by
Lucia Berlin
It wasn’t just that she was young. She had moved around all her life. Her father was a mining engineer; her mother had been ill, or crazy. She didn’t speak about them, except to say they had disowned her when she got married, wouldn’t answer her letters. You got the feeling no one had ever told her or shown her about growing up, about being part of a family or being a wife. That one reason she was so quiet was that she was watching, to see how it was all done.