Maybe that was true of marriage everywhere. Between times, in their own living rooms, the men seemed to be resting for the next round of pontificating and so saved their strength by staying silent.
Nora had discovered that by herself was a condition she really liked.
I was good with being alone, always liked it, but there’s something about doing a job alone that you’ve always done with someone else that just doesn’t feel right. Maybe it’s like making Christmas cookies by yourself. There’s nothing wrong with it in theory, but you’re really supposed to be doing it with other people, and not just any other people.
It’s hard to imagine yourself in the future. It’s why people do so many dumb things, because they’re mired in the moment. Smoking, drinking, making disastrous marriages, putting off medical tests. The reason we’ve made a mess of the planet is that being its stewards required us to imagine not our own futures but those four or five generations removed.
Some people measure their success by the profession their children have chosen, by the purchase of a house, by how often they visit or call. But the only measurement, truly, is something that’s quite subjective: have you raised good people?
For so long I’d thought about myself as a girl who’d walked away from her mother’s life that it would be a long time before I would start to think about the other part of the bargain, how easily she’d let me go.
It was a puzzle to her, how eagerly she’d rushed into life when she was eighteen or twenty, and in what a desultory fashion it had dragged out ever since.
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. – JAMES BALDWIN.
There’s a certain kind of conversation you have from time to time at parties in New York about a new book. The word “banal” sometimes rears its by-now banal head; you say “underedited,” I say “derivative.” The conversation goes around and around various literary criticisms, and by the time it moves on one thing is clear: No one read the book; we just read the reviews.
Occasionally someone will tell me that they won’t have pets because they’re messy, and I suppose there’s some truth to that, between the fur and the slobber and the occasional puddle on the floor. I have to choke down the temptation to respond that life is messy, and its vagaries go down hardest with those who fool themselves into thinking they can keep it neat.
Then one day we suddenly realized that we had been keeping him alive not because it was good for him, but because it was good for us, because it was too hard to make the decision to let him go. And in the joyful bargain between dog and person, that is the one unforgivable cheat.
The next day, eating a turkey sandwich with salt and mayonnaise, Rebecca decided Thanksgiving was the best holiday, although she had little to choose from: her family never celebrated Hanukkah but her father was militant about ignoring Christmas and insisted they spend December 25 eating Chinese takeout and going to the movies.
I don’t care that much about getting older, but I don’t want to be forgotten, because to be remembered is to live and to be loved.
It’s so easy to be wrong about the things you’re close to. I know that now. I learned that then.
A fix-it man, they used to call it, when things still got fixed instead of just junked. If.
It’s a lot harder to save people than you think it is.
Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don’t believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.
I looked around and it was like I was seeing everything frozen into a still photograph, like I was seeing my whole life but in one of those shots you look and later think, Yeah, that’s what it was like, once upon a time. Once upon a time ago.
You may admire, even love those photographs, but you don’t look at them and think What happened next? They have an immutable quality – that’s their strength and power. But there’s no question embedded in them. There’s a question embedded in all your work, that sense of ’what happens next.
Nora had looked at herself in the bathroom mirror as she was applying mascara and realized that her skin had begun to look like silk after you washed it, serviceable but without its sheen.