If she’d foreseen that Alphinland was going to last so long and be so successful, she would have planned it better. It would have had a shape, a more defined structure; it would have had boundaries. As it is, it’s grown like urban sprawl. Not.
And what has become of Ronette, after all, left behind in the past, dappled by its chiaroscuro, stained and haloed by it, stuck with other people’s adjectives?
Everyone has to be somewhere, and this is where Lucy is. She is in Lois’s apartment, in the holes that open inwards on the wall, not like windows but like doors. She is here. She is entirely alive.
By now she knew better than to betray desire.
You’re working with the gap between reality and perception. That’s why you have to hit them with something new, something they’ve never seen before, something they aren’t. Nothing sells like anxiety.
Rumania, for instance, had anticipated Gilead in the eighties by banning all forms of birth control, imposing compulsory pregnancy tests on the female population, and linking promotion and wage increases to fertility.
This is something you can depend upon: there will always be alliances, of one kind or another.
There are other jobs. There are other men, or that’s the theory.
But her mind can’t hold him, she can’t fix the memory of what he looks like. It’s as if a breeze blows over the water and he’s dispersed, into broken colours, into ripples; then he reforms elsewhere, past the nest pillar, taking on his familiar body.
It’s her second baby, she had another child, once, I know that from the Center, when she used to cry about it at night, like the rest of us only more noisily. So she ought to be able to remember this, what it’s like, what’s coming. But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
Poetry was the way out then, for young people who wanted some exit from the lumpen bourgeoisie and the shackles of respectable wage-earning. It was what painting had been at the turn of the century. Richard knows this now, although he did not then. He doesn’t know what the equivalent is at the moment. Film-making, he’d guess, for those with intellectual pretensions.
I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it.
He didn’t want to marry Selena. He couldn’t imagine marriage with her. He could not place her within the tedious, comforting scenery of domesticity.
To have them sizing him up. To have them thinking, He can’t do it, he won’t do, he’ll have to do, this last as if he were a garment, out of style or shoddy, which must nevertheless be put on because there’s nothing else available. To.
It’s amazing the way Mitch can just write these women off. Sink his teeth into them, spit them out, and Roz is expected to clean up the mess. Fire of his loins and then wipe, like a blackboard, and after that he can barely remember their names. Roz is the one who remembers. Their names, and everything else about them.
She told him he was a grouch, but since that was more or less the behavior she expected from husbands she didn’t seem to mind.
I stand there on the top step, frozen with hate. What I hate is not Grace or even Cordelia. I can’t go as far as that. I hate Mrs. Smeath, because what I thought was a secret, something going on among girls, among children, is not one. It has been discussed before, and tolerated. Mrs. Smeath has known and approved. She has done nothing to stop it. She thinks it serves me right.
I’ll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real. So that’s how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before.
She was something of his own that he had lost.
If my eyes could shoot out fatal rays like the ones in comic books I would incinerate her on the spot. She is right, I am a heathen. I cannot forgive.