The people I hung out with in my early twenties were middle-class and, at least to our minds, artistic. We’d all turned our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it.
I’m sad to be finishing school. I liked being in college. It was respectable to be a student. You get discount admissions all over town, and it makes you work.
The younger an ingredient, the more highly it was valued, thus the baby chicken, the baby spinach, the newborn asparagus, each pale stalk as slender as a fang.
I might reinvent myself to strangers, but to this day, as far as my family is concerned, I’m still the one most likely to set your house on fire.
I got into the express line behind a middle-aged man in a T-shirt. I never saw the front of it, but the back pictured a Labrador retriever standing on the beach with a bikini top in his mouth. Below him were the words GOOD DOG. Some people, I thought, opening the wet wipes so I could wash the tumor off my hands before I touched my wallet.
Were it not for Sorry! I’d never have known that Kathy’s mother shot a kitten in the head.
Why is it some people can manage a thing like a Fitbit, while others go off the rails and allow it to rule, and perhaps even ruin, their lives?
At what point had I realized that class couldn’t save you, that addiction or mental illness didn’t care whether you’d taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe? Which drunk or junkie or unmedicated schizophrenic was I crossing the street to avoid when I put it all together?
I’m often misunderstood at my supermarket in Sussex, not because of my accent but because I tend to deviate from the script. Cashier: Hello, how are you this evening? Me: Has your house ever been burgled? Cashier: What? Me: Your house – has anyone ever broken into it and stolen things? With me, people aren’t thinking What did you say? so much as Why are you saying that?
We’re like a pair of bad trapeze artists, reaching for each other’s hands and missing every time.
I can manage in a restaurant, take a cab, and even make small talk with the driver. “Do you have children?” I ask. “Will you take a vacation this year?” “Where to?” When he turns it around, as Japanese cabdrivers are inclined to do, I tell him that I have three children, a big boy and two little girls. If Pimsleur included “I am a middle-aged homosexual and thus make do with a niece I never see and a very small godson,” I’d say that. In the meantime, I work with what I have.
Following a brief period of hard-won independence she came to appreciate the fact that people aren’t foolish as much as they are kind.
I’m pretty sure I could tumble down all the stairs in the Empire State Building, naked, with a greased-up pepper grinder in each hand, and a box of candles around my neck, and still end up in the lobby with an empty rectum.
Did you just tell that lady you’re a doctor?” Amy would ask. “A little,” I’d say.
Our mother became the living ghost that haunted it, gaunt now and rattling ice cubes instead of chains.
It wasn’t where they belonged, necessarily. It was just where they ended up.
When apple-picking season ended, I got a job in a packing plant and gravitated toward short stories, which I could read during my break and reflect upon for the remainder of my shift. A good one would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.
I noticed my mother’s face assume an expression she reserved for unspeakable horror. I had seen this look only twice before: once when she was caught in the path of a charging, rabid pig and then again when I told her I wanted a peach-colored velveteen blazer with matching slacks.
The Artist’s impressions of a walk in the woods. The Artist’s view on viewing. The Artist on Art. How do you get your ideas for stories, Mr. Valentine? Well, I simply exploit everything I come into contact with. One ended, of course, by losing all spontaneity. You saw people as characters, sunsets as an excuse for similes –.
I didn’t need a fifteen-minute conversation, just some human interaction. It can be had, and easily: a gesture, a joke, something that says, “I live in this world too.” I think of it as a switch that turns someone from a profession to a person, and it works both ways. “I’m not just a vehicle for my wallet!” I sometimes want to scream.
I had that in my mouth ten minutes ago and now it’s a private part?