And I didn’t yet understand that just because you can recognize what another person wants and just because that person is older and more powerful than you are, you don’t have to give it to them.
He’s a lawyer in Atlanta, and he’s very active in his church,” Mrs. Bennet said. “If that’s not the description of a man looking for a wife, I don’t know what is.
It was generally less shocking to Liz that twenty years after high school she was still her essential self, the self she’d grown up as, unencumbered by spouse or child, than that nearly everyone else had changed, moved on, and multiplied. After.
It was one thingfor a person who didn’t really know me to act distant, but it was quite another for someone to get to know me and then back away.
Then she was in a different part of the club, and she and Kitty were dancing to a rap song they both knew all the words to, and Kitty was wearing a thin plastic headband with antennae off of which wobbled life-sized sparkly pink penises. How marvelous this headband was! Even more marvelously, Kitty pointed out that Liz was wearing an identical one. Truly, it was a magical night.
Oh, how different my life would have been had I not grown up in the same house with my grandmother, how much narrower and blander! She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant and contradictory place, and it had made me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.
The students’ announcements were lengthy – the longer roll call was, the shorter first period would be – and filled with double entendres: Boys’ soccer is practicing on Coates Field today, which, if you don’t know where it is, is behind the headmaster’s house, and if you still don’t know where it is, ask Fred. Where are you, Fred? You wanna raise your hand, man? There’s Fred, everyone see Fred? Okay, so Coates Field. And remember – bring your balls.
I have always found it peculiar, to say the least, when conservatives, especially conservative men, make these particular issues their ideological focus; there is something suspect to me about individuals who devote enormous amounts of time and attention dos objects they profess to find repugnant.
The tarps Ken Weinrich’s crew used has yellow and royal blue stripes, not unlike those for a circus, and this had lent a festive yet undignified mood to the proceedings.
Other people were so unsuccessful at fending off love! Members of Congress who had affairs with their aides, or students who I’d known in college, girls who as freshmen declared themselves lesbians, then graduated with boyfriends- to give in to such love represents, for them, a capitulation or a betrayal, yet apparently the pull was so strong that they couldn’t resist. That was what I didn’t understand, how people made the leap from not mattering in each others’ lives to mattering.
It occurred to Liz one day, as she waited on hold for an estimate from a yard service, that her parents’ home was like an extremely obese person who could no longer see, touch, or maintain jurisdiction over all of his body; there was simply too much of it, and he – they – had grown weary and inflexible. During.
Dena seemed about to respond, but instead, she belched again, a smaller belch that seemed unequal as a harbinger to the monstrous chunky gush that erupted from inside her. I held her hair back and looked away as she finished retching. Working with children had made me less squeamish – they were constantly presenting their grubby hands to your, having accidents – but at some point, disgusting was still disgusting, Especially with an adult woman.
Yet surely she was as culpable as he was; recalling her casual speculation about when Jasper’s wife’s grandmother might die and thereby free Jasper and Susan to divorce, Liz wondered if a stronger sign of a relationship’s essential corruptness could exist than for its official realization to hinge on the demise of another human being.
It was more when things slowed down, during the parts when you were supposed to have fun, that my lack of friends felt obvious- on Saturday nights, when there dances I didn’t go to, and during visitation... I spent those times hiding. Most of the other girls propped open their doors for visitation, but we kept ours shut.
But sometimes speaking is so hard! It’s like standing still, then sprinting.
Some people who run for office want to create change, and some want everyone to fall in love with them.
The margin between staying and leaving was so thin; really, it could have gone either way.
Does being forty feel fabulous and foxy?” Liz asked.
Since Liz’s adolescence, when viewing television commercials that celebrated the ostensibly unconditional love of mothers for their children, or on spotting merchandise in stores that honored this unique bond with poems or effusive declarations – picture frames, magnets, oven mitts – she had felt like a foreign exchange student observing the customs of another country.
Liz had tried not to experience the doubly insulting sting of being excluded by a person she didn’t care for.