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Most writers use props and scenery from their own lives. For example, my Henrietta eats her meager little dinner every night on a blue place mat, using exquisite heavy Italian stainless cutlery. An odd detail, inconsistent, it may seem, with this woman who cuts out coupons for Brawny towels, but it…

“How come you hit me?” Tim asked softly.

I started to answer him, to say, “Because you were insolent and unkind,” but I saw his smile of contempt as he waited for me to say just that.

“I hit you because I was angry. About Dolores and the rock. Because I felt hurt and foolish.”

His dark eye…

One morning I heard him say to her, in the breakfast nook, “Let’s do something spontaneous today, take the kids to go fly a kite!”

My heart went out to him. Part of me wanted to rush in like the maid in the back of Saturday Evening Post. I make great kites, know good places in Tilden for wind. T…

Oh ho ho ho, Mrs. Robinson. He has over two thousand dollars’ worth of stereo equipment and five records. Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, and three Beatles.

Mrs. Armitage had been different, although she was old too. That was in New York at the San Juan Laundry on Fifteenth Street. Puerto Ricans. Suds overflowing onto the floor. I was a young mother then and washed diapers on Thursday mornings. She lived above me, in 4-C. One morning at the laundry she…