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41 " I have always felt a sisterhood with bathtubs; without someone else within us, we are smooth white cups of nothing. "
― Lauren Groff , Florida
42 " She could feel the ocean pulling at her back but didn’t turn to say goodbye. It had failed to do what she had longed for it to do; it had been indifferent, after all. "
43 " All things nauseating and deadly are American, "
44 " We’re all alone, he said. "
45 " During our first months in the house, we hosted a homeless couple we only ever saw slinking off in the dawn: at dusk, they would silently lift off the latticework to the crawl space under our house and then sleep there, their roof our bedroom floor, and when we got up in the middle of the night, we tried to walk softly because it felt rude to step inches above the face of a dreaming person. "
46 " The scar on her hand turned a lovely silver in the sun, and she sometimes stroked it absently, signifier in lieu of signified, the scratch for the lost life. "
47 " And then the wind smacked the house. Bring it on! I shouted. Or, just maybe, this is another thing in my absurd life that I whispered. "
48 " At the funeral, out of a twisted loyalty to his father, he avoided his uncle. He didn’t know if his mother knew she’d been widowed; he thought probably not. He told nobody at school that his father had died. He thought of himself as an island in the middle of the ocean, with no hope of seeing another island in the distance, or even a ship passing by. "
49 " but my rebelliousness at the time was like a sticky fog rolling through my body and never burning off, there was no sun inside, and so I said that the boys and I would stay. "
50 " I would not make playdates, never ever. Motherhood meant, for me, that I would take the boys on monthlong adventures to Europe, teach them to blast off rockets, to swim for glory. I taught them how to read, but they could make their own lunches. I would hug them as long as they wanted to be hugged, but that was just being human. My husband had to be the one to make up for the depths of my lack. It is exhausting, living in debt that increases every day but that you have no intention of repaying. "
51 " She saw herself from a great distance, a woman stooping in knee-deep water for someone else’s wishes. "
52 " The girl summoned the ghost of the almost-professor she’d been and said, "
53 " It was a cleansing, she decided. If pretty words couldn’t save her, then losing them, too, was all for the best. "
54 " She no longer looked like herself: diligent, plump, prim. She looked like a surfer girl or a sorority sister, one of those quivering dewy creatures she had always silently disliked. "
55 " What a relief that she has boys; this princess nonsense is a tragedy of multigenerational proportions. "
56 " When they stopped on the walk to his place and he pressed her shoulders against the cold metal of a streetlight and kissed her with touching earnestness, she felt the soft hair at the base of his neck and thought he’d probably had a nervous breakdown. "
57 " she was a thin shell of glass and steel from the raw nerve at the center of herself. "
58 " The dead need nothing from us; the living take and take. "
59 " Words were space carved out of life, warm and safe. "
60 " Mostly, however, I see the mothers I know in glimpses, bent like shepherdess crooks, scanning the floor for tiny Legos or half-chewed grapes or the people they once were, slumped in the corners. "