The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

The unnamed female narrator remembers how her friend’s father sat naked on a sofa watching television, his penis and the scar down his chest on full display. In another memory, he is naked again, being led to the bedroom by his wife. In the third memory, his face is close to the narrator’s, and he smiles at her. She can’t remember if he molested her, but she doesn’t feel fear when she thinks of him, just the first stirrings of desire. After he died, the narrator began using her fingernails to recreate the shape of the man’s scar down the center of her own chest.

As a girl, the narrator falls “hopelessly in love” (88) with the “consumptive, moribund, and […] beautiful” Helen Burns from Jane Eyre (89). She commits the chapter describing Helen’s death to memory and spends every night imagining Helen dying as she holds her hand. At 14, the narrator learns that an ex-classmate’s brother is dying. She is anxious to meet the boy, sure she will fall in love with him. However, she is surprised to discover that she isn’t attracted to him, and she quickly realizes that she “didn’t like real sick people” (90).