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41 " information in the ad. "
― Jeanne Ray , Calling Invisible Women
42 " Five minutes later she came back to the car wearing low fitted gray pants, high-heeled black boots, a white T-shirt, and a long black nylon coat that flapped behind her like a graceful set of wings. She had on eyeliner and her hair was pulled back into a severe ponytail. She looked like a rock star or a publicist for rock stars. "
― Jeanne Ray , Eat Cake
43 " I wanted something for myself, a cake that was complicated and beautiful, a cake that would take up time I didn't have with enough tricky steps to keep my mind completely off of the matters at hand. I thought about a chocolate layer cake with burnt orange icing and the orange in the icing made me consider a Grand Marnier cake instead. Finally, in a complete non sequitur, I settled on a charlotte. I would make a scarlet empress. I closed my eyes and imagined myself making a jelly roll, the soft sheet of sponge cake laid across my counter. I spread the cake with a seedless raspberry preserve and then I rolled it up with even ends. I was nearly asleep. My parents were floating away from me. I took a knife and started slicing off the roll, but I didn't let it end. No matter how many rounds I cut, there was more there for me, an endless supply of delicate spirals of cake. It was the baker's equivalent to counting sheep, lulling myself to sleep through spongy discs of jam. There were enough slices of jelly roll for me to shingle the roof, to cover the house, to lay a walkway out to the street. In my dreams I made the house a cake, and inside the cake our lives were warm and sweet and infinitely protected. "
44 " Calvino "
45 " What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet.” —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet "
― Jeanne Ray , Julie and Romeo
46 " Their son went to the idol-worshiping, uniform-wearing Catholic school, "
47 " A prejudice can be a lovely thing to have, which is exactly why so many people have them in the first place. A prejudice is a simplification: Every member of this group is exactly the same and therefore I never have to think about any of them. What a time-saver! "
48 " Maybe he’s feeling unseen,” she said. “It’s possible that that’s the lesson in all of this, not who sees you but who you can learn to see. "
49 " You’re not going to do anything, to fix anything,” Irene said as she drove me to the office. “You’re just going to bear witness to his life. I think sometimes that’s the greatest gift we can give one another. "
50 " I leaned over and kissed him. I tried to make it count. A person had to be diligent about kissing. Kissing was the affirmation of the union, the secret handshake that identified its members. And even knowing how important it was, it was easy to let it slide altogether, and suddenly one day you wake up and realize that it has been weeks since you’ve kissed your husband while you’ve had any clothes on. Worse still were the kisses that became mere gestures of kissing, those hard little pecks like the kind you got from a great-aunt when you were five, kisses that weren’t kisses at all but said instead, I used to kiss you and this is the symbol that now stands in its place. It was the difference between eating a great meal and looking at a picture of food in a magazine: One made you feel full and the other only reminded you that you were hungry. "
― Jeanne Ray , Step-Ball-Change
