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JAY: [...] Only a strong membrane can suck in a sperm, Lenore. Here, I know, pretend I'm a sperm.
LENORE: I don't care for the way this session is going one bit.
JAY: No, really. Be secure. Pretend I'm a sperm cell. Here. I take the string out of the ... hood of my sweatshirt, affix it to my behind for a tail, like so ...
LENORE: What in God's name are you doing?
JAY: Pretend, Lenore. Be an ovum. Be strong. Let me hypothetically batter at you. Batter batter. Surrender to the unreal of the real interor.
LENORE: Are you supposed to be a sperm, wriggling in your sweatshirt-string like that?
JAY: I can feel the strength of your membrane, Lenore.
LENORE: A sperm in a gas mask?
JAY: Batter batter.
LENORE: I demand that you set my chair in motion.
"And the writing was just so . . . This one line I remember: 'He grinned wryly.' Grinned wryly? Who grins wryly? Nobody grins wryly at all, except in stories. It wasn't real at all. It was like a story about a story. I put it on Mavis's desk with the ones about the proctologist and the snowblower."
RICK: How do you know his age? That he's blond and virile, with a socio-economic background?
until this moment, I assumed that Rick had told Jay all about Andy, but here we learn there's something more sinister going on (i.e., it's probably all a big plot--ha-- controlled by Lenore Sr.)
Fieldbinder smiled coolly and speculatively stroked his own generous jaw, lingering over the deep cleft that somehow through physical processes obscure caught and reflected light in such a way as to blind anyone who tried to look directly into Fieldbinder's deep green eyes
_deep blue eyes, the color of cold crystal, with tiny fluffy white diamonds frozen in irises of ice.
_Fieldbinder grinned wryly. "The word has a music, in my opinion, is all."
amazingly like Dan Brown's writing. the best part is the hilariously negative portrayal of Dr. J, who hisses, bleats, lisps, and plays with himself covertly
[...] "Not infection rising from within, but injury punched into the tired envelope from without," "the skin no longer a viable boundary," and so on. He had not said membrane, to Lenore's knowledge.
Bloemker on geriatric acne. loving this glimpse into Lenore's (rightful) linguistic paranoia
[...] Am invited by Rex Metalman to a cotillion for his daughter, Melinda Susan Metalman. (Was it a real cotillion? Why can't I remember?) Am invited by Rex Metalman to some Puberty-Rite function for his daughter.
Rick's POV
But dancing was of course out of the question, and this girl in the throes of Rite of course either danced or installed herself in a social orbit around the hors d'oeuvre bar, and I will never ever again approach a female at a hors d'oeuvre bar.
see note 580
"[...] Even when it got real cool out on the porch of the place she'd wait, it turned out. She just kept looking at my Daddy like she didn't see what the problem was, this was just her life now, here, didn't we know it? While all the while we just stood around feeling terrible. [...]"
Andrew Lang on his grandmother waiting on the porch of the nursing home every single day. the most depressing image
[...] there was nothing the pathetic, paralyzed, helpless dentist could do about it; he was as inefficacious as he was inadequate."
"Jesus, Rick, what is this?"
"I promise we'll be able to relate to it. Let's just bear with. [...] she begins to offer less and less resistance to the malevolent blond psychologist's frequent and oafish sexual advances, many of them made right there in the dentist's hospital room, while the dentist lies right there, helpless and insensate."
"Blond? A blond psychologist?"
"Affirmative."
"Why is this story beginning to give me the creeps?"
"It means you're beginning to relate. You're being intuitive about it."
Fieldbinder grinned coolly, then wryly.
metafiction comedy gold