The death of her ex-husband, Will, affected Alice Wexler in an unexpected—so it was said, politely, when Alice, a psychotherapist, knew that what was meant was “shocking”—way. Alice herself was shocked. Her grief was vast and plumbless. She and Will had not been close. They had never been close, not even during the two decades …
Vanessa’s mother’s house is a disaster. There are newspapers—not even real papers, but Pennysavers—piled in the living room, some of them from years ago. “They’re for lining the birdcages,” her mother insists, but the birds are not in the cages, and Vanessa suspects they are never in the cages, which are piled one on top …
The clothesline was to blame. Back in Ishewa, his grandmother had a clothesline that stretched the full length of the orchard, and he remembered picking cherries and getting wind-boxed by a pair of shorts. Nothing erotic about that, but things were different here on the coast. Here all his girlfriends had black hair and clotheslines …
“I believe in red meat. Red meat and gin.” — Julia Child I In 1966 in Menlo Park, California, three days before graduating from a school where they had no friends, Beryl Ramsey and Coral Brown stood up as their bus stop neared, ignoring three girls whispering obscenities in the driver’s ear. They slouched …
“If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching.” — Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower Once a much older woman, a friend of a friend of my mother’s, told me, “If you don’t lose some of your memories you’d remember so much more than a young person. It wouldn’t be fair.” And …