[...] He knows she's out to transgress, but she also has a puritanical streak that makes her wary of fun qua fun; everything must be a step toward metamorphosis. [...]
She paused often to fight low blood sugar, and in lengthening blinks she dreamed of an afterlife in which the turfy fire blanket on her head was brushed out into a blade of satin and she had a big scary wardrobe and hit Pilates every day until she'd burned off the paradoxical melancholy of feeling …
Will tipped the girl thirty dollars to make up for his hysterical crying, and left the salon [...]
[...] The sense of Asian men was of conspicuous arbitrariness in a culture of the special. Whose social modes of being had been enshrined in national policy: internment and exclusion. Conforming yet abnormal. Another and an Other. [...]
[...] she moved her soap, pillow, blanket, and toothbrush to the office. At this stage, she would not let the scale of her concerns be diminished by piddling twenty-something drama. Only sacrifice mattered now.
