump in her mother's enormous breasts. Lola realizes in a supernatural kind of way that her life is about to change and finds it "exhilarating." Sure enough, their mother Beli has breast cancer. Lola remembers what a dutiful daughter she's always been to her tyrannical mother who didn't even believe her when Lola got molested at age eight by a neighbor. Lola did all the cooking, cleaning, and mothering of Oscar for much of her childhood while their mother Beli worked multiple jobs to support them.
But in the two years after her mother gets breast cancer, Lola starts to go wild. It culminates when she's fourteen and shaves her head. Beli slaps her, and Lola strikes Beli's hand away. By now, Lola refuses to cook and clean and help out. For some reason, Oscar doesn't help either, helplessly retreating to his room with his role-playing games. Beli, trying to recover from her latest operation, tries to work a second job. Lola tells Beli that she hopes she will die from the cancer.
Lola runs away from home to join her nineteen year-old boyfriend Aldo who works at the beachside amusement park in Wildwood New Jersey. She lives with him and his stingy father in a horrible bungalow. Aldo and the dad fight with each other and with Lola. She considers herself lucky that they don't "gangbang" her.
She calls Oscar at home and tells him to steal all their mother's money and bring it to her at a coffee shop. He agrees but instead brings their mother and uncle who try to capture Lola. She runs away but stops out of momentary pity to look back at her dying mother who lies crying in the gutter. Lola comes back only to find out her mother was faking the crying to lure her in. The family sends Lola to her grandmother La Inca in Santo Domingo to finish high school there. She joins the track team, and becomes a star runner. One night La Inca starts to tell her the story of Beli's past and Lola again gets a supernatural feeling that this information will change her life.
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