Part 7 Summary

Many years later, in the 1970s, a young woman named Louisa, who is a friend of a friend, comes to stay with Elizabeth for several days. Louisa is in town for a job interview, and in her free time, she sits on Elizabeth's couch being bored, as if that were an activity. When Louisa is not being aggressively bored, staring off into space, she talks about how hard it is for her to sleep at night. She is tortured by insomnia, and talks about it at length. Louisa lies just enough during her interview to land a good job as a sort of secretary. Elizabeth thinks about the uninteresting course of Louisa's life spread out before her, and thinks about her own mother.

Elizabeth feels that she can understand her father somewhat, but not her mother. Mama seems rootless, having moved around so...