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She is submitting her area to all kinds of invasion without understanding a fraction of what’s being done to it.
“Angry sea,” people say, but to the biographer the ascribing of human feeling to a body so inhumanly itself is wrong.
The water heaves up for reasons they don’t have names for.
She starts class by following her daily plan, but when she sees chins mashing into fists, she decides to abandon it. Tenth-grade global history, the world in forty weeks, with a foolish textbook she is contractually obliged to use, can’t be stood without detours. These kids, after all, have not been lost yet. Staring up at her, jaws rimmed with baby fat, they are perched on the brink of not giving a shit. They still give a shit, but not, most of them, for long.
They like this. They like slogans.
pears. If she could live off the land alone, without person-made things, she would. She hasn’t figured out how yet, but that doesn’t mean she won’t.
They laid their town in a valley that had been fished, harvested, and winter-camped for centuries by the Kalapuya people, who, in the 1850s, were forced onto reservations by the U.S. government. In the stolen valley the whites huddled and crouched, made everything smaller. Downtown Salem
The daughter’s father, though annoying, loves her more than all the world’s gold.
they must scrub their essay drafts clean of the phrase History tells us. “A stale rhetorical tic. Means nothing.” “But it does,” says Mattie. “History is telling us not to repeat its mistakes.” “We might reach that conclusion from studying the past, but history is a concept; it isn’t talking to us.”
“This room is where my joy dies,”
Will you be bringing a date to your friends’ dinner?” “Nope,” says the biographer, steeling herself for his next sentence, her face stiff with sadness that he can’t help himself. “About time you found someone, don’t you think?” “I’m fine, Dad.” “Well, I worry, kiddo. Don’t like the idea of you being all alone.” She could trot out the usual list (“I’ve got friends, neighbors, colleagues, people from meditation group”), but her okayness with being by herself—ordinary, unheroic okayness—does not need to justify itself to her father. The feeling is hers. She can simply feel okay and not explain
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Her body stayed in the room, but her brain didn’t.
Magic was of two kinds: natural and artificial. Natural magic was no more than a precise knowledge of the secrets of nature.
“Well done!” and it was the first time in her life the mender could remember being praised for doing something instead of for not doing it.
She’s one of those people who think they will understand something if they hear its name, when really they will only hear its name.
And at this point, what else can she do? You could stop trying so hard. You could love your life as it is.
“The comparing mind is a despairing mind,
“Laws aren’t natural phenomena. They have particular and often horrific histories. Ever heard of the Nuremberg Laws? Ever heard of Jim Crow?”
Shower-bunned blond hair. Drapey scarf to hide stomach. Black yoga pants. Mom clogs.
Having lost all of its government funding, because the current administration won’t sanction the liberal bias of baking shows and mountaineering documentaries, PBS now airs long blocks of advertising.
He’s told her many times that a whale can be killed by the pressure of its own flesh. Out of water, the animal’s bulk is too heavy for its rib cage—the ribs break; the internal organs are crushed.
A whale is a house in the ocean. A womb for a person.
“Have you ever considered, people, how much time has been stolen from the lives of girls and women due to agonizing over their appearance?” A few faces smile, uneasy. Even louder: “How many minutes, hours, months, even actual years, of their lives do girls and women waste in agonizing? And how many billions of dollars of corporate profit are made as a result?”
or forgot about it promptly after hearing it, because the law did not apply to her.
The lawyer wears a suit, like last time. As if to make himself more real. As if, in a suit, he will appear forceful and real and not the plump weird trembler he is. Among humans, the mender prefers the weird and the trembling, so she likes him.
Book-smart and life-dumb
The significance of Eivør Mínervudottír’s research was Mínervudottír was important because Was she important? From the Latin: to be of consequence; weigh. To carry in, to bring in.
The wife has been letting the house “go.” And letting herself “go.” We’ll go if you let us. Wife and house run away together, hand in door.
“How come nobody’s allowed to criticize a woman’s decision to give up her name for a man’s name? Just because it’s her choice? I can think of some other bad choices that—”
“Shut up, please,” said the wife, and that was the beginning of the end of her friendship with Ro.
“Am I fat?” “No!” Voice wobbly: “I weigh eight pounds more than Shell.” “Oh, sweetpea.” She kneels down on the kitchen floor, gathering Bex into her lap. “You’re exactly the right size for you. Who cares how much Shell weighs? You’re beautiful and perfect just the way you are.” The wife fails, as a parent, on so many fronts. “You’re my perfect darling gorgeous girl.” But she will do this one thing right.
A witch who says no to her lover and no to the law must be suffocated in a cell of the hive. She who says no to her lover and no to the law shall bleed salt from the face. Two eyes of salt in the face of a witch who says no to her lover and no to the law shall be seen by policemen who come to the cabin.
On the beach the wind drives hair into her eyes. She hurls a sneaker at a low-flying gull. Curses her aim. Retrieves her shoe. Jumps on an old log. The beach is a good place for rage: the sky and sea can take it. Her screams are absorbed by the booming waves, the heaped fields of oyster cloud. Because this is Oregon in January, nobody human is around to hear.
“What if she didn’t do what they said she did? What if—” “More rice, Mattie?” “It’s like you’re accepting whatever the news says. You weren’t even at the trial.”
“Tons of injustices happen in broad daylight,” adds the daughter, “when ordinary citizens are aware but do nothing.” “For instance,” says Dad. “The bystander effect. Nobody helping a crime victim when other people are around because everyone thinks someone else is going to do it.”
“You—” The lawyer smiles. “Not you.” “Why?” “You are so much your own person, Gin. And some people on the jury may feel… unnerved by that? People tend to be more comfortable with speech and behavior that does what they already expect it to do.
“I just can’t,” rasps the girl. “I’m sorry.” Horror thuds in the biographer’s chest: she has made her apologize for something that needs no apology.
(WHY ARE PIRATES SUCH GOOD SINGERS? THEY CAN HIT THE HIGH CS!)
There are millions of things the biographer will never do that she doesn’t pity herself for missing. (Climbing a mountain, cracking a code, attending her own wedding.) So why this thing?
By walking, she tells her students, is how you make the road.
She wants to stretch her mind wider than “to have one.” Wider than “not to have one.” To quit shrinking life to a checked box, a calendar square. To quit shaking her head. To go to the protest in May. To do more than go to a protest. To be okay with not knowing. Keep your legs, Stephens. To see what is. And to see what is possible.
