Bathrobe Quotes

Just his luck he was related to this grubby old dude. He hoped all sons of Neptune didn't share the same fate. First, you start carrying a man satchel. Next thing you know, you're running around in a bathrobe and pink bunny slippers, chasing chickens with a weed whacker.

You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest.

Bring it, Darth Bathrobe!

First, you start carrying a man satchel. Next thing you know, you're running around in a bathrobe and pink bunny slippers, chasing chickens with a weed whacker.

Are you insane? I'm not going to change my mind." "Yes you will." Braden sighed. "We're going to need each other through this. All of us. But if you can't do that, then I'm going to play hardball. I'm going to do whatever it takes. Some of it will frustrate you, some of it will turn on, and some of it will hopefully really piss you off." "You are insane." "No." We spun around to see Ellie standing in the kitchen doorway in her bathrobe, wearing a small, exhausted but determined smile. "He's fighting for what he wants.

From my observation, the older you get, the more you like the word cozy. That's why most of the elderly wear pants with elastic waistbands. If they wear pants at all. This may explain why grandparents are in love with buying grand kids pajamas and bathrobes.

Surely it wasn't possible that Vin diPietro was the first assignment. "Hello?" DiPietro waved. "You in there?" Nah, Jim thought. Can't be. That would be above and beyond any call of duty. Over the guy's shoulder, the commercial that was on the TV suddenly showed a price of $49.99-no, $29.99, with a little red arrow that ... considering where Vin was standing, poined right at his head. "Sh*t, no" Jim muttered. This was the guy? On the Tv screen, some woman in a pink bathrobe smiled up at the camera and mouthed, Yes, it is!

Then he got up and wandered off in his bathrobe to pour more divine Kool-Aid.

She wore a loose bathrobe that covered up a body that would have won first prize in a beauty contest for cement blocks.....She had a voice that made pearl harbour sound like a lullaby.

You have what we in France call ‘good time teeth,’” she said. “Why on earth would you want to change them?” “Um, because I can floss with the sash to my bathrobe?

A bathrobe answered the door. Inside it, a woman...

When she faced the noise, she found the mayor’s wife in a brand-new bathrobe and slippers. On the breast pocket of the robe sat an embroidered swastika. Propaganda even reached the bathroom.

Frankly, I don’t think of us as gods, either. I mean, once you’ve seen Thor passed out on the floor, or Odin in his bathrobe, yelling at Frigg because she used his toothbrush…it’s hard to see much divinity in my family

This is your heritage,' he said, as if from this dance we could know about his own childhood, about the flavor and grit of tenement buildings in Spanish Harlem, and projects in Red Hook, and dance halls, and city parks, and about his own Paps, how he beat him, how he taught him to dance, as if we could hear Spanish in his movements, as if Puerto Rico was a man in a bathrobe, grabbing another beer from the fridge and raising it to drink, his head back, still dancing, still steeping and snapping perfectly in time.

What the monkey!” My dad slammed through my door and burst into my room wearing nothing but his bathrobe. We all looked up at him in surprise. “You tell us,” I said. “Oh.” My dad actually looked sheepish. “It’s one o’clock in the morning and I was going to tell you to shut the monkey up and go to bed. I didn’t realize what was going on in here.” “What’s going on in here?” Cameron asked suspiciously. “Maturity.” My dad backed out of the room and closed the door.

The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some bizarre wartime bomb shelter of the unconscious.

He didn't say anything. Then he leaned closer, so that his arm touched my shoulder. A jolt ran down my body. Everyone in our little group watched, waiting for a response. "I would be honored to escort you, Katrina." "Oh. Okay." I pulled the bathrobe collar as high as it would go to hide my flaming cheeks. Malcolm slapped his hand on his knee, then turned to the man sitting next to us and said,way too loudly, "I'm taking Katrina to the Solstice Festival." "Good for you kid.

Patrick walked in dressed in an utterly unmentionable bathrobe. I was pretty sure that Disney wouldn’t have approved of what their cartoon characters were doing on that dark blue satin background. On the other hand, I was really glad he had on the bathrobe.

