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I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from other men. —George Bernard Shaw
we all need to knock hard, because life is deaf.’
Bo’s journey had been a tempestuous one, and oddly, Molly quietly envied her. In fact, she rather envied all those Bo-like people out there—which, she was beginning to fear, was most of humanity except her. People who heaved themselves into life, damn the consequences, and then simply shook off the damage with world-weary pluck.
“Please don’t say that,” she fretted. “Don’t count on me. It’s unwise.”
It had gotten too taxing to describe his coworker as “Bob Roman, who is as dumb as a bag of hammers,” so years ago, Davis had simply started referring to him as “the bag of hammers.” It was just easier.
Karma was merely the demonstrable truism that bad shit happened to everyone if you waited around long enough.
when Molly saw all the gratitude on her sister-in-law’s face, it struck her as madly unfair that there was such a thing as marital infidelity, that we built institutions in which so much hurt was possible, and that a night of pancakes and wine couldn’t fix everything.
if you’re ready to move on, move on. There’s no reason to spend these short lives of ours in unfulfilling relationships. You’re beautiful and interesting. Don’t you want to fall in love and get married?” “Of course not,” Molly said, as though the answer were obvious. “I want to be in love and be married.”
“When you’re in a canoe, you always float downriver. Nothing can change your direction. Something could come along and capsize your boat—rapids, a storm, a fallen tree—but there’s no force in the world strong enough to reverse your course. If you’re on that river, you’re going down that river. I feel like my marriage changed directions on me. It decided to swim upstream. And that feels even more unnatural than if the whole mess just sank altogether.
“Well, I didn’t go to Stanford or anything, but if all rules have exceptions, maybe there just aren’t any rules.” A dark laugh came from the old man. “I’ve had that thought more than once in my life.”
Then, a day or two later, some of the people with whom she’d shared the earth would put her in the ground.
He was always shepherding his kids off to amusement parks to bask in the counterfeit dangers and the controlled out-of-control, for it was there, among those trains, swings, pendulums, and drop towers, where the free fall was a ruse and the landings were always safe, that he could let his hair be windblown and delirious.
If everything about adulthood was predestined—right down to a taste for bland vegetables and rancor toward government—maybe the fraying of your family was just another rite of passage.
How could he convince her that a mistake, even a spectacularly hurtful one, was not necessarily cause to reevaluate everything you thought you knew about the maker of that mistake? Mistake making had to be as deeply encoded in our DNA as everything else, like color vision or bipedalism. If there was an evolutionary purpose behind blushing or carsickness or the hair on our ass, surely the tendency to fuck up was something evolution left in the batter for a reason. He offered this not as an excuse, but as a way forward. If his crimes bled of humanity, were they not, after all the pain and anger,
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Right there in that greasy spoon, Davis became achingly conscious of the volatility of time. It spun everyone around, holding all of humanity together with great centrifugal motion, until the wear of the tracks and the rust of the bolts flung everyone wildly away from each other into outer spaces.
Sometimes we choose our issues, Ms. Winger, but mostly they choose us.”
To Davis it seemed like yesterday that three-year-old Rachel had crouched behind that very tree while playing hide-and-seek. How appropriate that we began childhood thirsting for this game. It prepared us for a life lived in search of things we knew were out there but couldn’t quite see, hiding from things we knew would eventually find us.
“The best and the worst things in life are sudden, Ms. Winger. Everything else takes too damn long,”
Maybe there was no pride to swallow, after all. Maybe the greatest harm in stepping up and accepting responsibility for one’s mistakes was admitting to the world that you were capable of them.
It’s because we’re conditioned as a society to believe that women don’t leave. It’s sort of an article of faith, isn’t it? Mommies don’t walk out on their babies, and if they do, there must be something wrong with them. A strain of madness, and if not madness, then something deeply broken. But a unique type of brokenness, one that the abandoned child, despite everything, refuses to accept is unfixable. A deserted daughter doesn’t just say, ‘Mom left, screw the bitch,’ as they might about a father. It’s something they must make sense of, and it seems to me they never stop trying.”
And once again, Molly marveled at the vast, limitless ways in which the extroverts failed to grasp the introverts, how the fighters would never understand the fleers.
I realized that if you want to be the bigger person, all you have to do is act like the bigger person. You don’t have to actually be that person. People make it so hard. They wage war on themselves, they have these little battles in their head. But it really is easy. You just fucking act the part.
So much of life was holding on to the people and the things that rooted you in the world, so that you didn’t have to wake up each day and start anew.
For a long time now Molly had suspected that they were wasting each other’s time, and if you’re not sure whether or not you’re wasting time, then you probably are.
“My nephew slept over recently. He’s three. In the morning I asked him if he wanted french toast for breakfast, and the kid goes, ‘It’s scary.’ I wanted to tell him that that wasn’t an appropriate answer to my question. Nobody is scared of french toast. But the therapist in me recognized that there’s no emotion that isn’t valid. You want to be afraid of breakfast? Knock yourself out.” Molly stared down the oncoming traffic. She took Skyler’s point. It was okay to fear anything, even french toast. As long as you ate it anyway.
“I should read it, shouldn’t I? I should read some Twain before I die.” “You should do that very thing,” the man said. “Because who knows if you’ll have the opportunity afterward.”
It was important to drink up the differentness of where he was, to celebrate the fact that he was somewhere he’d never been before and might never be again.
We’re all terribly unsure of ourselves, son, each one of us tunneling toward something strange.
