It was November, that quiet, gray time of the year when you feel like holding someone’s hand. Gretel had her own hands clasped together, like a corpse.
Don’t worry. I’m not afraid of words.
I felt I had come upon the core of the meaning of life, to discover and re-create beauty.
They believed that remembering someone could bring them back to you long after they had departed, if you only concentrated hard enough, if you stood outside on a windy night and tried to count every star sprinkled across the universe like rice on a table or stones in a lake, like bones in a body or snowdrops in the grass.
You cannot unwrite a death that has been written.
Even now as the graves of these women went untended, and their passings unmourned, the seeds they had scattered turned the hillsides red and orange from May to September. Some called the pirates’ bounty flame trees, but to us they were known as flamboyant trees, for no one could ignore their glorious blooms, with flowers that were larger than a man’s open hand. Every time I saw them I thought of these lost women. That was what happened if you waited for love.
People expected certain things of me: assistance, silence, comfort. They had no idea who I was.
If you took all the trouble most girls got into as teenagers and boiled it down for twenty-four hours, you’d wind up with something the size of a Snickers candy bar. But if you melted down all the trouble Gillian Owens got herself into, not to mention all the grief she caused, you’d have yourself a sticky mess as tall as the statehouse of Boston.
In this short Life That only lasts an hour How much – how little – is Within our power.
Senator Kennedy from Massachusetts had won in the closest presidential election since 1916. Hatless and handsome, he had given people faith in the future when he gave his acceptance speech. I can assure you that every degree of mind and spirit that I possess will be devoted to the long-range interests of the United States and of the cause of freedom around the world.
I signaled for him to lean down, and he did so. I then did the second most terrible thing a mother could do, in some ways worse than burying her beneath the stones. I breathed my daughter’s last breath into his mouth. I gave her to him so that her spirit would belong to him and he could carry her with him, so that he could still be a man with a soul, even though he had lost everything else.
Now Jet could hear his voice when the wind carried as he recited a quote from Cotton Mather. Families are the Nurseries of all Societies: and the First combinations of mankind.
All I want for you is a normal life. Mother, what makes you think that’s what I want?
As for Franny, she wanted what she most often experienced in her dreams. To be among the birds. She preferred them to most human beings, their grace, their distance from the earth, their great beauty. Perhaps that was why they always came to her. In some way, she spoke their language.
Nature could be shifted, but not controlled.
Haylin was given a good talking-to by the headmaster and made to write a paper about workers’ rights, which he considered a privilege rather than a punishment. He was obligated to write ten pages, and handed in a tome of nearly fifty pages instead, duly footnoted, quoting from Thomas Paine and FDR. He couldn’t wait for the next decade. Everything would change in the sixties, he told Franny. And, if they were lucky, they would then be free.
Frances was sulky and suspicious, while Jet was kindhearted and so sensitive that a negative remark could make her break into hives.
Owens women ignored convention; they were headstrong and willful, and meant to be that way.
The aunts are so old it’s impossible to tell their age. Their hair is white and their spines are crooked. They wear long black skirts and laced leather boots. Though they haven’t left Massachusetts in more than forty years, they’re certainly not intimidated by travel. Or anything else, for that matter. They know what they want and they’re not afraid to be outspoken.
Midsummer’s Eve, the summer solstice, when the day is so long it seems for once there is all the time in the world.