Her mother always told her, “If he hits you, then you leave,” but Jack had never hit her, not with his fists.
A woman brings so much more to the world than birth, for she can birth discovery, intelligence, invention, art, just as well as any man.
Once upon a long ago time I was a girl with hopeful halos in my eyes—not unlike you—not a typical beauty but beautiful nonetheless, as all young girls tend to be in their prime, even if they don’t tend to know it.
Using one’s beauty was the only way a smart girl could get by, at least that’s how it was back then, though even for a smart girl there were really only three professions. You could be a nurse or a teacher or a wife.
All I cared about that summer were suntans, beaches, boys and booze.
I think first of the children. What the hell am I supposed to tell them? Then I think about money, the house, all those things no widow will tell you ever crossed her mind.
She fantasized sometimes too about killing him a little: a little poison in his pudding, a little flick-flick-flick with a fillet knife at his throat.
Let’s call my mood melancholy; let’s call it remembrance. Or maybe let’s call it longing. Yes, let’s call it longing instead.
I hung a picture of him above my bed and learned by hand the internal workings of the female combustion engine.
Then the weeks rolled by in a sinister psych ward haze filled with white-coated orderlies and rocking whack-job patients torn straight from some old Jack Nicholson film, all anti-psychotic meds and padded lonely cells...
It wasn’t as if she’d thought it through or anything, how what a person wanted wasn’t always what they needed, and what a person needed might be the last thing they could ever want.
Don’t worry if you fall, sweet girl. Youth is made for bruises.
