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The room smelled like old pipes, concrete, unwashed linens, and rape.
Men spend most of their lives being passed from woman to woman and being pressed into service for them. You cannot imagine the life I have saved you from!
“Later, you know, my wife accused me of being a vampire, just like you,” Manx said. “She said I was like the fiend in that first movie we saw together, the German picture. She said I was draining the life out of our two daughters, feeding off them. But here it is, so many years later, and my daughters are still going strong, happy and young and full of fun! If I were trying to drain the life out of them, I guess I did a poor job of it. For a few years there, my wife made me so unhappy I was about ready to kill her and me and the children, too, just to be done with it. But now I can look back
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“Oh, she’s been all kinds of busy,” Vic said. “Most recently she’s been helping Bing redecorate his basement. I felt like it needed some color down there, so I painted the walls with the motherfucker.”
If you’re going to be mad, she heard her father say, then use it, and don’t be used by it.
The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.
Manx doesn’t have happiness anymore. Only amusement. It’s an idea of endless fun, endless youth, dressed up in a form his dumb little mind can understand. His vehicle is the instrument that opens the way. S-s-suffering and unhappiness provide the energy to run the car and open his p-passage to that puh-p-place. This is also why he has to take the kids with him. The car needs something he no longer has. He drains unhappiness from the children just like a B-movie v-v-vampire sucking blood.”
Innocence ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. Innocent little kids rip the wings off flies, because they don’t know any better. That’s innocence.
When the car fell apart, he fell apart. At some point someone probably yanked the engine right out of it, and he dropped dead at last. But then the engine was put back and the car was fixed up, and there you go. As long as the car is roadworthy, so is he.”
You know, I can just tell you went to six years of college and majored in neuroscience or something, because only a truly gifted mind could talk himself into such utter horseshit. It’s dark out, you autistic fuck.”
Men, she thought, were one of the world’s few sure comforts, like a fire on a cold October night, like cocoa, like broken-in slippers. Their clumsy affections, their bristly faces, and their willingness to do what needed to be done—cook an omelet, change lightbulbs, make with hugging—sometimes almost made being a woman fun.
It sounded like delusion until you remembered that people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.
Her son squeezed her tighter. Her kidney twanged again. He was squeezing the life out of her, and it felt good.
Lou crushed a ceramic Christmas tree and a china plum sprinkled with gold glitter and several tin snowflakes. He began to sweat and removed his flannel coat. “Lou,” Tabitha said again, standing at the top of the embankment. “Why are you doing this?” “Because one of these is his,” Lou said, and nodded at Wayne. “Vic brought most of him back, but I want the rest.”
Wayne had an idea—a desperate, awful idea—that it was his mother. The children had all come back from something like death, and perhaps it was her turn.
