My sister and I didn’t know what that meant either but we were not equal to two questions in a row. And I knew that wasn’t what rape meant anyway; it meant something dirty. “Purse. Purse stolen,” said my mother in a festive but cautioning tone. Talk in our house was genteel.
The outside air had altered her mood, from an unsettled elation to something within reach of embarrassment, even shame.
She hoped he wouldn’t ask what she was doing at the party. If she had to say she was a poet, her present situation, her overindulgence, would be taken as drearily typical.
No way this could be seen as probable or possible, unless you think of a blow between the eyes, a sudden calamity. The stroke of fate that leaves a man a cripple, the wicked joke that turns clear eyes into blind stones.
The red velvet material was hard to work with, it pulled, and the style my mother had chosen was not easy either. She was not really a good sewer. She liked to make things; that is different. Whenever she could she tried to skip basting and pressing and she took no pride in the fine points of tailoring, the finishing of buttonholes and the overcasting of seams as, for instance, my aunt and my grandmother did.
The Shubert grandparents. No comfort there. He in uniform, she in a ball gown, displaying absurd self-satisfaction. They had got what they wanted, Sophia supposed, and had only contempt for those not so conniving or so lucky.
Certain suggestions, or notions, would make the muscles of her lean spotty face quiver, her eyes go sharp and black, and her mouth work as if there was a despicable taste in it. She could stop you in your tracks then, like a savage thornbush.
How am I supposed to know? She just wants to do it. You wait. You’ll see. She’ll get you over there bawling and whining about what a bastard I am. One of these days.
And so it often happened with those practical people. In spite of their calculations, their survival instincts, they might not get as far as they had quite reasonable expected.
She would have said that love was hocus-pocus, a deception, and she believed that. But at the prospect she still felt a hush, a flutter along the nerves, a bowing down of sense, a flagrant postration.
For some reason he thinks of Diane in her unbecoming red ski jacket and decides that her life is her life, there is not much use worrying about it. And he thinks of his wife, pretending to laugh at the television. Her quietness.
Shakespeare should have prepared her.
He said Catholics probably had an advantage, you could hedge your bets right until you were dying.
She smiled at me with such merriment of recognition, and such a yearning to be recognised in return, that you would think this was a moment granted to her when she was let out of the shadows for one day in a thousand.
They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy.
It would be better to think that time had soured and thinned and made commonplace a brew that used to sparkle, that difficulties had altered us both, and not for the better.
She thought that when she went with Peter to an engineers’ party, the atmosphere was pleasant though the talk was boring. That was because everybody had their importance fixed and settled at least for the time being. Here nobody was safe. Judgment might be passed behind backs, even on the known and published. An air of cleverness or nerves obtained, no matter who you were.
The preference most of them had for seeing through their camera, rather than looking at the real thing, and so on.
To dare it; to get away with it, to enter on preposterous adventures in your own, but newly named, skin.
But now he pays attention, he notices something about the bush that he thinks he has missed those other times. How tangled up in itself it is, how dense and secret. It’s not a matter of one tree after another, it’s all the trees together, aiding and abetting one another and weaving into one thing. A transformation, behind your back.