Absolution

by Alice McDermott

felt the utter shame of my situation, knowing it was nothing to be ashamed of, but feeling it all the same.

Looking back on those glorious first months of my married life, I confess I do wonder what ease, what pleasure, women have sacrificed since. Something to be said, I suppose, for the luxurious life of a contented concubine.

remember how her large hands left puckered sweat marks on the lined pages of her notebooks. How her voice rose and fell in various registers of outrage or irony as she questioned whatever was being offered: the interpretation of a poem, the accuracy of a historical account, the end result of a complex equation.

Evidence of where we’d been, stays against forgetfulness, I suppose. The process—the privilege of a long life—fills you with the lingering sense of uncertainty.

Small world, right? Although in truth it seems to me that it’s not the world that’s small, only our time in it.

We felt no envy, we do-good American ladies. We liked men better than women as well.

Now the easy, fertile future—my part in our successful life together—was no longer so easy. Or so assuredly mine.

we said so little about the future because we suspected, both of us, that once we were married we would not know this kind of friendship again.

In her voice, the familiar sound—familiar to me—of a struck match. A match struck, held hissing to a short fuse.

ISN’T IT AWFUL, really, how days and dates disappear, how the bright routines that absorb our attention for so many hours of the living day fall away so easily over the years, obscure and confound memory’s precision.

who strove to parrot her husband—not as an act of fealty, not even of admiration or love, but as an attempt, I think, to appear masculine herself. Strong and wise. A kind of verbal cross-dressing. Talking down to other women in this husbandly way was just a part of it.

“There’s a real danger in the bestowing of gifts upon the hopeless only to inflate the ego of the one who does the bestowing.”

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

she replied silently; she ducked her head demurely but managed nevertheless to make the gesture seem as defiant as a raised gun.

A brief awareness of how the natural world might, in an instant, reduce you to a brief, trembling, and utterly inconsequential detail of its larger machinations.

I offered God everything. If there’s a spiritual equivalent to an eternal blow job, I offered it.”

But of course there’s no life without regretting.

I felt suddenly overwhelmed—with heartache, regret, nostalgia, who knows? Blindsided by it: lost time, lost childhood, lost years.

One thing we were certain of, looking to the future: we didn’t want our parents’ lives. And then we did.

I’m pretty sure my mother had the life she wanted—I’m pretty sure no one could have made her live otherwise.

It was like a piece of the new sunlight, golden pink as it was, had fallen on that casual phrase “before he was ours.”