Chasing Wanda White

The chase unfolds on a late-summer afternoon at the dog park, where Nightbitch has brought her son and encountered a trio of unattended dogs—a golden retriever among them—that she suspects belong to someone significant. Searching the edges of the park for an owner, she finds no one attached to the doggy trio; every figure is engaged with some other animal, chasing or being chased, hollering, whistling, throwing something or picking up poop. Only a lone figure at the farthest reach of the park stands quite still, notebook in hand, watching the scene unfold. It is Wanda, exactly as Nightbitch imagined her to be: slim and lithe, with a cloak of silver hair, wearing a smart shirtdress and sensible shoes and a straw hat, radiating a wonderful ease. Nightbitch squints to bring her into focus, but the woman is so far away.

The Approach and the Denial

Nightbitch walks in the woman's direction, excitement rising, for this must be Wanda White. She takes deep breaths to calm herself but cannot, overcome with pure jubilation, a force so strong she begins to run, arms outstretched toward the woman. She knows it is her; she just knows. Shouting "Excuse me," she sprints toward the solitary figure, calling out, "Are those your dogs? I'm trying to find the owner." The woman—still so far away that Nightbitch cannot make out the particulars of her face, cannot read her expression or deduce from her demeanor her response to the question—cocks her head toward Nightbitch, pauses, and then shouts "No!" before walking briskly in the opposite direction, toward the woods that border the park. The denial is immediate and absolute, delivered without explanation or elaboration, and it triggers an instant escalation in Nightbitch's pursuit.

The Flight into the Woods

Nightbitch screams "Stop!" in panic, which has the opposite effect she had hoped for. The mysterious woman is now also running, hat in hand, her hair streaming behind her, headlong into the woods. Nightbitch yells "Wanda!" again, an edge of desperation in her voice that she cannot control, and begins to hyperventilate and shake from the exertion and sheer emotion of it all, still running, her heart thudding and legs hot with their effort. The woman disappears into the woods as Nightbitch stands panting, hands on her knees. She pleads to the woods, "Please, come back! Please," and stands at the edge listening as the woman crashes through the weeds and fallen branches and brambles. Already Nightbitch cannot see her through the thick, late-summer growth, nor can she leave her child behind to follow, for he is already in a panic, himself chasing after his mother, who is running away from him. She yells "Wanda!" into the brush, but no response comes.

The chase is thus doubly thwarted: the woman outruns her into the woods, and Nightbitch's own maternal obligation—the panicked son chasing after her—anchors her to the park's edge. The pursuit fails not because Nightbitch is slow but because she is a mother, and the child's need tethers her to the very identity she is trying to escape. The woman's flight into the woods, hat in hand, hair streaming, is the inverse image of Nightbitch's own nightly transformations: where Nightbitch runs as an animal into the darkness, this woman runs as a human into the daylight woods, and neither can be caught.

The Aftermath and the Text

That evening, Nightbitch texts Jen, asking, "Was that you I saw at the dog park this afternoon?" followed by a puppy emoji, a tree emoji, a sunshine emoji, and an upside-down smiley-face emoji, as if to say, "What a dumb-dumb I am if that was in fact you!" It is a bold move on her part, yet safe—she is not asking Jen directly if she is actually a dog sometimes, but allowing her safe passage into such a conversation. She has not really been in touch with Jen since the party, just a Book Babies here and there, and she waits and waits while the three little dots blink at her as Jen types. The text is a hedge, a way of testing the unbelievable without committing to it, and the unanswered blinking dots leave the question suspended.

The chase's significance radiates backward and forward through the novel. It echoes Nightbitch's own first transformation, when she lunged blindly into a throng of dogs, teeth searching for flesh, becoming "hair and blood and bone," pure instinct and anger—the animal's first dream. It also resonates with the peculiar fact that her husband, a man of science and reasonable explanations, never in a real and searching way attempted to get to the bottom of the dog he had seen that evening he arrived home to an almost empty house, a detail that remained largely uninterrogated, as if even the good, stable, reliable husband with his engineer's reasonableness had also, in some small or large way, been bewitched. The chase is the obverse of that bewitchment: where the husband fails to question the unbelievable, Nightbitch pursues it with desperate, hyperventilating certainty.

The Meaning of Wanda White

The novel's deepest revelation about the chase comes in its final formulation: "Wanda White is not a person. Wanda White is a place at which a person finally arrives." The failed pursuit at the dog park is thus not a missed encounter but a necessary stage of arrival. Nightbitch's jubilation, her outstretched arms, her pleading cries—these are the motions of someone approaching a destination, not a person, and the woman's denial and flight are the place's way of refusing premature entry. The chase is the test of whether Nightbitch can sustain her conviction without confirmation, whether she can believe in the unbelievable even when it shouts "No!" and disappears into the brambles. Her eventual arrival at Wanda White—standing behind the heavy velvet curtain, in darkness, smelling her own rosy musk, in anticipatory ecstasy just before she ascends to whatever is beyond that darkness and that stage—is the fulfillment of the pursuit that failed at the park's edge.

The chase also foreshadows the novel's public afterlife. When Nightbitch's show draws criticism as "needlessly brutal" and "the worst of performance art," her most devout fans wear pins asking "where do you go at night?" with the image of a ferocious dog, mouth open, about to attack. The pins and other merchandise are the work of Jen, who proves herself a PR genius, creating the most dazzling of campaigns, with bunnies showing up in high-profile and peculiar locales, mysterious social-media blitzes, a masterfully concocted and exquisitely executed "mystery" her crowning professional achievement. Sales of the once-out-of-print A Field Guide to Magical Women skyrocket, though no one, absolutely no one, can track down Wanda White. When researched by reporters, the University of Sacramento proves to be a short-lived institution no longer in operation and White herself a persona which exists only as an online profile at a defunct school. The woman who fled into the woods remains unfindable, and that unfindability is precisely what makes her a place rather than a person—a destination that can only be arrived at, never located.