Allison has taken up residence at Sally Kemp’s old house. While most of it has burned down, the greenhouse is intact enough for her to stay in. Finding an old stove in a cellar, she tries to figure out how to lift the stove and move it into the greenhouse. Eventually, she begins to speculate about how she can survive and what she should do with the rest of her life. A brindle dog shows up, and she begins to feed it some of her food.

Allison slips into a flashback of her time in the psychiatric hospital. Her therapist, Dr. Duk, attempts to treat her problems with speech by making knock-knock jokes. Allison often responds cryptically or confusingly to the jokes, because she has trouble with the double meanings of words and the duplicitous nature of language. She tells Dr. Duk that she was trying to become a white dwarf, using her allegory of a compressed star to signify that she wanted to shrink down and stop trying to please other people. She asks him not to give her another course of electro-shock therapy. Before the hospital, she had been living at home with no job or marriage.