54 pages • 1 hour read
Terry McMillanWaiting to Exhale
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 19-23Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary: “New Territory”
Gloria watches from her bedroom window as a moving truck pulls up to the empty house across the street. She also sees an older man arrive and is pleased to see he is Black. She wonders about his story and his family, excited to have Black neighbors to visit with.
Gloria goes to work only to discover Desiree, the woman who specializes in weaves, has quit, and Phillip is out with shingles. Gloria worries that her customers will connect Phillip’s illness with his being gay and the possibility that he might have AIDS. Bernadine comes for a cut, and they talk about a new man Bernadine is dating who is much younger than she is. She likes this man and claims that he gets along well with her children. Bernadine tells Gloria that she took the kids to Robin’s and Russell opened the door.
At home, Tarik tells Gloria that instead of going to college after graduation, he wants to join Up with People, an organization that travels the world putting on music shows to promote positive thinking and racial equality. Tarik claims that he has a good chance of getting in based on his ability to play the saxophone and his good grades. Gloria asks about college, and he claims he wants to go to Morehouse, but he wants to defer a year. Gloria has already looked at the brochures he brought home about Up with People and made a few phone calls, but she doesn’t tell him because she doesn’t want to get his hopes up. However, she does tell him that if he wants to go, he needs to earn part of the money it will cost. Gloria then tells Tarik how proud she is of him, and how lucky she feels that he hasn’t fallen into some of the bad habits other teenagers sometimes get into.
Gloria takes a pie over to the new neighbor and discovers that he is a widower named Marvin King. Marvin offers to help Gloria with anything that might need fixing at her house. When she learns that he hasn’t had a homecooked meal in a while, she offers to send Tarik over with a plate of food for his dinner. When Gloria walks away, she realizes Marvin is watching her, and she’s excited because no one has ever watched her walk away before.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Closer to the Bone”
Robin is happy to have Russell living with her once again, despite Carolyn calling and telling her that Russell has a sexually transmitted illness that Robin cannot find evidence of. Robin is aware that her friends are likely judging her for allowing Russell back into her life, especially given the fact that he is married to Carolyn, who gave birth to his child. However, Robin is happy to have Russell back, especially since he is claiming that he plans to divorce Carolyn.
Russell is at Carolyn’s discussing their divorce. Robin is anxious, so she calls her mother and learns that her father has taken a turn for the worse, and the doctor wants him to go into a nursing home. A lawyer is recommending that Robin’s mother divorce her father so that their assets will be separated, and she won’t have to spend all their retirement money on the nursing home. However, Robin’s mother is reluctant to go through with the divorce because she’s Catholic. Robin promises to go up there over the weekend to give her mother emotional support in making the decision.
Russell returns home and goes straight to the shower, then to bed. Robin smells perfume on his shirt but convinces herself it is from Carolyn crying in his arms over the divorce.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Drunk”
The girls plan a birthday party for Gloria at her house. They show up with bottles of champagne, a cake, and presents. They order pizza and turn on music, listening to the old records Gloria keeps. Bernadine announces that she broke up with her young suitor, and Savannah admits that she slept with Kenneth again when he came back into town. Robin claims that she and Russell have broken up again. Gloria opens her presents, and they listen to songs that conjure up old romantic memories. The ladies begin complaining about their trouble finding a man. Bernadine announces that Robin is struggling because she wants a man too much. Robin claims the problem is that the men who challenge them the most are the ones they fall for, and that makes it impossible to tie them down. Savannah claims that’s not her problem: She just can’t find a man who fits what she wants. Gloria announces that there a simply too many stupid men out there. They get drunk and try to call Kathleen, but each panics and hangs up when she answers. They continue to list the things wrong with men these days and get very drunk. Savannah becomes sick and passes out on the couch. The rest of the ladies fall asleep on the floor, and this is the scene that Tarik comes home to.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Monsoon”
Onika and John Junior arrive home from a visit with John and announce that not only did John and Kathleen get married over the weekend, but they are expecting a child. Bernadine struggles not to say anything derogatory about either John or Kathleen in front of the children but has to leave the room due to her emotional response to this news. Bernadine overhears John Junior tell Onika that she talks too much and shouldn’t have told Bernadine the news like that. Bernadine takes some satisfaction in the fact that John Junior is on her side.
Bernadine is in bed where she’d been reading, but now she’s daydreaming about James. Onika brings her the mail, and among the bills is a letter from the hotel where Bernadine met James. She opens it to find a letter from James claiming that he has buried his wife and can’t stop thinking about Bernadine. He wants to come to Phoenix to see her. Bernadine calls Savannah and tells her about the letter. Savannah encourages her to call James.
