Amelia liked me. She had me sit next to her and finish the food on her plate when she was done eating.
The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain. I.
People just wanted to be loved. That.
Everybody left you eventually. He.
Carolee bought me a mirror for my purse and Owen and Peter gave me a lizard in a jar with a bow. From Davey I got a big sheet of cardboard on which he’d taped animal scat and Xeroxes of animal tracks to match, with carefully printed labels.
But how long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?
My words, that’s what she wanted. What’s this? she kept asking. What’s this? But how could I tell her? She’d taken all the words.
I felt helpless to prevent her life from taking its likely direction. Could a person save another person?
All that remodeling. She never wondered where the money came from. Six girls bought a lot of remodeling, even antiques, especially if you didn’t feed them. I.
She thought she could justify anything, even murder, just because it was what she wanted.
It was safer in here, there were rules and regular meals, professional care. Mac was a floor you could not fall below. I supposed the ex-cons who kept going back to prison felt the same way. “You.
High-voltage wires stretched between steel towers like giants holding jump ropes into the distance.
It made me feel dizzy, like I wanted to grab hold of something heavy and hang on. This was the life I was going to be living, everyone separated from everyone else, hanging on for a moment, only to be washed away. I could grow up and drift away too. My mother might never know where I was, and in a few years, if someone asked her about me, she might shrug like this and say, “Haven’t seen her in two, three years.
And suddenly I felt panic. I’d made a mistake, like when I’d played chess with Ray and knew a second too late I’d made the wrong move. I had asked a question I couldn’t afford to know the answer to. It was the thing I didn’t want to know. The rock that never should be turned over. I knew what was under there. I didn’t need to see it, the hideous eyelets albino creature that lived underneath.
You never thought, maybe I should have left Astrid some words.
Like Berlin, I was layered with guilt and destruction. I had caused grief as well as suffering it. I could never honestly point a finger without it turning around in mid-accusation. Olivia.
I was graduating in two months, but I wasn’t to Pitzer, that was for sure. I was the old child, the past that had to burned away, so my mother, the phoenix, could emerge once again, a golden bird rising from the ash.
I didn’t want to remind her that I was the reason she was trapped in electric bills and kid’s shoes grown too small, the reason she was clawing at the windows like Michaels dying tomatoes. She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress.
Loneliness ia a human condition.
On the cover that leaned against the dirty couch, John and Yoko pressed together for a kiss they would never finish. People were always trashing Yoko Ono, blaming her for breaking up the Beatles, but Josie knew they were just jealous that John preferred Yoko to some bloated megaband. Nobody ever loved a lover. Because love was a private party, and nobody got on the guest list.