“The scarf I was wearing had been hand-colored a blunt red. It was tied around my neck like a choker, like a noose. But it wasn’t me who was about to hang.”
“People say a mother is only as happy as her least happy child. But what if the state of that child’s happiness has become a mystery? What if that child is no longer a child but a young man who has removed himself to a great distance and encased himself in a great silence?”
“Denial, as any addict in recovery will tell you, is not defined as knowing something and pretending you don’t; it is failing to see it at all.”
“I suppose unrequited love is the hardest kind to shed because it is not really love at all. It is a half-love, and we are forever stomping around trying to get hold of the other half.”
“Perhaps blame is the way the universe organizes itself around tragedy and loss. Without blame, suffering is random, and that kind of randomness leads to madness.”
“It was so undignified and unnecessary, the way married people behaved. The indiscriminate airing of grievances, the incessant flinging of blame and complaint. Of course, I had no idea back then what a marriage required. How the resentments and oversights and misunderstandings could pile up, sometimes moving ordinary kindness beyond reach. Love piled up, too, if you were lucky, but it seemed to be locked away in a separate compartment, sometimes unreachable when it was needed most.”
“If, when I looked, I was not perfect, how could I be beautiful? And if I was not beautiful, how could I be loved? I was not the only woman who ran that script.”
“Somebody said—some poet, I can’t remember which one—that unrequited love is the best kind. But I can tell you with certainty, Robbie, that the other kind of love, the kind I received from your father for more than two decades, is far more necessary.”
“I told him because I wanted what everybody wants—to be known. To know oneself, and to tell the whole story of that self, and to be loved anyway.”
“All of it was rushing together, making a psychedelic mess of my heart.”
“After all, experiencing something is not the same as remembering it. A memory is by its nature a revision.”
“They say the human body can lose 50 percent of its body parts and survive. But it depends on which parts, and which body.”
“The heart is large, and there is more than one material in the bucket we call love.”
“What happens to a marriage? A persistent failure of kindness, triggered at first, at least in my case, by the inequities of raising children, the sacrifices that take a woman by surprise and that she expects to be matched by her mate but that biology ensures cannot be. Anything could set me off. Any innocuous habit or slight or oversight. The way your father left the lights of the house blazing, day and night. The way he could become so distracted at work that sometimes when I called, he’d put me on hold and forget me, only remembering again when I’d hung up and called back. The way he wore his pain so privately, whistling around the house after we’d had a spat, pretending nonchalance, protecting you and your sisters from discord, hiding behind his good nature, inadvertently calling out my ill nature in the process, persisting in being optimistic, and cheerful, and affectionate, when there was clearly no call for any of that.”
“Watching you together—your hair and eyes, your flesh and bone, your three bodies so frank and solid in the world—gave me immeasurable pleasure. It was pleasure derived not from parental pride, but from gratitude. We had been blessed by the existence on this earth of our three particular children, and we had been assigned a blessed task in keeping you all safe in the world.”
