Activity

Back in the city the season was more appropriate to what I expected and hated: airless, choking heat, sunlight that seemed to burn without warmth. Steam lifted off the sidewalk. The hours were slow and gone before I could count them. The feeling of August was as uncomfortable as the weather. Enough…

One night I watched Take This Waltz, a movie directed by Sarah Polley, filmed near the street I used to live on. The movie has that feeling of an afternoon when everyone is on their front porches, watching the neighborhood drama and everything that can happen on a residential sidewalk. A marriage e…

Most of the movies that we had both seen were divorce movies. Since my husband had moved out six months before, I had been watching and rewatching anything about breakups, endings, affairs—allegorical or realistic, romances and tragedies, I often described these evenings as though I was self-progra…

Was every married couple two children playing house? Did it just feel that way for us, or was it a pantomime for everyone? There was an endless supply of fictions to choose from, the facts of one not enough to make us lose faith in another. Pretending or daydreaming as a child had had such a prophe…

My husband came back three days later, ashamed and repentant. I forgave him and mostly forgot. It was only much later that I remembered how it had been that third afternoon when I first started to really hear my friend’s voice saying, Maybe it’s for the best, that my sisters and I had walked to get…