The first thing we notice about our story is that we can’t really see the solid outlines of it – it seems bathed in something of its own. It is wrapped in an atmosphere. This is what makes it shine, perhaps, as well as what initially obscures its plain, real shape.
Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams.
It is memory that is the somnambulist. It will come back in its wounds from across the world, like Phil, calling us by our names and demanding its rightful tears. It will never be impervious. The memory can be hurt, time and again – but in that may lie its final mercy. As long as it’s vulnerable to the living moment, it lives for us, and while it lives, and while we are able, we can give it up its due.
Memory returned like spring, Laurel thought. Memory had the character of spring. In some cases, it was the old wood that did the blooming.
They could play an endless game of hide-and -seek in so many rooms and up and down the halls that intersected and turned into dead-end porches and rooms full of wax begonias and elephant’s- ears, or rooms full of trunks. She remembered the nights – the moon vine, the everblooming Cape jessamines, the verbena smelling under running feet, the lateness of dancers.
The frame through which I viewed the world changed too, over time. Greater than scene, I came to see, is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.
It is want that does the world’s arousing, and if it were not for that, who knows what might not be interrupted?
But the guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.
A little girl lay flung back in her mother’s lap as though sleep had struck her with a blow.
Don’t ever let this husband of yours, whoever he is, know you can cook, Dabney Fairchild, or you’ll spend the rest of your life in the kitchen. That’s the first thing I want to tell you.
I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters.
My father did not bring it up, but of course I knew that he had another reason to worry about my decision to write. Though he was a reader, he was not a lover of fiction, because fiction is not true, and for that flaw it was forever inferior to fact. If reading fiction was a waste of time, so was the writing of it. Why is it, I wonder, that humor didn’t count? Wodehouse, for one, whom both of us loved, was a flawless fiction writer.
Her father left his questions unasked. But both knew, and for the same reason, that bad days go better without any questions at all.
I learned from the age of two or three, that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. It had been startling and disappointing for me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.
Sounds from the highway rolled in upon her with the rise and fall of eternal ocean waves. They were as deafening as grief. Windshields flashed into her eyes like lights through tears.
I’ve always been shy physically. This in part tended to keep me from rushing into things, including relationships, headlong. Not rushing headlong, though I may have wanted to, but beginning to write stories about people, I drew near slowly; noting and guessing, apprehending, hoping, drawing my eventual conclusions out of my own heart, I did venture closer to where I wanted to go.
Only the writing of fiction keeps fiction alive.
On Sundays, Presbyterians were not allowed to eat hot food or read the funny papers or travel the shortest journey; parents believed in Hell and believed tiny babies could go there. Baptists were not supposed to know, up until their dying day, how to play cards or dance. And so on.
Surely even those immune from the world, for the time being, need the touch of one another, or all is lost.
When, sometime later, Laurel asked about the bell, her mother replied calmly that how good a bell was depended on the distance away your children had gone.