- Connie wakes up remembering something… maybe the first time she had a visit from Luciente. It's not clear. Again, the book is sometimes sneaky like that.
- She remembers other things; like that she used to be beautiful. Being in the insane asylum is bad for your skin, it turns out.
- She remembers a visit from her caseworker, Mrs. Polcari, who was about her age, but looked younger, because being poor takes it out of you.
- And now there's Luciente, appearing out of nowhere. Connie thinks of Luciente as a man at first, though eventually that switches around. People from the future are complicated.
- Now we switch to a memory of Dolly coming over with her daughter Nita and telling Connie she's pregnant.
- This chapter is drifts through various events. Sort of like time-traveling, but with bitter memories instead of zap-guns.
- Anyway, Dolly says Geraldo wants her to get an abortion, and then she has to run off to keep an appointment with a john.
- Connie smokes some pot. Then she goes out for a walk and sees a girl who reminds her of her daughter and starts to cry.
- Her daughter got taken away from her because she hit her.
- Now Luciente appears.
- Luciente tells Connie she's receptive, and that's why Luciente keeps visiting her. Connie thinks Luciente wants to have sex with her. Luciente thinks that's funny.
- Luciente uses lots of future words that haven't been invented yet, like "redding" (which means "learning," maybe) and "fasure" (which means "certainly" or "for sure").
- Then Luciente disappears again in a cloud of smoke, except without the cloud of smoke, and Connie can still smell Luciente's chemical scent a little.
- Connie realizes that she has often been able to figure out what people are thinking without them telling her.
- She could tell when her husband Eddie had been sleeping with other women, or when he was going to hit her. Though knowing those things didn't really make her happier.
- She remembers growing up and how her mother told her she'd have a life as a wife and mother and not much else, and to get used to it. (Not quite that harshly, but just about.)
- She had wanted to escape her mother's fate, but had also wanted her mother to approve of her.
- Connie gets a letter from her sister, Teresa, asking Connie to remember to send gifts on the children's birthdays, but Connie has no money, so that's not going to happen.
- And now we're remembering Professor Everett Silvester, a teacher Connie had when she was at college. He slept with her, and she's still angry with him. Connie is good at anger.
- She tries to figure out how she can help Dolly, and doesn't have any good ideas.
- Then Luciente shows up again. Luciente tells her he's from the future. He lives in 2137, in the village of Mattapoisett (which is a real village in Massachusetts. Look it up.)
- Connie is skeptical, as you'd expect.
- Why didn't you go to the President? she asks Luciente. Luciente says he doesn't trust the Establishment. He's kind of a future hippie, basically.
- Connie lights a cigarette, which really freaks Luciente out. In the utopian future they do not smoke.
- Also they don't have all the chemicals in the atmosphere and food that we do, and they arrange it so that their waste and drinking water don't get mixed together.
- Luciente thinks the present is disgusting and dirty. Connie is a bit offended.
- Luciente talks about composting. See? Hippie from the future.
- Even if he doesn't like her cigarettes, Luciente thinks Connie is important. He has trouble explaining why, though, because future language is different than past language. Inconvenient.
- He also says he's not really in the past; he's just a mental projection or something like that.
- And then Luciente vanishes as Dolly bangs on the door and rushes in, so we're back to the beginning of Chapter 1.
- The first two chapters are a big time loop. You could just keep reading them in a circle forever, till you got dizzy and spun into the hippie future of happy compost.
- Or you could go on to Chapter 3.