43 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingThe Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1999A 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 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Top of the Fourth”
Trisha wakes to a thunderstorm and estimates that about five hours have passed. She is hungry and her hiking pack contains a tuna sandwich, chips, twinkies, a hardboiled egg, some celery, a bottle of water, and a Surge soda. Knowing her parents would advise her to ration, she contents herself with several sips of soda, a Twinkie, and the egg. Trisha finds her beloved Walkman in her pack. She connects to WCAS, the station for the nearby town of Castle Rock, and ascertains the time—3:09 p.m. She listens until 3:30, when the announcer reminds listeners of the Red Sox game in a few hours.
Trisha remembers reading in a Little House on the Prairie book about finding a way out of the woods by following water. She walks along the cliff’s edge until a small stream appears. Halfway down the slope, a wasp causes Trisha to lose her balance and slide down the hill into the nest. She is stung several times as she runs away, coming to rest further along the stream. Her Walkman miraculously survives the fall. She tunes back into WCAS and learns that her mother has reported her missing.
As daylight fades, Trisha tries to pray for rescue, but it feels inauthentic. She recalls a conversation with her father. He was drinking during the day, which made Trisha uncomfortable. She asked him if he believed in God, and he responded that he believes in “the Subaudible,” a silent force for good that works on the side of humanity. Dissatisfied, Trisha pressed him further and he replied that he believes in Tom Gordon’s ability to save forty games in a year.
The memory reminds Trisha of the Red Sox Game. She listens to the coverage from Fenway Park as she eats her tuna sandwich and the remaining Twinkie. Trisha strikes a deal with herself: “If we win, if Tom gets the save, I’ll be saved” (92). Anxiously, she listens as Gordon strikes out the last batter and saves the game for the Red Sox. Trisha bursts into tears of relief and imitates Gordon’s signature victory gesture by pointing up at the sky at “something [that] [feels] like God” (99). The gesture makes her feel both comforted and lonely. Missing her mother, her father, and even her brother, Trisha curls up under a tree to sleep. As she drifts off, a rustling and rasping something approaches through the surrounding brush.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Bottom of the Fourth”
Trisha dreams that her father, Larry, drunkenly taunts her because she is scared to go into the cellar to get him another beer. Determined to prove her bravery, she opens the cellar and finds a massive wasp nest. Thousands of wasps fly at her. She wakes herself up by hitting her head against the tree she is sleeping under. It’s the middle of the night.
Trisha stumbles back to the clearing where she prayed before. Her earlier conviction that Tom Gordon’s save will lead to her rescue is gone. The bright moon makes her think of “a knocked-out loaded God Whose mind [is] like a circling cloud of bugs and Whose eye [is] the rapt and vacant moon” (108). Trisha smears mud onto her various stings and bites. The cold voice speaks to her again, telling her to abandon hope for salvation because there is a “thing” in the woods that will catch and eat her; when this thing finally reveals itself, she will go insane at the sight of its face. Trisha senses that there is in fact a horrible creature lurking just outside the clearing. Falling to her knees, she begs it not to hurt her. She remains crouched until a cracking branch signals the creature’s retreat.
Trisha returns to her sleep spot, terrified. She recalls her mother’s advice to imagine something when she has trouble sleeping and pictures Tom Gordon next to her in the clearing. She asks him for his secret to closing games. Tom replies that “you have to get ahead of the first hitter…[establish] that it’s you who’s better” (121). In the middle of this fantasy, Trisha falls asleep.
Thirty miles away in a Castle Rock motel room, Quilla wakes up with a sudden certainty that something terrible has happened to Trisha. Larry comforts her as she cries, and the two of them unexpectedly make love. In the adjoining room, Pete is in the throes of a nightmare, reliving the moment that he realized Trisha was gone over and over.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Fifth Inning”
When Trisha wakes, she is sure that the creature was only a manifestation of her fear and follows the stream hopefully. Later, she feels watched again. The stream leads her to marshland which soon becomes swamp. Discouraged, Trisha recalls Tom Gordon’s “special stillness,” a focused bravery that her father describes as “icewater in his veins” (138). Resolving to find her own ice water, Trisha steps into the bog. After several hours of wading, Trisha talks to an imaginary Tom Gordon. She finds a hummock covered in edible fiddlehead ferns, but the ferns are torn and bloody with a severed deer head lying among them. Trisha suppresses thoughts about the mysterious creature and wades away. She finds more fiddleheads on solid ground. As she devours handfuls of leaves, she hears buzzing flies and sees a tree that looks snapped in half. Nearby lies the rest of the deer’s body. Trisha hurries away, wondering if the creature deliberately sabotaged her food supply. She hears a helicopter, but the pilot does not notice her.
Trisha walks for three hours, growing thirsty. She finds a creek and drinks deeply. As she walks along the creek, the cold voice taunts her about her fear. Trisha is alarmed that such a mean girl lives inside of her head, picturing the voice as “a tough little sneery-mouthed tootsie” (162). Speaking to the sneering girl, Trisha shouts, “fuck you!” (162)—the first time she has ever used that word. She imagines herself saying it to Pete the next time he fights with their mother.
