It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I’m not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again.
The man cocked his gun and Patty had time for one last thought: I wish, I wish, I wish I could take this back.
She was a worst-case scenarist on a grand scale. Because it was never just that the door was unlocked, it was that the door was unlocked, and men were inside, and they were waiting to rape and kill her.
I hadn’t necessarily wanted to be cured. But I was out of places to write, slicing myself between my toes – bad, cry – like a junkie looking for one last vein. Vanish did it for me. I’d saved the neck, such a nice prime spot, for one final good cutting. Then I turned myself in.
Normally, Richard was the kind of guy I disliked, someone born and raised plush: looks, charm, smarts, probably money. These men were never very interesting to me; they had no edges, and they were usually cowards. They instinctively fled any situation that might cause them embarrassment or awkwardness. But Richard didn’t bore me. Maybe because his grin was a little crooked. Or because he made his living dealing in ugly things.
Frankly, I think Adora prefers us to feel like strangers. She wants all relationships in the house to run through her.
In Amma’s snideness, I caught a whiff of desperation and righteousness. Like she’d whined at breakfast: I wish I’d be murdered. Amma didn’t want anyone to get more attention than her. Certainly not girls who couldn’t compete when they were alive.
His brain was sticky, phrases and snatches of songs were always wedging themselves in there. Annihilation. He saw flashes of Norse barbarians swinging axes. He wondered for a second, only a second, if he’d been reincarnated, and this was some leftover memory, flittering down like ash. Then he picked up his bike and banished the idea. He wasn’t ten.
Diane didn’t worry, that was for less hearty women.
I waited patiently – years – for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we’d say, Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy. But it never happened. Instead, women across the nation colluded in our degradation!
You can like an immoral character because she’s interesting, not because you want to have her over for dinner.
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.