He came up behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders; bending low, he put his lips close to the nape of her neck. “How about a kiss for your jailbird brother?” he said. She turned halfway, as if to touch her lips to his cheek but he slid a palm down her back and tipped her face up to his and kissed her full on the mouth—not a brotherly kiss, there was no mistaking it for that, but a long, slow, greedy kiss, messy and voluptuous. His bathrobe fell slightly open as his left hand sank from her chin to neck, collarbone, base of throat, his fingertips just inside the edge of her thin polka-dot shirt and trembling over the warm skin there.

What brings us anywhere? You take one turn instead of another, you meet one woman instead of another, you have good health or you don't, luck vies with misfortune, you break down and arrive at Bellevue in your bathrobe on a Saturday morning or - what was his father's antique phrase - you pulled up your socks and got on with things. Your heart adapted to changing times. Your body did. Or it did not and you passed your days in a muffler of regret. And that was what they called intelligent design.

Hey…yeah. Okay.” Percy rubbed his eyes. Just his luck he was related to this grubby old dude. He hoped all sons of Neptune didn’t share the same fate. First, you start carrying a man satchel. Next thing you know, you’re running around in a bathrobe and pink bunny slippers, chasing chickens with a weed whacker.

I once read that Martha Stewart never wears a bathrobe. Not that I like Martha Stewart, nobody likes Martha Stewart, I don’t think even Martha Stewart likes Martha Stewart.

The bathrobe was magenta, a colour that still makes him anxious whenever he sees it.

I do admit, I am quite threatening.” He’s wearing a bathrobe and slippers.

What do you mean there is no bathrobe in my suite??!!

Instead she was a spectator—a strange woman in a bathrobe, watching through the window. But she was going to get her life back. That was exactly what she’d come to Pleasant Court to do.

Like hell he was," said the first C.I.D. man. "I'm the C.I.D. man arround here." Major Major could barely recognize him because he was wearing a faded maroon corduroy bathrobe with open seams under both arms, linty flannel pajamas, & worn house slippers with one flapping sole.

A while later Catch woke to the sound of the bathroom door opening. Hallie emerged wearing a white bathrobe, which hung suggestively low, revealing the slender line of her neck where it met her perfect collarbone. Her hair was damp and her skin shone ethereally in the golden glow of the lamplight, smooth, flawless, like porcelain polished to perfection. She smiled and for a moment Catch was left breathless.

Alice's robes were seasonal. She hadn't exactly planned it that way, but that's how it evolved. In winter there was a long, warm, deep purple terry-cloth robe. In spring she changed to a new blue-and-white cotton kimono. In summer there was a white chenille bathrobe with a pattern on it, and in the fall she wore a cotton robe her husband had bought her as a surprise gift. They were useful, practical garments, but when she thought about it, she realized she wore them as much for the feelings and memories they evoked as much as their physical comfort. When I told her I thought her robes had become like temple garments, she smiled,"Yes.

Brody let out a humorless laugh. “You should see the looks you get riding the subway at two a.m. with an eighteen-year-old you just pulled out of a crack house and a seventy-year-old woman in a bathrobe and curlers.

Dorothy's coming up. I think she's tight." "That's great." I picked up my bathrobe. "I was afraid I was going to have to get some sleep." She was bending over looking for her slippers. "Don't be such an old fluff. You can sleep all day." She found her slippers and stood up in them. "Is she really as afraid of her mother as she says?" "If she's got any sense. Mimi's poison." Nora screwed up her dark eyes at me and asked slowly: "What are you holding out on me?" "Oh, dear," I said, " I was hoping I wouldn't have to tell you. Dorothy is really my daughter. I didn't know what I was doing, Nora. It was spring in Venice and I was so young and there was a moon over the..." "Be funny. Don't you want something to eat?

Mail finally arrived for some troops—many had received nothing for two months or more—and Christmas packages often implied a certain homefront incomprehension of life in the combat zone: bathrobes, slippers, and phonograph records were particularly popular.

By the time she was standing up and in her bathrobe the day had fallen into its routine; after the first involuntary rebellion against every day’s alarm she subsided regularly into the shower, make-up, dress, breakfast schedule which would take her through the beginning of the day and out into the morning where she could forget the green grass and the hot sun and begin to look forward to dinner and the evening.

