Summary
Chapter 5 (Frank)
Women have always found Frank’s last name interesting, or at least amusing. He had really only ever had two regular women, and he liked the “small breakable thing inside each one” (67). When he met Lily he felt like he'd finally come home; he had been wandering for so long.
He met her one day when he needed to dry clean his clothes. He was shaky, without a place to stay, and unable to even recognize himself in the mirror. He thought he had to clean up finally and make his friends proud. He met Lily at the cleaner, and he would still be with her if it weren’t for the letter about Cee.
Something in Lily floored him; made him want to be a better man.
Chapter 6 (Lily)
Lily is a seamstress, working in theater and showing off the skills she learned from her mother. This was better than being a cleaning woman, and she liked working for Mr. Stone. But now the theatre was closed because of a controversial play, and so she was working at Wang’s Heavenly Palace dry cleaners. There were no tips from actors, but she got to work during the daytime. She hated walking back late at night to her room.
When she thought of her room, it also made her angry. She was ready to put a down payment on a house, but the real estate agent could not give her one because of the law. The agent told her sympathetically she had rentals in other parts of town, and even though Lily dismissed her at first, she eventually went back and rented a space. She still hoped to buy a house like the first one she admired.
One day a man came into the dry cleaner and asked if she could do same-day service. It was technically too late but something about his quiet, faraway look got to her. She agreed, and when he came back, he offered to walk her home.
They spent months together until he said he had to leave for family reasons. Being together was lovely at first, but over time she saw Frank’s inability to get up sometimes, his lack of enthusiasm for her goal of getting a house, and how hard it was that the war still haunted him and made him randomly change so quickly. After the one time at the church convention he promised it would not happen again, and for a time things returned to normal.
Lily began to be noticed for her sewing skills and her reputation grew. She wanted to have her own place and open a dressmaking shop within it.
Her complaints about Frank multiplied. He would not remember to do anything and she hated nagging him. She hated his “clear indifference, along with his combination of need and irresponsibility” (79). When he asked to borrow money to go help his sister, she felt a sense of relief. When he left her solitude returned and with it her peace of mind. She could get serious now and put her plan in motion.
That day Frank left, Lily found a purse of coins in the street. She left it there for a time, not wanting to take it if someone returned for it, but when it was still there hours later, she decided the universe meant this to be a fair trade for Frank Money.
Chapter 7 (Frank)
Frank was convinced Lotus, Georgia was the worst place in the world—even worse than the battlefields of Korea, which at least had excitement and a chance of winning. If not for his two friends, he would have suffocated as a child. His friends and his sister kept his parents’ indifference and his grandparents’ hatefulness at bay.
People in Lotus did not want to learn anything; his own family was content living in that mindless way. Thank the Lord for the army.
The only thing he missed about Lotus were the stars. Only his sister could ever bring him anywhere near that place.
Chapter 8 (Lenore)
Lenore kept young Jackie on because she was a skillful sewer, but she was not so great at the floors.
She tried not to think about her first husband, who was energetic, caring, a good Christian, and had money. He was shot to death by someone who wanted or envied the gas station he owned. It was during the Depression and the sheriff didn’t care much, so she packed her things and left Heartsville, Alabama for Lotus. There she married a widower (well, she couldn’t get a marriage certificate because she did not have a birth certificate, so they took vows at God’s Congregation).
They had just settled in when Salem’s ragtag relatives showed up. Fixing up the house had been for nothing, apparently. The infant’s crying at night tortured her, and the only reason she agreed to watch her when the parents were at work was because the boy, Frank, was really in charge of the baby. She was miserable that her haven was destroyed, and focused her ire on the children. The girl’s birth circumstances did not bode well and she was completely helpless.
The years passed. Thankfully the family moved out. Lenore eventually had to call in help when she started getting dizzy, so that is why she persuaded Jackie’s mother to come and help her with chores. The girl had a Doberman who would never leave her side.
She learned gossip from Jackie, such as that Cee ran off with a boy and took her car and after the boy left she was too ashamed to come home. She learned Frank survived in Korea but the other two local boys did not. She scoffed thinking about them, because they had all gone over to the hairdresser Mrs. K’s house to learn about sex. Yet fathers and mothers didn’t care about Mrs. K; she didn’t want the husbands, and their own daughters were safer. Mrs. K did not solicit or charge and styled hair extremely well.
Lenore was profoundly unhappy all the time. All that brought her a modicum of satisfaction was owning property and having savings. Jackie was the only company she wanted, until Jackie’s precious dog ate a hen and Lenore beat it. Jackie was horrified and Lenore pleaded with her mother to no avail.
Now Lenore was content only with the person she prizes the most—herself. She has a stroke one night and Salem finds her, and though she is ambulatory, her speech is slurred. The good churchgoing women of Lotus bring food and do chores even though they despise her, but at least they never have to say out loud what they know to be true: “the Lord Works in Mysterious Ways His Wonders to Perform” (92).
Analysis
In these chapters Morrison opens up the narration to two more characters, Lily and Lenore, not only giving the reader insights into their individual lives but also helping explain more about Frank and Cee. Through Lily, Frank’s PTSD and toxic masculinity are even more conspicuous; through Lenore, the children’s isolation and craving for love and acceptance are made manifest.
Lenore is indelibly tied to Locus, the children’s former “home” that caused them so much pain. Frank describes it as “the worst place in the world, worse than any battlefield,” (83), frustrating in its ignorance and backwardness. He thinks “Nobody in Lotus knew anything or wanted to learn anything” (83) and that “Any kid with a mind would lose it” (84). Lotus did not feel like home, and as a result, Mark A. Tabone notes, “Both siblings search for home in the novel: Frank in the military and later with a woman named Lily, Cee in Atlanta with Prince and later in Dr. Beau’s picturesque suburban house.” But, as will be discussed in the final analysis, it is “not until the pair’s embattled return to Lotus, however, [that] they finally ‘arrive.’”
As aforementioned, Frank’s conception of the meaning of masculinity is an important part of the novel, and, as this conception changes, an important part of his character arc. Before he gets to Cee, Irene Visser explains, “Frank’s notion of manhood at this stage...reflects the culturally dominant notion described by Harvey C. Mansfield as that which ‘sees and welcomes drama and prefers times of war, conflict, and risk.” Due to his tough childhood, Frank learned to adopt a stance of immovable strength and unrelenting aggression. He admired the rearing horses, which “symbolically [represented] his fascination with manhood as violence and aggression.” In war he relished the murder of Koreans to avenge his fallen friends, and, as we soon learn, murdered a young Korean girl. Back at home he found himself in fights and experienced blackouts, and he repressed his emotions and never cried. Additionally, as critic Katrina Harack writes, he “views women as vulnerable and needing protection, as sexualized beings, or as abusers and abandoning mothers.” Men are to be “strong, territorial, and independent,” and even when some of this breaks down with Lily, there are still “unnerving aspects of Frank’s masculine identity” in this relationship.
The literal journey to rescue Cee is paralleled by his developmental journey toward a different sort of progressive masculinity. Harack suggests that Morrison believes men “need a concept of masculinity that is not dependent on white male definitions, is not exploitative of women, and that allows for strength and vulnerability while taking responsibility for their lives.” He has to abandon his childish views, which comes through reconciling with trauma and memory; “only as he begins to face these memories does the healing process begin, one which requires him to dislodge his entrenched notions of masculinity.”
