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What! How can so many thoughts and observations possibly have elapsed in so brief a period? An impressionist will answer along the lines of “The distortions inherent in our perception of time,” but to us counters, time is a bore— and not just because too much has been said and written about it. Time is irrelevant to math. [...]
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They’re tough customers, those two. They’ve got me doing pigtails. And buns.
Incredulous laughter. I don’t believe you, said Charlie, our oldest sister. She dragged her chair next to our father and offered him her golden hair, which fell almost to her waist. Make a bun, she dared him.
Our father gathered Charlie’s hair in his fists but seemed unsure at first what to do with it. Girls, he roused us. Get me the pins and brush.
Serious! Stickler! came the table howls.
Our father brushed Charlie’s hair until it crackled in the candlelight. Then he herded it into a shimmering bundle and looped it expertly around, pins pursed between his teeth. Silence fell on the room as everyone watched. Our father slid the pins into Charlie’s hair and anchored in place a beautiful, shining bun. It made Charlie look like a little girl,although she must have been in her twenties by then.
Laugher broke at the table, and everyone clapped.
Charlie’s eyes brimmed and overflowed. I don’t know why I’m crying, she kept saying as she flicked away the tears. But they wouldn’t stop.
We knew why. We were getting the best of him.
The river is smooth and still, pressed between walls of redwoods and so cold that their fingers throb when they dip them in. Could it harm them to submerge? Lou has heard of very cold water causing heart attacks, and feels responsible, having led everyone here. As they’re mulling over the safety of swimming, Tim Breezely suddenly strips off his clothes and dives from a log, buck-naked. The smash of cold stops his breathing; he has a brief blackout sensation of death. But when he surfaces, howling, what’s died is his gloom—he’s left it on the river bottom. Freedom! Joy! Tim Breezely will soon divorce—they’ll all divorce—everyone will divorce. An entire generation will throw off the fetters of rote commitment in favor of invention, hope—and we, their children, will try to locate the moment we lost them and worry that it was our fault. Tim Breezely will become a dedicated jogger before anyone jogs who isn’t being chased. He’ll write books about exercise and mental health that will make him a household name, and will receive thousands of letters from people whose lives he has transformed, even saved.
Getting high, which is hard to accomplish through the methadone (it takes a lot, Roxy has to be careful), gives her a sensation of power and transcendent rightness beyond anything she could have imagined when she uttered those words: make my mark. Making her mark ended up not involving any of the things she’d banked on—her dancing, her beauty, her sexual confidence—in fact, all of those succumbed to it. Heroin is her great love, her life’s work, and she has given up everything for it, through renunciation or sheer neglect. No one can say she hasn’t been steady— or, rather, everyone says that, but only because they fail to grasp that her scarred arms and swollen fingers, her gray teeth and thin hair and stooped, halting gait, are testaments to her fierce devotion. She’s outlasted even Jocelyn, whom she used to nod off with at her father’s house. Jocelyn got a social work degree in her forties and settled down with a famous guitarist who’d been in love with her since high school. Not Roxy. She will depart this world empty-handed: a sacrifice that only Kiki, in the religious fervor of her girlhood, might have understood.
Dolly→Joe Jojo, that is OUT OF THE QUESTION. My part in all of it was deplorable, not to mention that I would have to revisit the boiling oil catastrophe.
Joe→Dolly Are you not the one who first explained to me that Americans love redemption stories precisely because they are so irrevocably tainted by original sin?
Dolly→Joe This isn’t a redemption story! It’s a story about how I sank so low that I took a job camouflaging the atrocities of a genocidal dictator!
lol but tbh i also love a redemption story
[...] those two years of graduate school, of writing workshops and literature classes, had been the happiest of his life. He’d hauled boxes for a moving company, read two books a week, and begun the novel that Athena and some others, too, had liked. Alone by choice on Saturday nights, writing by an open window in his studio apartment, Gregory had experienced a kind of euphoria: a swelling, bursting, yearning hunger that had something in common with lust but included everyone, from the revelers outside his window to the carousers down the hall. He was where he wanted to be, and needed nothing else.
“They have the chair,” Eddie said, “and she needs it.”
He hadn’t intended to ask his friend for the money, but now he felt a sudden rise of hope that Dunellen might offer it. He had it, God knew. Might easily have the sum on him now, in his mammoth roll—warmed, like the rosaries, by his fierce body heat.
“Nat could help you with that,” Dunellen said thoughtfully, after a long pause. “I’d have a word, buy you as much time as you need. Take it right off your pay if that would help any.”
It took Eddie a moment, in his half-stupor, to absorb Dunellen’s meaning. He was sending Eddie to the loan shark. And judging by the soft look in his eyes, Dunellen regarded the steer as an act of charity.
Eddie took great care not to react. “I’ll think about it,” he said mildly. If he remained at Sonny’s another minute, Dunellen would read his displeasure and punish him for it. “ ’Night, Dunny,” he said, sliding the Duesenberg’s key across the table. “Thanks.”
ough
When the lunch whistle blew at eleven-thirty, she was itching to get outside. In order to justify leaving the building, she didn’t bring a lunch—a ploy she knew did not fool Mr. Voss. But he couldn’t very well deny a girl food, so he watched grimly as she made for the door while the marrieds unwrapped sandwiches from waxed paper and talked about husbands in boot camp or overseas; who’d had a letter; clues or hunches or dreams as to where their beloveds might be; how desperately frightened they were. More than one girl had wept, describing her terror that a husband or fiancé would not return. Anna couldn’t listen. The talk stirred in her an uncomfortable anger at these girls, who seemed so weak. Thankfully, Mr. Voss had put an end to that topic during working hours, prompting an unlikely trill of gratitude in Anna. Now they sang songs from their colleges while they worked: Hunter, St. Joseph’s, Brooklyn College, whose song Anna finally learned—not having bothered to in the year she was a student there.
lol understandable
Your supervisor doesn’t mind you going out?”
“He likes me,” Nell said, an explanation Anna guessed she must employ—perhaps correctly—to account for much of what happened to her.
“Ours likes us to stay in,” Anna said, aware that she was playacting a little, invoking a version of Mr. Voss that was slightly outdated. Hanger-on seemed to be the part she was auditioning for, perhaps the only one available.
“Try lipstick,” Nell said. “Works wonders.”
“He isn’t that type.”
Nell’s face was all sunny curves; she looked perpetually on the verge of laughter. Yet her blue gaze was rife with calculation. “There’s no other,” she said.
lol
Anna ate her spaghetti and meatballs with her eyes fixed on the water. She was waiting for the diver to surface, but he did not. He was breathing underwater. She tried to picture him at the bottom of the bay—would he walk or swim? What was down there? Jealousy and longing spasmed through her. “Would they ever let us do that?” she murmured.
“Would you want to?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
Nell gave a disbelieving laugh. “They’d never let us. But they might just make us. If the men keep leaving in droves.”
honestly yeah good analysis