All day, I worried—what if she resorts to the bathrobe sweater at the last minute? What if she gets something in her teeth and doesn’t notice? What if this guy doesn’t see how totally adorable she is? What if he hurts her feelings? Saturday night, I went to a movie with a friend, but the whole night I was checking my phone to see if my mother had called or texted. When she finally called at midnight, I picked up the phone on the first ring. “How was it?” “Aw, it didn’t go so well.” My heart sank. I was already hatching revenge plots against the cad when she continued, “He was nice, but I’m not sure I’m interested.” I breathed a sigh of relief. Not everyone is lucky enough to hang out with my fashionable, smooth, totally cool mom. Just me.

Nine-thirty. I throw on my bathrobe. With soap in one hand, and potty, hairpins, panties, curlers and a wad of cotton in the other, I hurry out of the bathroom. The next in line invariably calls me back to remove the gracefully curved but unsightly hairs that I’ve left in the sink. Ten o’clock. Time

In his faded tartan bathrobe and brown leather slippers with the rundown heels, his hair all in sleep corkscrews and Alfalfa cowlicks, he looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way. (jesus

It would be incorrect in every sense to say that so near the end of his life he had lost his faith, when in fact God seemed more abundant to him in the Regina Cleri home than any place he had been before. God was in the folds of his bathrobe, the ache of his knees. God saturated the hallways in the form of a pale electrical light. But now that his heart had become so shiftless and unreliable, now that he should be sensing the afterlife like a sweet scent drifting in from the garden, he had started to wonder if there was in fact no afterlife at all. Look at all these true believers who wanted only to live, look at himself, cling onto this life like a squirrel scrambling up the icy pitch of a roof. In suggesting that there may be nothing ahead of them, he in no way meant to diminish the future; instead, Father Sullivan hoped to elevate the present to a state of the divine. It seemed from this moment of repose that God may well have been life itself. God may have been the baseball games, the beautiful cigarette he smoked alone after checking to see that all the bats had been put back behind the closet door. God could have been the masses in which he had told people how best to prepare for the glorious life everlasting, the one they couldn't see as opposed to the one they were living at that exact moment in the pews of the church hall, washed over in stained glass light. How wrongheaded it seemed now to think that the thrill of heartbeat and breath were just a stepping stone to something greater. What could be greater than the armchair, the window, the snow? Life itself had been holy. We had been brought forth from nothing to see the face of God and in his life Father Sullivan had seen it miraculously for eighty-eight years. Why wouldn't it stand to reason that this had been the whole of existence and now he would retreat back to the nothingness he had come from in order to let someone else have their turn at the view. This was not the workings of disbelief. It was instead a final, joyful realization of all he had been given. It would be possible to overlook just about anything if you were trained to constantly strain forward to see the power and the glory that was waiting up ahead. What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for him.

Janine bit her lip. She was still holding Mimi’s hand, patting it gently. “I don’t think we’re supposed to move her,” she said, “but we should keep her warm. Let’s cover her with her bathrobe and try to put her slippers on. Then I’ll stay in here, and you go wait outside so you can show the paramedics where to come.” “Okay,” I replied. I got Mimi’s robe and fuzzy slippers out of her closet. Janine put the slippers on while I covered Mimi. Then I ran outside and stood impatiently on our front stoop.

On Saturday Ben and I drove to Johns Island to see Skyfall.” “You did?” Hi asked sharply. “Thanks for the invite, jerks.” Shelton raised his palms. “You were at temple. We’re supposed to just wait around? Plus, you’ve seen that move like five times.” “You still could’ve asked,” Hi grumbled. “I don’t—” “Guys!” I clapped my hands once. “The story, please.” “An hour in, I go for a popcorn refill.” Shelton shuddered. “When I get back, Ben’s sitting in the dark, flaring away, and he’s not even wearing his sunglasses! I almost wet myself. He said he wanted to watch the movie in HD. Man, I don’t remember a single minute from the rest of the film.” “In a theater!?” My temper exploded. “That stupid mother—” “Hiram!” Our heads whipped. Ruth Stolowitski was standing on her front stoop. “Get back in here this instant! You’re not dressed.” Ruth wore a fuzzy pink bathrobe, her free hand vising the garment closed. Her eyes darted, as if worried that cagey perverts were surveilling our remote island, waiting for just this opportunity to get an eyeful.

