Summary

While on lunch break at work at Renewable Solutions in Oakland, California, Purity “Pip” Tyler talks to her mother by phone. Pip, a recent college graduate with $130,000 in student debt, now sells power purchase agreements to homes in potential renewable energy districts. Pip dislikes talking to her mother, because her mother constantly imagines she has some illness, disease, or condition that Pip knows her mother, a grocery store cashier, never has. Pip’s mother also practices a form of yoga-like spiritual art she calls Endeavor, in which no actual art is ever created, and in which she limits contact with the non-natural world around her. Pip knows that in the past, her mother was very different. Pip explains that her coming weekend visit to her mother, where she still lives in Felton, will bring up the subject her mother hates talking about...