"The not blinking really bothers me, I've got to tell you. And what's this on her neck, here? On Brenda's neck?"

"Birthmark. Pimple."

"Is this an air-valve? This is an air-valve! See, here's the cap. Are you sitting with an inflatable doll?

"Don't be ridiculous."

"You're sitting with an inflatable doll! This isn't even a person."

"Brenda, this isn't funny, show Ms. Beadsman you're a person."

"My god. See, she weighs about one pound. I can lift her up." Lenore lifted Brenda way up by the thigh. Brenda suddenly fell out of Lenore's hand and her head got wedged between the bench and Mary-Ann's hand, and she was upside down. Her dress fell up.

"Good heavens," said Mr. Bloemker.

"One of those dolls. That's just sick. How can you sit in public with an anatomically correct doll?"

"I must confess, the wool seems to have been completely pulled over my eyes. I thought she was simply extremely shy. A troubled Midwesterner, in an ambivalent relation ..."

[...] the patients there couldn't remember the names for things, televisions, water, doors ... and so under Gramma Lenore's influence he had them identified with their function? [...] So the door is 'What we go from room to room through'? Water is 'What we drink, without color'? Television is 'What we watch Lawrence Welk on'--Lawrence Welk being primitive, undefined, even in syndication, no problem with Lawrence Welk. How my mother and all the rest came after a fashion to relearn the words they needed, via function, via what the things named were good for? And then Gramma Lenore noticing that the one component of the facility this method couldn't be applied to was the patients themselves, because they had no function, no use, weren't good for anything, really at all? No? She told me this drove her up the wall. They had no use at all. What? No, the derivative comes from the pineals of cattle. We use cattle pineals. Rather we would if we could. Now, just wait, please. [...]

[...] Care for a Corfu nut, by the way? No? They're quite good. I got them in Canada, fishing. [...]

[...] Modern party-dance is simply writhing to suggestive music. It is ridiculous, silly to watch and excruciatingly embarrassing to perform. It is ridiculous, and yet absolutely everyone does it, so that it is the person who does not want _to do the ridiculous thing who feels out of place and uncomfortable and self-conscious ... in a word, ridiculous. Right out of Kafka: the person who des not want to do the ridiculous thing is the person who is ridiculous. (Idea: Kafka at an Amherst/Mt. Holyoke mixer, never referred to by name, only as "F.K.," only one not dancing ...) Modern party-dance is an evil thing. [...]

A truly, truly horrible dream, last night. Don't even want to talk about it. I am fresh out of bed. Urinating. I look down. Just a lazy stream of early-morning maple-syrup urine. Suddenly the single stream is a doubled, forking stream. Then a tripled trident stream. Four, five, ten. Soon I am at the node of a fan of urine that sprays out in all directions, blasting the walls of the bathroom, plaster shooting everywhere, contents swirling at my feet. When I awaoke--alone, Lenoreless, hence the dream--I was really afraid I had wet the bed, the windows, the ceiling. I may murder Jay over this one.

Do pictures tell? I have a color Polaroid of Vance at seven and Veronica at twenty-nine traversing a rickety dry-gray dock in Nova Scotia to board a fishing boat. The water is a deep iron smeared with plates of foam; the sky is a thin iron smeared with same; the mass of white gulls around Vance's outstretched bread-filled hand is a cloud of plunging white V's. Vance Vigorous, as he holds out his white little child's hand, is surrounded and obscured by a cloud of living, breathing shrieking, shitting, plunging incarnations of the letter V; and I have it captured forever on quality film, giving me the right and power to cry whenever and wherever I please. What might that say about pictures.

"I almost attacked him on the spot. I just had no idea where to begin hitting. He's much larger than he was a week ago."

[...] an ocean into which this particular seal was going to pour a strong (hopefully unitary) stream of his own presence, to prove that he still is, and so was [...]

[...] In the girls' faces I see softness, beauty, the shiny and relaxed eyes of wealth, and the vital capacity for creating problems where none exist. For some reason I see these girls also older, pale television ghosts flickering behind the originals: middle-aged women, with bright-red fingernails and deeply tanned, hard, seamed faces, sprayed hair shaped by the professional fingers of men with French names; and eyes, eyes that will stare without pity or doubt over salted tequila rims at the glare of the summer sun off the country club pool. [...] The boys [...] I see so many calm, impassive, and cheerful faces, faces at peace, for now and always, with the context of their own appearance and being, that sort of long-term peace and smooth acquaintance with invariable destiny that renders the faces bloodlessly pastable onto cut-outs of corporate directors in oak-lined boardrooms, professors with plaid ties and leather patches at the elbows of their sport jackets, doctors on bright putting greens with heavy gold shock-resistant watches at their wrists and tiny beepers at their belts [...]

[...] as I opened my mouth there somehow flew out of my mouth an enormous glob of the chewed hors d'oeuvre, the Ritz cracker and bologna, chewed, with saliva on it, with shocking force, and it flew out and landed on the fleshy part of Janet Dibdin's nose, and stayed there. And the friends were blasted into silence, and the rest of the hors d'oeuvre in my mouth turned to ice, adhered forever to my palate, and the Beatles sang, "Guess you know it's true," and Janet stopped all life processes, virtually killed with horror, which she out of a compassion not of this earth tried to hide by smiling, and she began to look in her purse for a Kleenex, with the obscenely flesh-and-bone-colored glob of chewed food on the end of her hose, and I watched it all through the large end of a telescope, and then the world ceased mercifully to be, and I became infinitely small and infinitely dense, a tiny black star twinkling negatively amid a crumple of empty suit and shoes. This was my taste of hell at twenty. The month following that night is an irretrievable blank in my memory, an expletive deleted. That portion of my brain is cooked smooth.