This chapter is narrated from Frank’s first-person perspective. Frank reflects on his experience with women and says that he has had only two regular ones. He is drawn to women’s softness and fragility, liking “the small breakable thing inside each one”(67). When he meets Lily, at the dry cleaner’s where he goes to have his army clothes laundered, he “felt like I’d come home” after spells of drinking and gambling away army pay (68). Frank claims that if it were not for the letter about Cee, he would still “be hanging from her apron strings” (69).

Frank then challenges the narrator, who he assumes thinks that Frank is attracted to Lily “for a home with a bowl of sex in it” (69). Rather, Frank says that something about Lily makes him want to be good enough for her. In a final affront to the narrator’s authority, Frank says, “I don’t think you know that much about love. Or me” (69).

This chapter is narrated from a third-person limited perspective and shadows Lily. Lily works in the Skylight Studio theater as a “seamstress/wardrobe,” which is a promotion from the cleaning job that she was hired to do (71).