Karen Memory (Karen Memory, #1)

by Elizabeth Bear

I didn’t feel hungry, but food would likely be wise. Eat when you can, my father used to say. You never know when can will turn to can’t.

this novel’s establishing itself as full of charm and wide-eyed *knowing*, if that makes any sense. I’m really enjoying how *real* this narrator is.

Her hands were medium sized, too, and clever-quick as anything.

I picked my coffee up, too, because talking goes easier if the other person sees you doing what they’re doing.

Amazing what people can fail to see when it’s a man doing it to a woman, even a respectable-looking woman.

I chewed up, for a moment, how unfair it was, too—that Priya’s life could be decided by people she’d only just met. But that was everybody’s lot, I supposed. Or at least every woman’s.

My da would of said that a good master keeps his authority in part by not asking for the impossible except when he really has to. If he does that, then his horse won’t realize it’s impossible when he asks for it.

But wasn’t that part of a whore’s job? Being the sort of ear that lonely men could turn to? I wondered who lonely women paid to listen. As with so much, it seemed as if the world had a solution for the one but not the other.

Harriet Tubman?

They don’t care who a woman is, or what she’s scared of, or who she wants to become. They think they want a woman, but what they really want is a flattering looking glass wearing lipstick and telling them what they want to hear.

Ha!

I liked her scowl and I liked her freedom to wear it.

“A woman in the West? You show me one who doesn’t drink, and I’ll show you one that wants to.”

“So you do something for me someday,” I answered. “Friends don’t keep score.” Because friends don’t have to keep score, my da would of said. Friends just pitch in as needed, as they can.

She just stood there, canisters of flour and meal on the counter all behind her, hugging that quilt like a cat with only one kitten. I was afraid she was going to cry, and I was afraid I was going to beat her there.

This book’s so prettily written!

I wish now I’d been more mindful of my gratitude. Connie had a way of doing such—putting herself out to make things a little easier for all while being so quiet about it you never think to stop and appreciate the kindness.

Friends do things for each other. So were we friends, or was I courting her? Did they have to be exclusionary? How did I find out which she wanted it to be? It bothered me for a whole half a second before I realized that if I was only being her friend because I wanted to get into her bloomers then I was a pretty lousy friend and a pretty lousy romantic prospect.

God dammit Karen Memery is the BEST character ever.

My da wouldn’t of approved of that name—Adobe. He’d say you couldn’t yell it well enough, and every horse, dog, and child should have a name you could holler clearly through a hurricane.

I’ve never heard this word used before.

Being a growed woman, it turned out, was harder work than it looked. But that’s a thing, too, ain’t it? Them as work hardest get no respect for it—women, ranch hands, sharecroppers, factory help, domestics—and them as spend all their time talking about how hard they work have no idea what an honest day’s labor for nary enough pay to put beans in your family’s bellies is all about.

So many pretty turns of phrase!

Another new word for a thing I know exists.

I might be a little afraid—not of Bantle, but of the crazy stupid shit a man like Bantle will do. Normal people, they’re lazy. They want to protect what they got and they won’t risk it. Peter ain’t like that, Karen honey. He’ll risk all sorts of things just for a little power, or the chance to make somebody hurt.”

Maybe I’d let myself feel safe. Maybe wanting to feel safe was a mistake.

Priya wanted to go around the back after the show and see the elephants. She said she’d heard sometimes you could ride on them or feed them peanuts. I didn’t feel the need to make the acquaintance of an elephant, but I was happy to go wherever Priya led. She could look at elephants and I could look at her, and we would both be happy.

Eavesdropping’s a sin, but ignorance is fatal. Take your pick.

You ever hear somebody blithely say something so amazingly plastered over with bullshit it just makes your eyes bug?

this French book translated from the Arabic that I’d been struggling through. I liked it a lot, when I could make head or tail of it. It was about a woman who’s married unwilling to a sultan who murders each of his brides after consummating to stave off getting an heir, but she keeps him at bay every night by outwitting him, and telling him stories he can’t bear not to know the end of, so he keeps letting her live another day.

I wished I could offer her tea. You don’t think about it, but all those little fusses we make over company have their purposes. They give us something to do with our hands and our anxiousness until everybody settles in and starts having fun. It’s probably why the men who come into Madame’s spend so much money at the bar. Even though they gotta know—the savvy ones, anyway—that we girls is drinking soda water or cold tea. But it gives everybody something to do with their hands.

funny how I was just thinking that I’d forgot about that even after being taught it when I was younger and when Dwight yelled it on The Office.

Don’t get me wrong. I knowed I had courage. But until that moment, I didn’t know I had the courage to run through a fire. We surprise ourselves all our lives, Miss Bethel would say. That is, if our lives is gonna be worth living.

Crispin put his finger on my lips. I pushed it away. Or tried to: I missed. But he moved it back a fraction. That’s what I like about Crispin. Well, one thing out of many. He leaves it to you to judge what you is and ain’t capable of. Most men seem to like to decide that for a girl.

She had years and miles on Dyer Stone, and brains to boot. But he had a prick, and inherited money, and a prick. I guess that gave him the right to lord it over her.

I was so caught up in thinking about what might happen when I got to Heaven that I forgot to die on the way down at all.

this door opened in silent as a jaw gaping. And weren’t that an unsettling image?

Anybody who believes in stoic Indians or inscrutable Orientals never saw those two grinning at each other like a couple of rattlesnakes over a nest of baby bunnies.

It’s comforting when God lets you get away with something once in a while. And a little unnerving. You start to wonder what he’s got set up for you next and why he’s softening you up, like.

I blinked at him, dumbfounded. I’d always thought that was just a word, but it turns out to be a real thing and now I can say it’s happened to me.

Priya had quit shivering, but I was trembling like a marriage license in a young man’s hand.

Some would say a whore don’t have no expectation of Heaven. I’d say, if she gives value for cash, she’s got a better shot at God’s blessing than your average banker. Jesus loved Mary Magdalene. He kicked over tables when He met a moneylender.

Is there nothing so awful that men won’t use it to try to show off to girls?

And then I had my greatest stroke of genius since that ham sandwich with pickles that time.

Butter wouldn’t have melted in my smile, I swear.