I was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat. I was smart, if loud. I was good, if ruined.
In moments like this she thought of all the little girls who grew into adulthood and old age as a sort of cipher alphabet for all those who didn’t. Their lives would somehow be inextricably attached to all the girls who had been killed.
Sometimes cats fall ten flights out of the windows of highrises and land on their feet. You only believe it because you’ve seen it in print.
These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors.
When the dead are done with the living,” Franny said to me, “the living can go on to other things.
People grow up by living. I want to live.
She held on to two sides of an hourglass and wondered how this could be possible. The time she’d had alone had been gravitationally circumscribed by when her attachments would pull her back. And they had pulled now – doublefisted.
I felt like observing my way out of there, but I didn’t.
I was raised by a solitary woman to be a solitary child, and that was, I now saw, what I had hopelessly become.
Ruth did not believe in makeup. She thought it demeaned women.
My mother’s desire to reach those waves, touch her feet to another ocean on the other side of the country, was all she was thinking of – the pure baptismal goal of it. Whoosh and you can start all over again. Or was life more like the horrible game in gym that has you running from one side of an enclosed space to another, picking up and setting down wooden blocks without end?
She had needed the time to know that this love would not destroy her, and I had, I now knew, given her that time, could give it, for it was what I had in great supply.
Buckley kept the shoe on his dresser, until one day it wasn’t there anymore and no amount of looking for it could turn it up.
I wish now that I had known this was weird.
It was in these moments, I knew, that my father loved my mother most. When my mother was broken and helpless, when her hard shell was stripped away and her spite and brittleness couldn’t serve her. It was a sad dance of two people who were starving to death in each other’s arms. Their marriage an X that forever joined murderer to victim.
I had begun to chase my husband as I had once chased my mother, toe to toe, a shadow girl trying to be what I thought they wanted me to be. I.
He wore his own innocence like a comfortable old coat.
The niggling idea of what she would do as Ray grew older and her husband worked increasingly long hours crept up the inside of her foot and along her calf to the back of her knee and began to climb into her lap.
Confucius-says.
So much in life is about almosts, not quites.
Soon she noted that teachers in subjects besides gym didn’t report her if she cut. They were happy not to have her there: her intelligence made her a problem. It demanded attention and rushed their lesson plans forward.