Lesje isn’t sure any longer whose house it is. She wouldn’t be surprised to get a gracious phone call from Elizabeth saying that she and the children would be moving in the next day and could she please get the spare room ready and make sure all the stray socks and boots had been gathered together? Nate.
I didn’t want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas.
It wasn’t his actual poems she was regretting, unless she had no taste at all. They hadn’t been any good, he knew that now and certainly she did too. It was the poems, the ones he might have written, if. If what?
Serves him right for marrying a youngster. Serves him right for marrying three of them in a row. Serves him right for marrying his graduate students. Serves him right for marrying a bossy, self-appointed custodian of his life and times. Serves him right for marrying. But.
He hadn’t paid much attention to them when they were babies. They and their pastel, urine-soaked paraphernalia had taken up so much space, they’d attracted so much attention that ought to have been his, and he’d decamped in each case before they were three; so they don’t like him much, nor does he blame them, having hated his own father.
This is one of the things I wasn’t prepared for – the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing.
Change and decay in all around I see,′ she said, smiling in a way he did not like at all. ‘I’m not prepared for eternity.
He will exist for her at least, he will be created by her, he will have a place in her mythology after all.
Gullible Verna, who’d believed she was in love. Or who was in love. When it came to love, wasn’t believing the same as the real thing?
Antinous sighed. ‘The gods wanted to destroy us,’ he said. ‘That’s everyone’s excuse for behaving badly,’ I said.
No reply is in itself a reply.
Being here with him is safety; it’s a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside.
Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
She who does not hesitate is lost.
I keep walking. I feel daring, light-headed. They are not my best friends or even my friends. Nothing binds me to them. I am free.
That’s the girl, as Grandma Win would say. Put one foot on the first stair, then the other one beside it, like when you were three. You need to take care of yourself, because who else will? There.
He had the freedom of a nobody, with a blank future unrolling before him on which anything at all might be written.
For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will accept their duties with willing hearts. She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way. She said: Because they won’t want things they can’t have.
His letters always begin without greeting and end without signature, as if they’re part of one single letter, unrolling through time like an endless paper towel.
I am still a coward, still fearful; none of that has changed. But I turn and walk away from her. It’s like stepping off a cliff, believing the air will hold you up. And it does. I see that I don’t have to do what she says, and worse and better, I’ve never had to do what she says. I can do what I like.