“Did I tell you? My mother, she never did stop dancing.”
“Yes. You told me. And mine, she never got well.” Roberta lifted her
hands from the tabletop and covered her face with her palms. When she
took them away she really was crying. “Oh shit, Twyla. Shit, shit, shit. What
the hell happened to Maggie?” (261)The close juxtaposition of Twyla’s epiphany and Roberta’s confession and
then this final interchange show that the two women have taken steps toward
forming a new, more mature dyad. By repeating what they already know about
their mothers, they each reaffirm their shared vulnerability. Then Rober-
ta’s moment of what Zunshine calls embodied transparency (Getting Inside
21–25)—Roberta’s tears, her swearing, and her final question give Twyla (and
Morrison’s audience) clear access to her anguish and regret—has the potential
to take them to the next step. Roberta is willing to show even more vulnerabil-
ity as she seeks guidance from Twyla in a way that she has never done before.
Morrison adds to the significance of Roberta’s embodied transparency by
implicitly contrasting it with her attempt to hide her mental state at the end
of the scene in Howard Johnson’s. Twyla responds to Roberta’s disrespect by
asking about her mother, and Roberta lies by saying “Fine” with a “grin [that]
cracked her whole face” (250). Furthermore, Morrison builds multiple layers
into Roberta’s final question. It is—finally—a genuine question about Maggie
because Roberta can think of her as someone with her own distinct identity.
But it is also a question about their mothers, about why they could not take
care of their children. And, given the way Maggie has come to be so signifi-
cant to their dyad, it is a question about what happened to their friendship, a
question that invites a commitment to improve it.
Still, Morrison does not take them beyond these first few steps, and, given
their fraught history as well as the way the story has emphasized the multiple
factors beyond themselves that influence that history, the ending raises more
questions than it resolves. How does Twyla respond to Roberta now and in the
future? Will Twyla share her epiphany with Roberta or keep it to herself? Will
the women perhaps succeed in reestablishing their social mind, if only for a
short time? Is this moment the closest they will ever get? Such is the difficulty
of the divide that they are trying to bridge that Morrison’s decision to leave
these questions open seems just right.
A FINAL REFLECTION: while I staunchly believe that combining the cogni-
tive and rhetorical approaches has offered insights into “Recitatif ” that neither
approach could have offered alone, I also realize that I have deployed cognitive
166 • CHAPTER 8