And that got him to realize that, dressed only in his bathrobe, he was just one gust of wind away from being sued by our entire neighborhood for crimes against humanity. Even now his Poocha Loocha Libre boxers were disturbingly visible. I'd seen them before-they were a Father's Day present from me-but never on him. So now I needed to go eat my own eyeballs.

He pulls on a bathrobe and throws on his running shoes, which haven’t gotten much mileage on them of late.

A coat without buttons is still a bathrobe. And buttons shouldn’t be talking shit about the naked guy in the shower if they’d care to remain buttons.

A bathrobe answered the door.

My mug had a reindeer in a bathrobe and slippers with Christmas lights laced in its antlers, toasting the merry season with champagne and saying, “Bingle Jells.

What made it even more depressing, old Spencer had on this very sad, ratty old bathrobe that he was probably born in or something.

First, you start carrying a man satchel. Next thing you know, you’re running around in a bathrobe and pink bunny slippers, chasing chickens with a weed whacker.

He was dressed in a plaid bathrobe and bunny slippers

They always ate and made tea on the alcohol lamp before going to bed. This was quite in the German tradition, Tilda said. Germans in their homes ate six meals a day: breakfast, second breakfast, dinner, afternoon coffee, supper and in the evening tea or beer with sandwiches and kuchen. Betsy, in the cherry-red bathrobe, and Tilda in a blue one, feasted merrily.

Perry, the manager, had come up with him, in trousers and bathrobe. He was a stout, jovial-looking man ordinarily, but right now he was only stout. ("The Room With Something Wrong")

He was standing motionless in front of the closed elevator door. In his faded tartan bathrobe and brown leather slippers with the rundown heels, his hair all in sleep corkscrews and Alfalfa cowlicks, he looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.

Before eight a man came down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly water, and much grunting and loud breathing, floundered a minute in the sea.

It made me think of the way so many of us live our lives. We can see what we want, and nearly kill ourselves trying to get it in a way that’s not working. Meanwhile, if we just stopped, got quiet for a minute or two, and looked at things a little differently, we’d notice the door to what we want being held open for us by the nice lady in the bathrobe across the room. Then all we’d have to do is fly through it.

Sophia thought about the bathrobe more and more. The thing living in it was as quick as lightning but could lie in wait for days without moving. It could make itself thin and slide through a crack in the door, and then roll itself up again and crawl under the bed like a shadow. It didn't eat and never slept and hated everyone, most of all its own family. Sophia didn't eat either, that is, nothing but sandwiches.

He introduced me to want, the gateway drug. He introduced me to my body. Made me unafraid of it. I fell in love with him, with mornings making coffee in his small Chelsea apartment, days in plush bathrobes talking books and philosophy, going out to dinner at the best hole-in-the-wall spots (he knew them all) and taking long walks over the Brooklyn Bridge at night, eating truck ice cream on the waterfront. Kissing with rainbow sprinkles in our teeth.

With a brutal tug he pulled off her bathrobe before she had. time to resist and he loomed over an abyss of newly washed nudity whose skin color, lines of fuzz, and hidden moles had all been imagined in the shadows of the other rooms.

I could feel a terrific lecture coming on. I didn’t mind the idea so much, but I didn’t feel like being lectured to and smell Vicks Nose Drops and look at old Spencer in his pajamas and bathrobe all at the same time. I really didn’t.

From Bertrand Russell’s “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish”: “I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious — for instance, the nuns who never take a bath without wearing a bathrobe all the time. When asked why, since no man can see them, they reply: ‘Oh, but you forget the good God.’ Apparently they conceive of the Deity as a Peeping Tom, whose omniscience enables him to see through bathroom walls, but who is foiled by bathrobes.

