She yearned to call him, but hated the sound of the phone ringing, ringing, knowing that he might be standing right there, not picking up, knowing it was her.
Her gut ached, as if love was being dug out of her with a dull knife.
Meredith’s father, the composer, who shot himself in this house. Came all the way from Vienna to shoot himself in LA. Escaped the Nazis but not himself.
He was obsessed with obituaries. She’d never read them before, he couldn’t believe it, to him it was like someone who’d never read the funnies... Michael always wanted to know what they died of- accidental gunshot wounds, overdose, cancer. ‘Was it suicide?’ That’s what he really wanted to know.
I learned, whatever you hung from my earlobes or out on my back, I was insoluble, like same in water. Stir me up, I always rest on the bottom.
She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot.
Don’t tell me how you hate your new foster home. If they’re not beating you, consider yourself lucky.
Michael hated this, it was the worst thing he could imagine, disappearing into the mass- he didn’t know how to submerge himself, he was the puzzle piece that fit nowhere.
Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. It.
Now it seemed unbelievable, the innocence of a girl in a fairy tale.
She was a woman for whom a man would buy a diamond ring or a new car, just to cheer her up.
All this time, masquerading as a nice, well-bred girl when I was a stream in flood, a length of fire, the fall of a hawk.
How many children had this happened to? How many children were like me, floating like plankton in the wide ocean?
I lay on my mattress on the screen porch and waited for him to leave, watching the blue of the evening turn velvet, indigo lingering like an unspoken hope, while my mother and the blond man murmured on the other side of the screens. Incense perfumed the air, a special kind she bought in Little Tokyo, without any sweetness, expensive.
I was torn and stitched, I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.
The stroke of the brush was the evidence of the gesture of your arm. A record of your existence, the quality of your personality, your touch, pressure, the authority of your movement.
Mother prescribing her books like medicines. A good dose of Whitman would set me straight, like caster oil.
This was an artist’s stare, attentive to detail, taking in the truth without preconceptions.
Claire smiled with relief that my mother had made the first move. She didn’t understand the nature of poisons. My.
Don’t you let them forget about you,” she said. But this was not about being forgotten. This was about being in a file cabinet with my name on it and they closed the door. I was a corpse with a tag on my toe.