Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

But Antoinette had done all the work, after all, and already the heat she’d felt for her husband was half diverted into her son.

[Grief is for the strong, who use it as fuel for burning.]

Also the fact that he’s a guy. A girl screws around like Lotto and she’s, like, diseased. Untouchable. But a guy can stick it a million places and everyone just thinks he’s doing what boys do.”

Hurricanes of entitlement, all swirl and noise and destruction, nothing at their centers.

Holy Communion of scuttlebutt.

“What’s it like?” Natalie said quietly. “Marriage, I mean.” Lotto said, “A never-ending banquet, and you eat and eat and never get full.” Mathilde said, “Kipling called it a very long conversation.” Lotto looked at his wife, touched her cheek. “Yes,” he said.

Up there rose the ghosts of parties, of themselves when they were younger, too dumb to understand that they were ecstatic.

The warrior went next: marginalized voices, voices of color, voices traditionally repressed will be heard as loudly as anyone’s, drowning out the voices of the boring old white men of the patriarchy.

Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you’d crush them to paste.

Paradox of marriage: you can never know someone entirely; you do know someone entirely.

Even then, she knew that there is no such thing as sure. There is no absolute anything. The gods love to fuck with us.

Somehow, despite her politics and smarts, she had become a wife, and wives, as we all know, are invisible. The midnight elves of marriage.

She’d survived on wine and sugar for months because, fuck it, she never really got a childhood, and what was grief but an extended tantrum to be salved by sex and candy?

[Grief is pain internalized, abscess of the soul. Anger is pain as energy, sudden explosion.]

Animal magnetism is real; it spreads through bodily convection.

“We have all had stupid youths,” said Mathilde. “I find them delicious.”

Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.

Unplug from the humble needs of the body and a person becomes no more than a ghost.

Mathilde said, sotto voce, “One more word about Pilates, I’ll pop.” The woman laughed silently, and said, “We’re all doing planks while the great American ship goes down.”

“I AM NOTHING,” Alice said, after Gertrude died, “but a memory of her.”

think I’m dying,” he whispered. “You’re severely hungover. And we’re born dying,”

wondered at the kind of anger that would crumple your heart up so hard that you could watch a child struggle and fail and weep for so long, without moving to help. Mothers, Mathilde had always known, were people who abandoned you to struggle alone.

Sex as rebellion against the way things should be. [Sounds familiar? It is. No story on earth more common.]

In they’d come, integers; out they came, squared.