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Ursula, the one who long ago appointed herself the person in their family who would keep her sights fixed on the sun, no matter what, never mind that she was only seven years old.
Who’s to say what normal is anyway? Particularly as it relates to a family.”
says. How can it be that something as simple as the tone of a person’s voice can have the effect of a knife
slicing into your heart? It can have that effect if the person is someone you love, and they’re speaking as if you’re a stranger to them now. A stranger you gave birth to once, a million years ago.
“I think I died once. That day in the pond. I think I saw God. Either God or a cloud.”
“I wonder how Gilligan would feel if he ever got off the island?” Toby says to his mother. Or maybe to himself. “I wonder if he’d be happy if they rescued him. He might end up missing his old life with his pals.”
“It’s okay to be sad,” Toby says. “Life is sad sometimes. Just not always. It’s a combination.”
This is an aspect of Toby everyone in their family knows well—the way he connects so deeply with a person, sometimes, that he seems almost to become them. Whenever Eleanor watches a movie with Toby, she can count on the fact that if she looks over at him with his eyes on the screen, his expression will perfectly mirror that of
whatever actor he identifies with in the film. If the movie’s one of his favorites, that he’s seen many times, he’ll soundlessly mouth the words the actor speaks along with him.
“I’m sorry,” Al said. If anyone should understand what it was to have your family try to make you into a person you weren’t, he of all people should have understood. “I’ll never do that again.”
“You may be well acquainted with ice,” Eleanor says. This next might have sounded like a line, though it isn’t. “But here’s what it looks like when a woman melts.”
It occurs to Eleanor, when she contemplates the nature of her relationship with Guy and the powerful hold he has on her, that this may be what she loves: They don’t live together. They don’t share children or a household. They never talk about bills or dental appointments or whose turn it is to clear away the dishes.
Eleanor’s love had not saved her son from landing face down in the pond and lying there long enough to kill off a significant number of brain cells. Eleanor’s love had not spared her oldest child the agony of feeling he was born into the wrong body.
On the rare occasions when Eleanor gets to talk with Lulu over the phone, or Orson, she can hear the television in the background. Fox News, no doubt.
(Ramona the Brave. Ramona and Her Mother. Ramona and Her Father. Lulu loves Beverly Cleary at the moment, though Ursula’s concerned by the absence of persons of color in her books.)
Here’s what you did—if you were wise. You held on to these small, good moments, the small, good things, and tried not to be greedy for more. They’re like the pieces of expensive broken bowl lined up on the windowsill that catch the light. The times when it hits the glass might be rare. You never knew where you’d find one of these moments, or when. Best not to go looking for them. Keep your eyes open and they’d appear. And for one fleeting moment anyway, you remembered what happiness felt like.
It’s the light coming through the window at just the right angle, just for a moment there. You wish it never ended but you know it will. Take joy in those moments the sun hits the broken pieces of the Dale Chihuly bowl just right, and never mind when it doesn’t. Leave it at that.
“It’s hard missing people,” Eleanor says. “But just think how much harder it would be if you had no one to miss.”
Brains aren’t the only important thing in life.”
For decades, Guy explains, a treaty has been in place, preserving Antarctica’s resources, but that treaty is due to expire in the year 2041. “If we don’t do anything to protect those resources before then,” he says, “oil rigs and tankers will move in and the last pristine place on the planet would be lost forever.”
The art of kintsugi is based in the idea of repairing broken pottery in such a way as to transform it into something more beautiful than the original piece.
“You know what they say,” Hans tells them. “‘Stronger in the broken places.’”
“A girlfriend would have been the best. But life isn’t perfect. I already knew that.”
she learns the news. Sinead O’Connor has died. They’re not saying she took her life, but Eleanor guesses that in one manner or another the singer, who had struggled for years and recently lost a son to suicide, must have died of a broken heart.
anymore. It took her a while, but Eleanor has finally reclaimed her life—the freedom to take a tap dance class even if she’s not very good at tap dancing or fix herself a bowl of popcorn for dinner if she wants, or drive to Boston to have dinner with Jason and Hank, or stay in bed on a Sunday morning watching four episodes in a row of The Crown.
If you live long enough, everything happens. The good and the terrible. And it may be the case—it probably is—that a person’s glorious triumphs seldom serve as the best teachers of what it means to be human. The lessons are all in the failures.