Trisha sets up a makeshift shelter in a clearing when her stomach begins to hurt. She tunes into the Red Sox game for comfort. During the fourth inning, she vomits and has diarrhea—the stream water has made her sick. Weak and feverish, she tries to sleep but her thirst has been worsened by vomiting and soon she has to drink from the creek again. The Red Sox lose before Tom Gordon gets a chance to pitch. Someone calls into WCAS to announce that Trisha was abducted by a pedophile named Francis Raymond Mazzerole. As Trisha finally falls asleep, police across several states look for Mazzerole’s van. Several hours later, she wakes with a fresh bout of illness. As she tries to steady herself against a tree, she hallucinates Tom Gordon standing about fifty feet away from her, radiating his signature stillness. Trisha finally feels calm and her sickness passes. She crawls back into her shelter and instantly falls asleep. Meanwhile, something comes out of the woods to watch her. At dawn, the creature retreats, but remains close.
Chapters 5-7 Analysis
In these chapters, King heightens the stakes of Trisha’s situation. She’s now been lost for several days and her supply of food and water is dwindling. In addition to the threat of the elements, Chapter 7, “Fifth Inning,” introduces an additional antagonist in the form of a malicious “something” that stalks Trisha through the woods, sabotaging her food supply and watching her sleep. The mysterious and menacing creature embodies Trisha’s fears of abandonment and death. Its presence makes the woods seem more dangerous, skewing her perception so that even the moon looks treacherous. She is beginning to realize that the worst parts of her life in Sanford are nothing compared to the threat of the wilderness, signaling that her ordeal has begun to make her mature past her years.
As the difficulties increase, Trisha must rise to meet them. She continues to draw on advice from different parts of her life—her family, her teachers, even a remembered passage from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie (1935). She also has to lean on her own courage and trust her survival instincts even though she feels completely out of her depth in her unfamiliar surroundings. Her strong imagination helps her stay grounded, allowing her to find pleasure in small acts like making mud with her fingers. It also lets her explore and express different parts of herself through several imagined characters. One of them is the “tough tootsie,” the sneering girl whom Trisha imagines as the owner of the pessimistic voice in her head. When Trisha swears at the tough tootsie, it’s an important character detail. Trisha is usually someone who “[goes] along to get along,” (27) but she chooses to confront the imagined girl and stand up for herself. She then imagines swearing at Pete, a change from her chipper attitude at the start of the novel. Ironically, Trisha has more freedom to be herself in the woods than she did while playing the part of family mediator.
Imagining the presence of Tom Gordon is another one of Trisha’s coping mechanisms. Their conversations are a tool for her to filter her thoughts through the lens of an authority figure and role model; Trisha does not fully trust herself out in the woods, but she trusts Tom Gordon. Tom Gordon advises her that to close a game, you have to let your adversary know that you are in control. If the tough tootsie represents Trisha’s doubts, then Tom Gordon stands in for the part of her that believes in herself. Although Trisha is the only person physically present for much of these chapters, her imagination populates the novel with a rotating cast of characters. She talks aloud to herself and to Tom Gordon and is constantly remembering happier times with her family or borrowing amusing phrases from her peers, making her isolation seem less intense.
The theme of faith emerges prominently in these chapters. King emphasizes the fact that Trisha has a hard time connecting to her faith due to her secular upbringing. This is demonstrated when she tries and fails to pray for salvation. Trisha does not have a clear concept of God or know if she can rely on a force outside of herself to look out for her. Her father’s explanation of the Subaudible presents an alternative to belief in a traditional God figure, but Trisha finds little comfort in the idea of a benevolent force with limited power. Instead, she chooses to place her faith in baseball. King imbues the game with a spiritual quality through Trisha’s conviction that the fate of the Red Sox is tied to her own chances of rescue. Her belief that she will be saved if Tom Gordon saves the game shows just how important the sport is to her; it gives her something to pin her hopes on when everything else feels uncertain. After Tom Gordon saves the game, Trisha imitates his signature victory gesture by pointing upward at “something [that] felt like God” (99), her faith in a higher power seemingly bolstered by her symbolically renewed hope of survival.
Trisha’s clashes with nature become more serious in these chapters. The stream she has been following widens into a bog that she has to wade across painstakingly. Her food supply is running low, and she gets so dehydrated that she has no choice but to drink from a nearby stream, but the water makes her violently ill. It feels as though her surroundings are punishing her, although the truth is that the woods are an unsafe place for anyone with no survival training, especially a nine-year-old girl. The stakes are further heightened by the fact that the police search for Trisha has gone off track, a fact unknown to Trisha herself but conveyed to the reader by the omniscient narrator. King continues to use this dramatic irony to emphasize the frightening circumstances and increase dramatic tension.
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