A woman like me is always a temptation, if possible to arrange it unobserved; as whatever we may say about it later, we will not be believed.
I remember thinking when the girls were born, first one and then the other, that I should have had sons and not daughters. I didn’t feel up to daughters, I didn’t know how they worked. I must have been afraid of hating them. With sons I would have known what to do.
You can see by what I’ve told you that I was a child who learned early the virtues – if such they are – of self-sufficiency. I knew that I would have to look out for myself in the world. I could hardly count on family support.
My own hair reposes in a cardboard box in a steamer trunk in my mother’s cellar, where I picture it becoming duller and more brittle with each passing year, and possibly moth-eaten; by now it will look like the faced wreaths of hair in Victorian funeral jewelry. Or it may have developed a dry mildew; inside its tissue-paper wrappings it glows faintly, in the darkness of the trunk.
Das Vergessen war absichtlich: Es war dasselbe wie Sich-Erinnern, nur das Gegenteil.
I had not been exposed to these kinds of situations, so this event was not trivial to me. Instead it was horrifying. It was also shameful: when a shameful thing is done to you, the shamefulness rubs off on you. You feel dirtied.
Had he helped to choose their graceless imitation-Victorian bed? He had; or at least he’d stood by while the crime was being committed.
One must always keeps both sides in one’s head; it’s the only way to anticipate the moves of one’s opponent.
Her eyes gleam, sometimes a little wickedly, for although my mother is sweet and old and a lady, she avoids being a sweet old lady. When people are in danger of mistaking her for one, she flings in something from left field; she refuses to be taken for granted.
Jack had stolen that from Nosferatu: the love of a pure woman had an uncanny power over the things of darkness. Maybe 1964 was the last moment when you could get away with that: try such a thing now and people would only laugh.
Having fun has always been high on my mother’s agenda. She has as much fun as possible, but what she means by this phrase cannot be understood without making an adjustment, an allowance for the great gulf across which this phrase must travel before it reaches us. It comes from another world, which, like the stars that originally sent out the light we see hesitating in the sky above us these nights, may be or is already gone.
In our efforts to rise above ourselves we have indeed fallen far, and are falling farther still; for, like the Creation, the Fall, too, is ongoing. Ours is a fall into greed: why do we think that everything on Earth belongs to us, while in reality we belong to Everything?
It’s so good, to be touched by someone, to be felt so greedily, to feel so greedy.
Why don’t women have to prove to one another that they are women?
When your main game’s over, you can always move your chessboard elsewhere.
And so they continue, in a straight line that takes them over the Atlantic and past the curvature of the earth, out through the moon’s orbit and into the dark reaches beyond.
I smile a forgiving smile. The real truth is that I was sneakier than my brother, and got caught less often. No front-line charges into enemy machine-gun nests for me, if they could be at all avoided. My own solitary acts of wickedness were devious and well concealed; it was only in partnership with my brother that I would throw caution to the winds.
There’s a classic iceberg on the port side, with a centre so blue it looks dyed, and ahead of them is a mirage – a fata morgana, towering like an ice castle on the horizon, completely real except for the faint shimmering of its edges. Sailors have been lured to their death by those; they’ve drawn mountains on maps where no mountains were.
Were my kindliness and essential femininity being trotted out for their inspection? Were they being told in a round-about way that I was harmless, that they could expect to be talked to by me, but not devoured?
After lunch, there’s a lecture on walruses. There are rumours of rogue walruses that prey on seals, puncturing them with their tusks, then sucking out the fat with their powerful mouths. The women on either side are knitting. One of them says, “Liposuction.” The other laughs.