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“Stop,” Lucy said, raising her hand, palm outward. “We get it.”
you’d have to kneel, and pick out whatever food you’d thrown away, and eat it right from the garbage, and you’d be crying—
Look, I’m just saying I can understand why you guys wouldn’t want to eat. I just don’t understand why I do.”
“Her grades are good and her guidance counselor says she can get her into college with expenses paid. Just like you did, Lucy.”
“Sure. And then she’ll just go away like you did.”
“Because she has a different mother, Vicky. That’s why she won’t. Thank you, Lucy.”
No one’s going to cut your clothes up this time.”
“Don’t you remember how one day you were here crying and Mommy came home and cut up your clothes?”
When Daddy wasn’t walking around twanging his wang, they’d be doing it right up there—”
I never heard any man make the sounds he made during sex.”
It was not that bad.” Her voice rose. “No, I mean it.”
“It was exactly that bad, Lucy.”
But, Pete, that was sad. She’s so small, and she’s— You see her online and—”
“She’s not coo-coo, Pete. She just couldn’t stand being back here. It was too hard for her.”
that a complaining woman was like pushing dirt beneath the fingernails of God, and this was an image Dottie had never been able to fully dislodge.
people absorb first and learn later,
The woman forgave everybody.
She came to understand that people had to decide, really, how they were going to live.
‘Of course she didn’t call you back, Shelly. Annie thought you were pathetic! She thought you were an idiot!’ ”
“The age difference. Here’s what I have learned about the age difference. People think girls like older men because they want a father. Classic theory. But girls want older men so they can boss them around. They’re wearing the pants, I can tell you that. She was nothing but a whore.”
“That’s where Annie recoiled from me and said she hated this huge new house. She said, ‘This house is Shelly’s penis.’ That’s what she said.”
After all, the point of the woman’s story was that Annie had humiliated her. Humiliation is not to be laughed at; Dottie knew that well.
nobody ever talked about in this country, because it wasn’t polite, but Dottie also thought people didn’t talk about class because they didn’t really understand what it was.
That she and her brother, Abel, were the American Dream, and that the rest who still ate from dumpsters deserved to do so?
And so he left. They always did leave.
Charlie Macauley was his name. Charlie Macauley of the unspeakable pain.
“After a man eats, he becomes shy.”
having satisfied her needs, she was ashamed. She had confided more than she had wanted to, and now Dottie was somehow to blame.
Shelly Small as a woman who suffered only from the most common complaint of all: Life had simply not been what she thought it would be.
No, they came to her when she reported the assault upon her vanity.
Shelly had a husband who would break into song at the breakfast table with her in a room with strangers sitting nearby, and that was no—excuse me, Dottie thought—small thing.
To listen to a person is not passive. To really listen is active, and Dottie had really listened.
In the kitchen—and while it was a terribly conventional form of revenge—she spit in the jam and mixed it up and spit again, as much as she could gather in her mouth, and took some pleasure in seeing the jam bowl empty by the time the Smalls left.
most likely since the beginning of time.
And what she heard was Shelly Small making fun of Dottie in terms Dottie found outrageous.
Dottie’s body parts ostensibly not having been made use of in quite some time, and Dr. Small, not surprisingly, was quite graphic during his part of the discussion and they had a very merry time doing this, as though Dottie was a clown on stage tripping over shoes too large; their humor was like that.
who love each other.
she heard sounds from the man that made her think how some women thought of men as pigs.
Instead she heard the sounds of a woman who would do anything to make herself feel superior to an old lady who was, as Shelly had put it only minutes earlier, so puritanical as to object to almost anything.
Shelly got into the shower promptly after, and to Dottie this was always the sign of a woman who had not enjoyed her man.
Dottie felt a deep sense of revulsion—she had been used.
“I am not a prostitute, Dr. Small. That is not my profession, you see.”
“Precisely what I said is what I mean. I offer guests a bed, and I offer them breakfast. I do not offer them counsel from lives they find unendurable.”
“Or from marriages that are living deaths, from disappointments suffered at the hands of poor friends who regard their houses as a penis. This is not what I do.”
“You shouldn’t be dealing with the public, good Christ.”
“I’m surprised no one’s reported you, though I suspect they have. I’ll go online myself, by God.”
Nor would Dr. Small, who most likely could barely use the Internet; his materials, she remembered, had been in a binder his first morning at the breakfast table.
she did not say “Fly safely,” because she did not care if they flew right into the sea,
“What a goddamn whackjob, Jesus Christ,” and then Dottie felt the wonderful calmness come to her again. She said politely, “Goodbye now,” and closed the door behind them.
in fact, when Annie and Charlene took a bath he often came in to wash them with a washcloth. Annie’s own father thought bodies were private and had recently become red-faced and yelled—yelled hard!—because Cindy had not wrapped her sanitary pad adequately with toilet paper before putting it in the garbage.
