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He laughed. He had an amazing patience with people, even drunk people trying to derail his life at the last minute.
Smells are amazing. They trigger memory quicker and deeper than any other kind of stimulant to the senses.”
In the war he had seen plenty of death, but never in all his years had he seen something as terrifying as this face before him now.
Frances flew out to greet her. “Audrey!” They all had names like that then, out of old storybooks.
When you die, she thought now, you can no longer give love. You can’t give love anymore. She wouldn’t be able to love her children. It struck her suddenly as the very worst thing about death, worse than not being able to breathe or laugh or kiss. A kind of existential suffocation, to not be able to give her children her love anymore.
Sometimes it feels there is nothing about her life her children cannot uncover, cannot redefine. Once she had thought there would be a certain amount of grace and mystery in being a parent and that what went unsaid about her experiences would be respected and what was revealed would be absorbed without contradiction, occasionally sanctified. Wasn’t that how she had treated her own parents’ pasts? Perhaps it is because they have become American, these children of hers.
I was a bit more like your father then. I loved big houses and beautiful clothes.”
She always makes herself out to have been giggly and lighthearted, the gravity of life never pulling on her until she found herself married with children to raise. But her mother’s face is serious, has always been serious, her expression in even the most spontaneous childhood photographs resembling, as her father once said, the portrait of a disgruntled cabinet minister.
this audience makes her feel needed in a more extravagant, less basic way than usual. There is so much to tell: the gardens, the courtyard, the intricate bodice of her dress. Finally, the words she chooses are the right ones; they take on the exact shape and magnificence of the moment they describe. She feels strong and alive, driving her children south on a smooth highway.
When she told it to her husband, there were two ghosts. She had wanted him to see what they’d become. She described everything carefully, their movements, their fingers, the shapes of their mouths. We mustn’t become them, Robert, not yet. But he didn’t understand. He had stopped wanting to understand her.
This morning, however, without warning, a sentence rose, a strange unexpected chain of words meeting the surface in one long gorgeous arc. As she hurried to get it down, she could feel the pressure of new words, two separate sentences vying for a place next to the first, and then more ideas splitting off from each of those and where there had been, for so long now, arid vacuity there was fertile green ground and any path she chose would be the right one. Words flooded her and her hand ached to keep up with them and above it all her mind was singing here it is here it is and she was smiling.
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The strong tugs at her breast returned her to a more familiar self. She pressed her lips to the fuzz at his hairline and nibbled. These animal moments of motherhood obliterated everything else briefly.
But let’s not quibble. This book is about the father. No one will actually come out and say this nowadays, but women are at their best when they’re writing about men: their husbands, their fathers, their lost loves. It’s when they start writing about themselves that they become unreadable.” He proceeded to cross out several more pages, shaking his head. “You simply cannot name me a book, a great book, a lasting book, that was written by a woman about a woman.”
Keep the girl, just train her eye on the father and don’t let her slip into those little pity parties she has for all her feelings. Think”—he clenched his eyes and his jaw and his fists, then released—”Huckleberry Finn,” he said. “And let’s most certainly not follow her into her adulthood.”
“We know where she’s headed. We don’t have to read it. She marries, she has babies, and they fill her with love and rage. What’s new or startling about that?”
How often her mother said that, as if it were their last hope, a white ring tossed onto the waves. She tried to say the things they liked to hear: who got A’s, who got in trouble. But every night she failed. Such an uncompelling child, wholly unable, night after night, to keep her parents afloat. And then the poem slipped out of the spelling book and her mother snatched it up before she could. What’s this? Her parents’ eyes met. If they’d been wolves, they
And with them came a feeling, a presentiment, that she would eventually destroy this good life, for wasn’t her need to write like her parents’ need to drink? A form of escape, a way to detach? And, like the alcohol, it weakened and often angered her, left her yearning for the kind of rare and extraordinary ability she’d never have.
“I have a million distractions,” she said, hearing a long-gone flirtation in her laugh, knowing that if he touched her she would not resist. “But only three children.” Usually it gave her pleasure to speak of her children—their ages, their quirks—but now they were obscuring the conversation.
but she’d needed to find something to create distance, to put a wedge between her and that small squeak of joy he’d revealed to her. Monotony, especially the unfamiliar monotony of being loved, was something she couldn’t seem to get comfortable with.
