I'm Thinking of Ending Things

The protagonist and Jake are driving to Jake’s rural childhood home to have dinner with his parents. This is the first time the protagonist will be meeting them as well as the first time that her and Jake have taken a trip together. The protagonist is not excited to meet Jake’s parents. She describes herself as feeling nostalgic, guilty, and distracted because she has the thought of ending things with Jake in her mind. The protagonist has no plans of ever mentioning Jake to her own parents.

Despite the protagonist’s plan to end their relationship, she describes their connection as “a rare and intense attachment. I’ve never experienced anything like it” (4). She believes they met about seven weeks ago but isn’t sure. Neither can she remember the last road trip she was on. She notices the radio station they are listening to has played the same song twice in an hour, but Jake ignores her statement. They pass a burned down farm with a new swing set in front, but when the protagonist mentions how odd it is that a deserted farm should have a new swing set, Jake ignores her comment again.

The protagonist tries not to look at her reflection in the mirror, as it is a “no-mirrors day for me. Just like the day Jake and I met. These are thoughts I keep to myself” (7). She describes their meeting at trivia night at the campus pub, where she and her friend had gone for a drink even though she is no longer a student there. The protagonist hates competitive trivia and would have preferred to stay home.

Jake is at the next table and competing in trivia night with a group. The protagonist strikes up a conversation with him, and he tells her their team’s name is Brezhnev’s Eyebrows, after a Soviet engineer. The protagonist does not enjoy such obscure witticisms but is attracted to Jake nonetheless because of his “exotic” intelligence. Jake tells her he is a cruciverbalist, or an expert at crossword puzzles. He explains that he wanted their team’s name to be Ipseity, which means selfhood or individuality. Later, she finds a note from Jake in her purse with his number on it.

At the end of the chapter, Reid includes a conversation between two unnamed Speakers. Their conversation takes place after the main events of the book and Jake’s death by suicide. They discuss the violent nature of his death and their shock that “[n]othing so horrible has ever happened around here” (13). The Speakers are familiar with Jake and work at the high school where he was a janitor.

As they drive, the protagonist considers what makes her relationship with Jake meaningful to her. Individually, neither she nor Jake attract attention. But when they are together, the protagonist is pleased that they attract attention. She remembers how quickly she and Jake progressed in their relationship and their intimacy. Jake has never called her sexy but does complement her beauty “the way guys do” (15) and, more significantly, calls her “therapeutic.” While in bed with Jake one night, the protagonist remembers an incident from her childhood. When she was six or seven, the protagonist woke in the middle of the night to see a man standing outside her bedroom window, watching her and rubbing his hands together. The man is so tall his face is hidden by the top of the window. She remembers unidentifiable music playing outside. The man waves to her: “It had the effect of malice, as if he were suggesting I could never be completely on my own, that he would be around, that he would be back” (19). The protagonist fell asleep after the wave.

This memory continually gives the protagonist anxiety and the fear that the man is always somewhere nearby, watching her. She believes she saw him multiple times on the bench outside of her house doing nothing but looking in her direction. While still in bed with Jake, her phone rings four times. The protagonist names the person on the other line the Caller. She has never told anyone about the Caller’s insistent, frequent, and obtuse voice messages, though she resolves to do so soon.

The first time the Caller contacted her was the night she met Jake. She can tell the Caller is a middle-aged man or older “with a distinctly feminine voice, almost as if he was putting on a flat female intonation” (22). The calls continue, often late at night, and come from the protagonist’s own number. A few days later the Caller begins leaving the same voice message after each call, in which he tells the protagonist that there is “one question” that needs to be answered. The Caller hangs up if the protagonist picks up his call, preferring to leave a voice message. The last message the Caller left before the night the protagonist and Jake drive to Jake’s parents’ house was more frightening as the Caller changed his usual message to say he knows what the protagonist looks like and that she bites her nails, which she has been doing since childhood. The next time he calls, the protagonist answers and yells for him to stop, but the Caller ominously says that she was the one who called him.

At the end of this chapter, the Speakers discuss Jake’s history of secrecy, depression, and loneliness.

The protagonist considers how the words people use and their actions do not necessarily indicate their thoughts. She claims that “Jake told me our relationship has its own valence” (29), which prompts her to consider how changeable relationships can be. She describes Jake’s habit of reading silently at breakfast, which is annoying to her, and feels guilty that such a small character trait is influencing her decision on whether to end things. The “banal” and everyday things about Jake she notices threaten to outweigh her attraction to him, his lifestyle as a professor, and his intellect.

She asks Jake whether he believes secrets to be inherently bad or immoral in a relationship. He replies that whether a lie is immoral depends on the lie and the context of the relationship.

The protagonist claims that what bothers her the most about their situation is that she can’t share her doubts with Jake. “They have everything to do with him, and he’s the one person I’m not comfortable talking to about them” (32). The protagonist believes her having to decide this on her own is contradictory to a relationship, as a relationship is meant to represent the wishes of each person involved.