More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
We women would have to go to work. Our children, even our infants and newborns, dropped off every morning at some massive brick or concrete government institution. Our aging parents and grandparents sent off as well to desolate warehouses— no sweet Babkas squeezed in among your loving family, your daily life—all so that we would be free to take up our duties in office buildings or factories or construction sites. (We’d seen the photographs of stout and solemn-faced Soviet women in babushkas sweeping Moscow streets.)
Been a very long time since I read a passage in a book where I stopped and thought to myself, oh, now THAT is clever. This passage, where Tricia and her college friend Stella imagine the awful world that will come to be should communism win, made put my Kindle so I could fully appreciate what I had just read. Interesting that everything these characters feared is now just modern American life, even with the fall of the Soviet Union.
“I’m sick to death of hearing how the issue is complicated.” Bold. Brazen. “The issue is actually quite simple: there has to be a break with the past, there has to be retribution.” The candlelight might have caught, or caused, the tears that were suddenly standing in her eyes. “Nothing breaks without violence, Aunt Lorraine. There’s no retribution without blood.” Her eyes shifted toward me. Shifted back. “This is exactly why we’re going to Birmingham.”
I was beginning to suspect that Marilee was the kind of woman, numerous in those days, 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.
Then he asked her, switching to slow French that was charmingly distorted by his drawl, if she’d ever seen versions of his poems in another language? Chinese, perhaps? She shook her head. She said, in English, that there were too many different words, in English and Vietnamese. Too many words that cannot be translated. She held out her palm, made a wall with the other, a chopping motion to indicate that there were some barriers words could not cross.
His voice was different now, less collegial, courteous. An edge of facetiousness, or, I don’t know, contempt. Maybe with Wally gone—his only peer—he felt free to show his disdain for us women. I admit I’d seen other professional men, in more pleasant social settings, adopt the same tone when they found themselves alone among women, merely women.
We were having scrambled eggs in our own kitchen after the cocktail party. Moments before, Douglas had been disgruntled, as whiny as a child, much as he always was after cocktail parties where he hadn’t eaten enough to call it dinner but had eaten too much to want a real dinner once he got home. In all the years of your own long marriage, in all your years of “getting things done” at cocktail parties and garden parties, I bet you went through this, too. Doug complained when I offered to throw some steaks on the grill—it was too late, he’d be up all night with acid reflux—and complained again
...more
It occurred to me that evening that my love for my mother had been wholly physical: the familiar quick fingers, the green eyes, the rough texture of her hair, the curve of muscle in her calf, and, yes, the high instep of her small feet—those were the images that came to mind when I argued that I loved her. Had loved her. That: the physicalness of her, the familiarity of her sharp-boned embrace. That body of hers was what I mourned for. Still mourn for now.
