She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn't drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its little magic.
...to encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen...
I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.
It was as if they'd discovered something that had once been there but had gotten hidden or misunderstood or forgotten over time, and they were charmed by it once more, and by one another. Which seems only right and expectable for married people. They...
He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.
My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.
Loneliness, I've read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it's promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to ...
In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.
