Mango Street darkens in this section of chapters, which ends with Esperanza's questions concerning her life and future. In between, she experiences death, which affects her in complex ways. Her father's grief shakes her; suddenly she is in the position of comforting him as though he were the child and she the adult. At the same time, she is suddenly aware that he, too, will die. Her aunt's death causes her to feel great guilt, because she and her friends have mocked this sick woman's grotesque mannerisms.
Aunt Lupe, ill for a long time, has been a sort of fixture in Esperanza's life, her condition both frightening and repulsive to the girl. Now the person who praised her poetry is dead. And with her aunt's death, Esperanza moves closer toward her own mortality: Why was this woman, young and pretty once, struck down? Finally Esperanza can only believe that death does not choose for a reason but merely points at random to its next victim. It is an unsettling and very adult thought. The combined emotions surrounding these deaths bring dreams to Esperanza and her friends, and they discover for the first time that the dead can haunt the living.
Part of the horror Aunt Lupe's illness has inspired in Esperanza and her friends (who have visited Lupe together) may stem from the condition of the sick woman's house and the kind of care she has received from her husband and sons. Traditionally, the wife and mother is in charge of all housework, including cooking and cleaning but also, often, repairs, painting, and refinishing as well. Lupe has obviously not been able to hold up her end of this household work, and (as Esperanza makes clear in this chapter) her husband and sons resent having to perform these "feminine" chores and show their resentment by performing them badly or not at all. The dishes pile up in the sink, Lupe's sheets are dirty, as are the walls and ceiling. Like the other adult women Esperanza knows and will come to know, her aunt serves as a sort of model; this is one possible future for Esperanza herself, and a terrible, terrifying one. If men are always possessed of the power in sexual and marital relationships, the men in Lupe's life are using that power cruelly against their wife and mother, and clearly no one expects any other kind of behavior from them.
