He felt like an animal limping away, some wounded buck that needed to be put down.
A multichild household is a pit of petty jealousies, this I knew, and the Nash children were panicking at the idea of competing not just with one another, but with a dead sister. They had my sympathies.
I always feel sad for the girl that I was, because it never occurred to me that my mother might comfort me. She has never told me she loved me, and I never assumed she did. She tended to me. She administrated me. Oh, yes, and one time she bought me lotion with vitamin E.
I’d come to find the morning depressing, to know it would come again and again.
Libby was a Christmas baby, which meant she never got the right amount of presents. Patty would hold one extra gift aside – and Happy Birthday to Libby! – but they all knew the truth, Libby got ripped off. Libby rarely felt less than ripped off.
She was wearing a black pantsuit with a pale pink turtleneck underneath, a painfully aspirational look for a stripper.
Another time-honored ploy: A woman is less likely to throw you out if she’s offered her hospitality. If you have allergies or a cold, asking for a tissue is even better. Women love vulnerability. Most women.
But she did invite me to her house, and women like that don’t invite over women like me unless they want something.
I was busy thinking of all the people that had been harmed: intentionally, accidentally, deservedly, unfairly, slightly, completely.
Paper is first year,′ I said. At the end of Year One’s unexpectedly wrenching treasure hunt, Amy presented me with a set of posh stationery, my initials embossed at the top, the paper so creamy I expected my fingers to come away moist. In return, I’d presented my wife with a bright red dime-store paper kite, picturing the park, picnics, warm summer gusts. Neither of us liked our presents; we’s each have preferred the other’s. It was a reverse O. Henry.
DNA to me was some sort of magical element, some glowing goo that was always getting people out of prison.
I like other people’s things better. They come with other people’s history.
There was just me, left wretched in my childhood bed.
I wanted to slice barren into my skin. That’s how I’d stay, my insides unused. Empty and pristine. I pictured my pelvis split open, to reveal a tidy hollow, like the nest of a vanished animal.
Only Tanner Bolt could get away with making me, a client, fly to him, then tell me what kind of dance I’d need to do in order to give him my money.
I stared back – cows are the few animals that really seem to see you.
For so many years, my husband has lauded the emotional solidity of midwesterners: stoic, humble, without affectation! But these aren’t the kinds of people who provide good memoir material. Imagine the jacket copy: People behaved mostly well and then they died.
Against the far wall was a wire cage holding a pack of unblinking bunnies. World’s dumbest pet, I thought. Who would want an animal that sat, quivered, and shat everywhere? They say you can litter-box train them, but they lie.
It is always consoling to think of suicide; it’s what gets one through many a bad night.
Patty knew that feeling, a dream hangover, like when she jumped up from a panicky sleep at 2 in the morning and tried to talk herself into thinking the farm was OK, that this year would pick up, and then felt all the sicker when she woke up to the alarm a few hours later, guilty and duped. It was suprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were OK, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that that simply wasn’t so.′ -Dark Places.