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an unmistakable demeanor of someone who was not average and never would be.
Elizabeth Zott held grudges too. Except her grudges were mainly reserved for a patriarchal society founded on the idea that women were less. Less capable. Less intelligent. Less inventive. A society that believed men went to work and did important things—discovered planets, developed products, created laws—and women stayed at home and raised children.
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faced tough things before. She would weather what came. But weathering is called weathering for a reason: it erodes. As the months went by, her fortitude was tested again and again.
Thus the topic of family was like a cordoned-off room on a historic home tour.
It’s one thing to be brilliant, but to be brilliant without opportunity—that was something else. If Mozart had been born to a poor family in Bombay instead of a cultured one in Salzburg, would he have composed Symphony no. 36 in C? Not a chance.
They lay together like felled trees.
Physical suffering, he’d long ago learned, bonds people in a way that everyday life can’t.
he hypothesized such proximity could revise her perception of marriage. This theory even had a scientific name: associative interference.
“Oh. I’m a rower. Trying to be.” “Are you any good?” “No.” “Then why are you doing it?” “I’m not sure.” He shook his head. “Boy, do I get that.”
What a mess devotion was.
And there they were in the thick of it, the only living dead things.
“Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun,” a quote from Marcus Aurelius,
“No one’s fine with a newborn, Miss Zott. The little gremlin will suck the life right out of you.
que será, será approach to parenting.
“It’s classic neurogenic deprivation,” Elizabeth said, nodding. “The brain doesn’t get the rest it needs, resulting in a drop in executive function and accompanied by an increase in corticosterone levels. Fascinating. But what does this have to do with TV?”
Harriet had produced four children, each one completely different from the others and wholly different from herself. And now? They were all strangers, each living in a far-off city with lives and children of their own. She wanted to think there was some iron-clad bond that connected her to them for life, but that’s not how it worked. Families required constant maintenance.
