Activity

[...] The real magic surrounding Angie is the way she is respected rather than teased by the boys—the way even adult men speak of her admiringly as “tough” and a “tomboy.” She can hit a ball over the fence and do more chin-ups than most of the boys on the block, and when she takes to wearing a jean…

My mother and I have suggested throwing a party for his ninetieth, where all the many people who love him could gather, but he won’t hear of it. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” he says. The trappings of socializing—having to maneuver around with his walker, possibly falling down as he often does or not making …

Since Kathy’s diagnosis, though—or maybe it dates back before then and I merely found a catalyst on which to pin the label of previously unnamable feelings—I feel myself unspooling, a hypomanic restless energy mounting. I change radio stations mid-song; I’m eating and sleeping less, something under…

At last, Death is starting to listen. Almost nightly now, my father dreams of his dead brothers. My mother and I rarely figure in his subconscious. In the dreams, his brothers are still young: Emilio playing the sax; Joe a mildly powerful bookie; Frank on the front porch smiling and waving with his…

My husband and I still have sex. We still go on dates. We still take family vacations. Nobody could call us “estranged.” It’s just that for the past four or five years, significantly predating my emotional affair, we seem to speak different languages, that old feeling of connection refusing to clic…