The Cliffs

by J. Courtney Sullivan

Paul would accuse her of being dramatic, but when you thought about it, a house was a foreign object, invasive to its surroundings. Nature would keep trying to assert its dominance, to force its way in.

There was no more effective way to shut down criticism than I did my best. What could a person ever say in response?

“Jane, have you ever noticed that it’s always women who believe in the unseen? Men might believe in God, maybe even heaven, but they’re not willing to believe in ghosts. Life after life. I think it’s because they have no concept of life before life, how it feels to imagine a person and then bring that person into existence.”

There were many ways to define what it meant to be an alcoholic, but for Jane it was when drinking changed your personality. When it made you mean.

Sometimes the tragedies of a person’s life didn’t happen neatly, single file, one at a time, but all at once, so that it was impossible to know how you felt about any part of the whole.

History could only ever be as meaningful as those alive were willing to make it.

None of it felt within her control as it happened, but when shaped into a narrative, her life became manageable, as if she had planned it exactly that way.

The definition of a lifetime, as she saw it, was when the people most important to you wouldn’t recognize the ones who previously filled their roles.

There was an old story about Hans Hofmann praising something Lee Krasner had made as “so good you would not know that it was done by a woman.” And Krasner was hardly ever mentioned without the detail about being Jackson Pollock’s wife. Even though she taught him. Women carried knowledge of that sort of thing around, whether they wanted to admit it or not. It changed the way many of them worked.

Marilyn was ecstatic to learn that mother love was every bit as intense as the love she had known before, but more beautiful. Steadying. Love that didn’t unsettle her, but instead made her comfortable in her skin, and in the world.

To be young and fortunate was to believe in your own greatness. Not to understand the importance of the slog, the toil. The work of the work.

Sometimes, watching him, so capable, so strong, she felt like she was falling back in love, and maybe this was what marriage was supposed to be. Pulling apart, coming back together.

She vowed to nurture these parts of Daisy. She never once called her pretty without also reminding her that she was smart or creative or kind.

Her mother once told her and Holly that if you couldn’t think of something nice to say, you could always just state a fact with enthusiasm, and it would be received as a compliment.

You have to hand it to men, they’ve managed to convince us that the things that make women powerful are weaknesses. Motherhood is the most radical act in the world, and we’ve turned it into tapioca pudding. What’s more toothless, more invisible in this culture, than a mother?”

She supposed that for an atheist like her it was easier to imagine an afterlife that had nothing to do with God. Just humans, continuing to be something like themselves.

The greatest heartbreak I have ever known was leaving my sister behind.

I never had an image in mind for how life ought to look. I believe that to be the most freeing fact of my existence.

In every graveyard in every town in all the world, there lie buried stories more remarkable and strange than a name, a date, a designation on stone could ever in a million years convey.

The silver lining of being a total fuck-up was that you could sometimes find the grace to give others a pass for their failings. Or if not a pass, at least some understanding.