Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

You see, once you start observing the night sky, you begin to orient yourself in time and space.

So it came as a huge shock to the men in the department, many of whom fancied themselves secretly destined for victory, to see that the woman they’d overlooked was lapping them in a race they did not know had started.

But I want to go somewhere so few people have ever gone that you could name them all—and when people do name them, I want them to name me.”

my mom said that if I was going to be proud of myself for being generous, that I had to do it even when it meant I might lose something. She said, ‘You have to have something on the line, for it to be called character.’ ”

She was happy, in some ways, to know that her body would decompose. That she would give back to the Earth all she had taken from it.

Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but strong enough to do it anyway.”

“Barbara is…very delicate. If you so much as look at her the wrong way, she might just say the worst things you can think of. And mean each and every one of them. We all just tiptoe around her. We always have. I am not…I am not honest with her. Maybe ever. I don’t even know what that would look like. And I hate it about myself.”

Because the world had decided that to be soft was to be weak, even though in Joan’s experience being soft and flexible was always more durable than being hard and brittle. Admitting you were afraid always took more guts than pretending you weren’t. Being willing to make a mistake got you further than never trying. The world had decided that to be fallible was weak. But we are all fallible. The strong ones are the ones who accept it.

Barbara often accused Joan of thinking things, claiming that Joan didn’t even have to speak, because of how clear her disdain was from her body language. And the fact was that yes, sometimes Joan worried that Barbara was careless. Sometimes Joan was concerned about Barbara’s inability to consider other people, to think things through from any perspective other than her own.

“It’s 1981, and I’m done pretending sexist jokes are funny just so men will give me a chance at something I’m probably better at than they are.”

Vanessa didn’t quite understand either side of it—the betrayal of someone or the forgiveness possible. But Steve had said that over time, she would understand both. Once she’d loved someone long enough, she’d understand that anything is possible, that she was capable of worse and greater acts than she knew.

Joan knew that she would not need to find a way to tell Vanessa how she felt. Vanessa would understand it. Which meant Joan would not need to learn how to be anything other than who she already was.

“Because I do not believe there is any original sin in any of us and I cannot sit there and listen to someone say there is. I don’t want to believe in any being who would judge and punish like that. And I’ll pay the price if I’m wrong and God does exist. Because I will not submit to a God like that willingly.”

“Because there are so many ways to define God and there’s still so much unknown about the universe. I could never say that science has obliterated the possibility of God.

“When you die, someone will bury you or turn your body into ashes. Eventually, you will return to the Earth. You already are a part of the Earth. What better reason do we have to take care of this Earth and everything on it than the knowledge that we are of one another?”

But to love Frances was to be always saying goodbye to the girl Frances used to be and falling in love again with the girl Frances was becoming.

I had one grandmother I never saw and one who, when she died, I cried for three days. The word isn’t what matters. It’s the specific relationship.

How was it that two people, right next to each other, given the rarest of perspectives, could draw two totally opposite conclusions?

Joan marveled at how easy Barbara’s inner life must be. How entirely undemanding of yourself it was to believe that everything happened to you. And everything was about you. And that your feelings were the only ones that mattered. Worse yet, to afford yourself the role of the victim always—regardless of how grotesquely it required you to twist reality—so that you never had to look in the mirror and admit you were the perpetrator.