Her house is not perfect; parts of it are in fact crumbling, most noticeably the front porch. But it’s a wonder that she has a house at all, that she’s managed to accomplish a house. Despite the wreckage. She’s built a dwelling over the abyss, but where else was there to build it? So far, it stands.
When it was raining we would sit at this table and draw in our scrapbooks with crayons or colored pencils, anything we liked. In school you had to do what the rest were doing.
Pieces for Peace, rescue the Korean poet, ban the bomb. It’s just that he’s never agreed to do anything before. He wonders why, this time, he has. Not that this enterprise is any more likely to succeed than her other enterprises. But collecting signatures against RCMP Wrongdoing does not at the moment seem any more futile than most other things in his life.
Life, life, you sang with every cell, compelled into dancing as the spell held you enchained and you burned air.
It was a problem in comic books: drawing an invisible man.
She was keeping it in a cedar box with some other penises she’d stolen; she was feeding them on grains of wheat. That’s the usual method of tending penises.
But the truth is that I don’t know what the villagers thought or talked about, I was so shut off from them. The older ones occasionally crossed themselves when we passed, possibly because my mother was wearing slacks, but even that was never explained.
Why are you still walking? said the doctor. You have no knee.
At four o’clock his replacement, a German Catholic theologian, he’s been told, will arrive and grip his hand earnestly as if he is indeed a kindred spirit. Nate, embarrassed, will leave the booth and join the walkers, those homeward bound, those merely wandering; he will lose himself among the apathetic, the fatalistic, the uncommitted, the cynical; among whom he would like to feel at home.
She isn’t doing lab work today but she wears the lab coat anyway. It makes her feel she belongs here. She does belong here.
When I started school myself I begged to be allowed to go to Sunday School, like everyone else; I wanted to find out, also I wanted to be less conspicuous. My father didn’t approve, he reacted as though I’d asked to go to a pool hall: Christianity was something he’d escaped from, he wished to protect us from its distortions. But after a couple of years he decided I was old enough, I could see for myself, reason would defend me.
He gazes into her eyes and lies with such tenderness, such heartfelt feeling, such implicit sadness at her want of faith in him, that she can’t question him. To question him would turn her cynical and hard. She would rather be kissed; she would rather be cherished. She would rather believe.
STAFF ONLY. Then she’d seen their lab coats as badges, of nationality, membership of some kind.
So Tony is a foreigner, to her own mother; and to her father also, because, although she talks the same way he does, she is – and he has made this clear – not a boy. Like a foreigner, she listens carefully, interpreting. Like a foreigner she keeps an eye out for sudden hostile gestures. Like a foreigner she makes mistakes.
Still, this is the only place she wants to work. Once there had been nothing equally important to her, but there is still nothing more important. This is the only membership she values.
He was once among those who felt the universe should be just and merciful and were prepared to help it achieve this state. That was his mother’s doing. He recalls his convoluted pain, his sense of betrayal when he realized finally how impossible this was. Nineteen-seventy, civil rights abolished, a war with no invaders and no enemy and the newspapers applauding.
Crepuscular, he thinks: it sounds like.
But whatever his reaction is, she knows her final decision will not be based on it. Nate has been displaced, if only slightly, from the center of the universe.
Why had my father abandoned me? If he was still alive, why didn’t he at least write to me? Hadn’t he loved me even a little?
Someday they may be grandmothers. It occurs to her, a new idea, that this tension between the two of them is a difficulty for the children. They ought to stop.