sexy & good-looking & a pleasure to talk to forever.

Jennifer, I said to her at her bat mitzvah, surrounded by Sapirstein cousins, all with prime-time haircuts, wearing thin-strapped slip dresses that fluttered prettily around their narrow thighs while Jennifer's clung damply to her full back and puckered around the waistband of her panty hose, Jennifer, your Hebrew was gorgeous, your speech was witty, and you are a really, really interesting young woman. She watched her second cousin toss long, shiny red hair and sighed. Jennifer, I said, and when I pressed my hand on her arm she shivered (and I thought, Does no one touch you?), Jennifer, I know I don't know you very well, but believe me, they will have peaked in three years and you will be sexy and good-looking and a pleasure to talk to forever. She blushed, that deep, mottled raspberry stain fair-skinned girls show, and I left her alone.


The Gates are Closing -by Amy Bloom in Zoetrope: All-Story: Back Issue
(collected in A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You)

girls porch trucks highway; sighed and went in

My mother and I should have both been girls who stayed out on the porch a little longer than the rest, girls who strained to hear the long-distance trucks on the highway and who listened to them, not the nearer crickets. We would have been girls who had names in their heads: Ann Arbor, Chicago, Cheyenne, San Francisco, Portland, Honolulu, Los Angeles; girls who looked at the sky and wanted to go away. We would have been the kind of girls who thought we, more than other people, saw the sadness of things, the poignance of lush darkness around stars, but who finally sighed and, calling the dog with a mixture of reluctance and relief, shut the door and went in home.

Page 61
Anywhere But Here by Mona Simpson
ggl bk search 'should have girls'

you want the womb, and a mother, any mother, someone's mother, to sing you to sleep

Book of Dahlia:
She wanted the intactness back, and the family, and the womb, and the womb before the womb, and her mother, but not her actual mother. She would have been okay, truly. She would have! She really would have. After she was done being the opposite of okay, she would have been okay. Her life could be seen as a series of things she had failed to get over. And now it was over. where would it all go? All those memories, things she couldn't get over, and didn't, and wouldn't, now.
So this was it then. Okay. Where was her mother --or a mother, any mother, someone else's mother-- to sing her to bed?

you want the womb with all that is not there. the river, the rocks, the words, No. there are no words and none of the words are theirs. No tears, or all tears, fluid. but no grief. No train, no platform, no one being left, no one leaving. no Dog Monday, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, longer than you think. you are not thinking of the things of this world, the soldier finally come home, the old dog --old? not so old! seven years on, his Jem stepping off the train-- a flash across the platform. Chesterton's things of this world: mothers, fighting peoples. So: nations, navies, wars. but also: a cat purring, back to your face, feet against your palm, Not here. Snow, sleds, the wooded hills: "It's a wonderful world, Hobbes old buddy! Let's go exploring!" A boy and his tiger. A boy and his penguin. Goodnight Opus. Goodnight Moon. A boy and his bear in an enchanted forest, not here, playing.

dlww at 12/23/2008 11:48:00 AM