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He was generous now in this way; death had given that to him.
And what Patty never forgot was the look of her mother’s eyes, they were wild; her mother could not stop herself from wailing, this is what Patty saw, her mother’s breasts and her mother’s eyes looking at her—yet unable to stop what was coming from her mouth.
“Patty, I swear to God you must never tell a soul, and when you’re older, you’ll understand.”
She and her sisters watched as their father wept. They watched as he swore, and became stony-faced.
Her own excitement caused her always terrible, and terrifying, shame.
Angelina’s green eyes swam with tears, and Patty reached across the table and touched her friend’s hand. Angelina held up a finger, and in a minute she was able to speak. “I just hate both of them,” she said, and Patty said she understood.
Listen to this! Lucy Barton’s mother was awful to her, and her father—oh dear God, her father…But Lucy loved them, she loved her mother, and her mother loved her!
We’re all just a mess, Angelina, trying as hard as we can, we love imperfectly, Angelina, but it’s okay.
Patty was aware of how much Angelina wanted to talk about herself,
This was the skin that protected you from the world—this loving of another person you shared your life with.
She remembered how she’d heard in the clothing store one day, as she’d left with Sebastian, the young clerk saying to another clerk, “It’s like she has a dog.”
Lucy wrote how people were always looking to feel superior to someone else,
The girl was not belligerent.
“He did. Because of things that had happened to him.”
“I’m sorry. But when someone’s nice to me— Oh God, it just kills me.”
“The Barton kids, Jesus, that poor boy, the oldest kid.”
Shoes always gave you away.
Karen-Lucie’s husband had thrown himself off the top of the Sheraton in Fort Lauderdale three years before.
Linda was jealous of Karen-Lucie Toth—she knew this, it was not a suppressed feeling—because Karen-Lucie was famous and childless and still pretty, and because she had no husband.
Linda would have liked her own husband, whose intelligence had once impressed her so, to simply disappear.
Ever since her daughter moved away, saying those awful things about her, Linda had slept away from her husband.
“Did you? Because of her slightly slutty, kind of working-class look?”
She did not watch with him again the view of Yvonne in the bedroom or the bathroom. She did not mention to him that Yvonne had reported her white pajamas missing.
and Linda sensed immediately how little confidence the woman really had.
Linda could see she was uncomfortable, and Linda was not sorry.
Jay had had his successes before, but Linda had never felt as complicit.
She listened intently, and fairly soon she heard Yvonne going downstairs and walking through the walkway to her room. The door to her husband’s room shut quietly, and Linda took her sleeping pill.
And the policeman said, “Mrs. Peterson, why don’t you go back upstairs now?”
Jay was shaking his head slowly as the policemen stood in the kitchen with their arms at their sides. “We thought she seemed odd from the very beginning, but I’m sure you understand I don’t care to discuss any more of this without speaking to my lawyer. I’m represented by Norm Atwood, and you know what he’ll say. This is outlandish, entirely ridiculous. I don’t imagine the county looks forward to a lawsuit from me.”
“She says I tried to rape her,”
Jay had been charged with third-degree battery and released on bond.
Norm explained that Jay had most likely been charged because Yvonne was in such a condition of hysteria, running down the road at three A.M. in underpants and a T-shirt, then knocking on a door in town, and that there was a small bruise on her wrist that could conceivably indicate a struggle.
Her daughter said, “Fuck you, Mom. Just fuck you both. I’m never coming home again.”
A few years earlier, her daughter had found something on her father’s computer, and the girl had screamed and screamed and screamed. Dad screws women right in the house, and you do nothing? You’re more pathetic than he is, Mom, you make me sick
It had started as a private game, a way of breaking domestic boredom, creating a Linda Peterson-Cornell that seemed daring, provocative, a person her husband appreciated more.
moved out and into a squalid little apartment, and it was the most terrible thing Linda could imagine, worse than if her mother had died.
reacted with fear as though her mother’s attempts at freedom might be contagious, terminal, along with the estrangement of her daughters,
so she opened the door cautiously and it was skinny Joy Gunterson, saying, “Linda, I just had to come over.” Linda said, “No you didn’t, no you did not. You have nothing in common with me, do you hear? You have nothing in common with me. Go away.” “Oh, Linda. But I do—” “I’m not going to end up living in some trailer, Joy.”
When the person you love more than anyone spends his days in a cell, then you’re in a cell too. It doesn’t matter where you are. You’ll find out who’re your real friends. They won’t be who you think. Trust me on that.”
Did you, or did you not, watch women with your husband while they undressed, showered, used the toilet? How long had you been aware that your husband was watching them this way?
Why should it matter when now nothing matters?
But your husband scared my friend, he scared her bad.
Don’t you go pissing down my back and then tell me it’s raining outside. You have to know somethin’ about your husband, and if Yvie takes this to trial, and I hope to hell she will, you’ll be called to testify, and it is your duty
“I am in no position to tell anyone how they ought to be cognizant and aware of what their husband is up to. I have thrown stones in a glass house, and I am sorry.”
that Yvonne Tuttle and Karen-Lucie would never return to town, there would be no trial, no mention of cameras, and Linda would live with her husband in a state of freedom, because he would always know,
a photograph of Karen-Lucie’s cracked plates on the wall.
as though Karen-Lucie were the Pretty Nicely Girl who had suffered the blow from behind, who had come home from school and found her mother gone, thinking she had been important, loved all along.
another rat to hump, making a nest in broken bricks,
The very stuff that would make him roll his eyes now—her utter foolishness, the useless, nauseating softness that lay at the center of her—had thrilled him quietly that day with a rush of love
But there was suddenly a refreshing simplicity that seemed to move into the room, an unexpected and huge relief, a straightening out of—things