Bernadine’s mother comes over and tells Bernadine that she’s moving back to Philadelphia. She doesn’t like the heat in Phoenix, and she has purchased a condo with her sister in downtown Philadelphia. A short time later, Bernadine calls James and tells Savannah that he’ll be coming to town at the first of the month. Savannah is happy for Bernadine, even as she’s struggling to find the man of her dreams. But she believes he’s out there somewhere. She also tells Bernadine that she’s gotten an opportunity to produce a local television show to see if she might be a suitable full-time producer. Bernadine tells Savannah that her lawyer discovered some tax fraud John committed, and they think they can use it to encourage John into a settlement.
Chapter 23 Summary: “To Heaven and Back”
Savannah’s mother calls and tells her that her food stamps got cut to nearly nothing. She asks Savannah to write a letter about how Savannah pays part of her mother’s rent so that she can fix this issue with the food stamps office. Not only does Savannah agree, but she also sends her mother some money to help her get through the rest of the month.
Savannah travels to Las Vegas for a conference and meets a man named Charles on the shuttle to the convention center the first day. They hit it off and decide to sneak out of the conference and return to the hotel to swim. Charles lives in San Francisco and works for a sister television station to Savannah’s. They talk until late in the day and discover they have a lot in common. Later, they go to a party for the conference and decide to leave early to get dinner. They kiss in the elevator as they go up to Savannah’s room, and Charles pulls out a book that is meant to help a person get to know themselves better, asking her some of the questions inside. They seem to have many of the same likes, dislikes, and intentions for their future. They become intimate, and Savannah finds herself opening to him more than she’s done with a man in a long time.
Savannah and Charles spend the week together instead of attending the convention. When they part, Charles promises to come visit Savannah in Phoenix as soon as he can, asking that she come visit him as well. When Savannah gets home, she excitedly tells her friends about this great man she met in Las Vegas. However, Charles never calls her, and when she calls him, she gets his voicemail. Savannah is angry by Charles’s actions and decides not to open herself up to another man in that way again.
Chapters 19-23 Analysis
As the novel builds toward its climax, Chapters 19-23 create suspense in the narrative as McMillan foreshadows significant changes for each of the four protagonists in terms of their love lives and personal and family health statuses.
Gloria’s innocence in relationships is revealed through her joy at meeting her new neighbor, Marvin, and their connection injects some suspense into the plot as Gloria appears to be on the verge of her first romantic relationship. Gloria is impressed with his interest in her, excited that he stops to watch her cross the street. However, this new relationship comes at the same time as trouble at Oasis Hair. With two of her employees gone, Gloria is working overtime, which puts stress on her body, foreshadowing a health crisis later in the novel. With the trouble at the salon, McMillan injects current events contemporary to the novel’s publication, specifically the AIDS crisis that began in the 1980s and was still occurring in 1990. The novel reflects the public’s fear of the disease through the character Phillip, who is gay; Gloria worries that their customers might assume his shingles has something to do with AIDS and that it might impact his customer base. As the situation evolves, it does become an issue, illustrating how scared the public was at this time despite the fact that AIDS had been studied for nine years and knowledge of its transmission was understood, revealing that the irrational fears of the public were unwarranted.
Russell’s return to Robin’s showcases once more her willingness to overlook his behavior, especially when she convinces herself that he wasn’t cheating on her with Carolyn when he took hours to discuss a divorce with her and returned smelling of her perfume. Robin’s desperation to marry causes her denial, which will lead to her continuously allowing disrespectful or harmful men into her life to take advantage of her. At the same time, she stands on the sidelines as her mother deals with the financial and emotional impact of having a spouse who is terminally ill. The comparison between her parents’ marriage and Robin’s relationship with Russell highlights her parents’ relationship as an obvious source of Robin’s motivation to find a good man: Robin clearly wants the kind of marriage her parents have, but the men she’s attracted to are not reliable.
Bernadine continues to grapple with her identity in these chapters. When she learns that John has married Kathleen and they are expecting a baby, she is upset. However, Bernadine is not upset because she wants to reconcile, but because she has once again lost her identity as John’s wife. John had been the center of Bernadine’s world for 11 years and in a few short months, she now has to redefine herself. This news just solidifies what has already happened and leaves Bernadine once again questioning who she is and what the future holds for her. When she receives a letter from James, whose terminally ill wife has passed, it becomes clear that Bernadine hopes he will be a part of her future and foreshadows the development of this new relationship.
Meanwhile, Savannah’s love affair in Las Vegas is everything she wants from a man. There is intimacy, but also a connection on an intellectual level. Savannah is excited and optimistic, so when he seemingly ghosts her, Savannah is equally heartbroken. Charles changes Savannah’s outlook just as Bernadine’s single night with James changes her perception of herself and the world around her. However, for Savannah, Charles’s actions help her realize that she’s better off on her own. Charles takes the hope away, but also shows Savannah that she’s okay without a man, putting her on a path that foreshadows her decision to give up on love.
