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She remembered curling next to her mother on their twin bed, ear to her chest. To hear her heart. Each labored breath. To will each one. Please please please.
[...] Just an hour from home, we were unfamiliar friends again, hand in hand, sleeping naked in bed to escape the heat, the slow ceiling fan whipping my long hair over his chest in a steady, slow rhythm. This is how most relationships must end, I think. Slow and without drama or pandemonium, without reason: just two people who become accessories to the bland survival of the everyday.
i don't like the repetition of slow, or the intrusive "I think", but i do like the sentiment
After the blows came kicks sometimes. With mud-caked boots. Drawing blood from a broken nose that never repaired right, from split lips and knocked-out teeth. She should have feared death but she didn't. In the moments when Daniel appeared ready to kill her, all thought ceased, and she retracted into the shell of her arms, saw splinters of light, spinning walls, felt like a child on a merry-go-round thrust off and ready to hit the floor. Sometimes, at the crescent of raw fear, she felt free, like she soared. The pain came later.
the level of detail is too maudlin/artless for me but the ending is nice. though idk why "crescent" fits here - why not crescendo?
How was she to know that Carmen had stood at the back door that night? That she'd seen her father's face slowly consumed by licking flames and tiptoed back into the house? In fifteen years, Carmen would board a plane to Miami, and Dolores would never see her again. She would think it was politics that had divided her from her firstborn daughter.
ok this is a cool twist but why state the last sentence explicitly, and in such a matter-of-fact way (without any new detail or color)? it kinda ruins the vibes
[...] You're not like other girls, he says, and I wind the words tight around me, a cape. The world is full of other girls - shiny-haired, giggle-glowing, simultaneously pure and sex-enthralled, groups of them, worlds of them, walking in community, writhing under club lights, running through parks. But if he says he doesn't like other girls, if I am not an "other girl," he will be mine, not theirs.
Except that I know deep down that I am other girls. They spin in me and around me. I am of them: my coworker who has been wearing the same lipstick shade, Barely Legal, every day since some guy leaned over the counter and complimented her on the color. [...] Sasha who is no longer my best friend, because her boyfriend told her he thought she should dress more like me [...] and so she realized I was not an other girl to him or that she was not a special girl, a chosen girl, or that all the categories collapse at the behest of the men who make them and that it is just easier to pretend that we have any control in the first place. Control is pushing me away.
the prose feels a bit clunky but the "categories collapse" bit is kinda nice
The woman's husband comes around Christmastime. The woman's husband is handsome [...] Isabel walks him to my counter and says, he needs a cream for his dry skin but nothing that smells too flowery. Then she walks away to browse shoes, and I tell the husband about our line of men's products in blue-black containers that suggest sailorly conquest and rapacious strength. I'm sorry for my wife, the husband says, she sounds so dumb sometimes. I don't know how to respond, so I say do you use a daily antioxidant to battle signs of premature aging? He frowns and walks away. I place a hand on the cold glass counter and picture it cracking under my weight. I am thin and wipsy like a bowl of feathers, like crumpled paper tumbling in the wind. Nothing cracks in my presence.
heh. the jeanette sections are the strongest imo
So how did you survive? I say, and what I really mean is how will I walk out of these gaudy gold-etched doors into the wet open mouth of a hot Miami afternoon and survive, and then the day after that, how will I survive, and then the day after that, how will I survive, and when will I stop feeling exhausted from all the surviving?
[...]
See me, see me, I think. Just for this one moment, see me. I am sinking, I am screaming, Tell me how to live, Mommy.
So much silence and the mind became unbearable [...] Cancer had ripped through her mother so fast, there was so little time to consider something so frivolous as loss. What a luxurious thing, to feel. The pain a tender ache now that she could massage and curl into. [...]
Next door, in the house just like ours, lives an actual African American grandmother, the wife of the retired postal worker. We’re getting paid to have our house made over to look like what a set designer imagines their house looks like so that Walmart can try to sell things to people who look like them. John tells all this to his friend Dan, who says, I think that’s the definition of white privilege.
if it is then it's a stupid concept. not load-bearing at all. wtf
This woman’s grandfather built her house, I’ll learn later. She owned it outright and could have left it to her children but the property taxes kept going up in her old age. Someone selling loans convinced her to remortgage the house to pay her taxes, another neighbor tells me. And that’s how she lost it. The bank owns it now, it’s in foreclosure, but she’s ninety years old and they aren’t going to evict her. They’re waiting for her to die. In the meantime, there’s a tarp on the roof and two broken windows upstairs.
sad