These things matter to me, Daniel, says the man with six days to live. They are sitting on the porch in the last light. These things matter to me, son. The way the hawks huddle their shoulders angrily against hissing snow. Wrens whirring in the bare bones of bushes in winter. The way swallows and swifts veer and whirl and swim and slice and carve and curve and swerve. The way that frozen dew outlines every blade of grass. Salmonberries thimbleberries cloudberries snowberries elderberries salalberries gooseberries. My children learning to read. My wife's voice velvet in my ear at night in the dark under the covers. Her hair in my nose as we slept curled like spoons. The sinuous pace of rivers and minks and cats. Fresh bread with too much butter. My children's hands when they cup my face in their hands. Toys. Exuberance. Mowing the lawn. Tiny wrenches and screwdrivers. Tears of sorrow, which are the salt sea of the heart. Sleep in every form from doze to bone-weary. Pay stubs. Trains. The shivering ache of a saxophone and the yearning of a soprano. Folding laundry hot from the dryer. A spotless kitchen floor. The sound of bagpipes. The way horses smell in spring. Red wines. Furnaces. Stone walls. Sweat. Postcards on which the sender has written so much that he or she can barely squeeze in the signature. Opera on the radio. Bathrobes, back rubs. Potatoes. Mink oil on boots. The bands at wedding receptions. Box-elder bugs. The postman's grin. Linen table napkins. Tent flaps. The green sifting powdery snow of cedar pollen on my porch every year. Raccoons. The way a heron labors through the sky with such a vast elderly dignity. The cheerful ears of dogs. Smoked fish and the smokehouses where fish are smoked. The way barbers sweep up circles of hair after a haircut. Handkerchiefs. Poems read aloud by poets. Cigar-scissors. Book marginalia written with the lightest possible pencil as if the reader is whispering to the writer. People who keep dead languages alive. Fresh-mown lawns. First-basemen's mitts. Dish-racks. My wife's breasts. Lumber. Newspapers folded under arms. Hats. The way my children smelled after their baths when they were little. Sneakers. The way my father's face shone right after he shaved. Pants that fit. Soap half gone. Weeds forcing their way through sidewalks. Worms. The sound of ice shaken in drinks. Nutcrackers. Boxing matches. Diapers. Rain in every form from mist to sluice. The sound of my daughters typing their papers for school. My wife's eyes, as blue and green and gray as the sea. The sea, as blue and green and gray as her eyes. Her eyes. Her.

Triton’s trident, they put the Royals on trial! But as much as Galen would love to throw that in their faces, he won’t. This is his one chance, however small it is, to turn things around for him and Emma. And he’s not about to toss that chance to sea with both hands. Rachel has pulled more chairs out to accommodate the gathering. The table they circle is shinier than Emma’s lip gloss. Unlike the human meetings Galen has attended with Rachel to sell his underwater finds, there is no paperwork on the table, no cups of coffee, no cell phones. Also unlike human meetings, most participants are either dressed in bathing suits or bathrobes. Leave it to Rachel’s creative hospitality. It is a sight Galen will never forget, seeing the elderly council of Archives sit uncomfortably in human chairs. If the situation weren’t so dire, he’d have to laugh. Especially since Tandel’s bathrobe has the human symbol of peace all over it in fluorescent colors. “Thank you for coming,” Galen says. He takes his place next to Grom, who sits at the head of the table. Appropriately, Antonis sits at the head of the other end, accompanied by Rayna and Toraf. Emma is at Galen’s left side. He doesn’t need to look at her to know she’s scowling at him.

Sometime later, I stood watching the cold rain fall, when suddenly I felt Daemon's arms around me and his lips on my neck. He loved my pregnant body and his hands roamed over it under the warm terrycloth of my bathrobe. I was lost in the moment, content to stay here forever...lost in the cold rain and welcoming warmth of Dublin, and lost in the arms of my husband. Since we arrived early this morning we were in our room, making love and sleeping, lost in a fairy tale moment, savoring every caress.

She grinned at her husband. He was wearing a blue towelling bathrobe that was too small for him, and it showed his long, muscular legs. ‘You’re not so bad yourself,’ she said, and she picked up the phone. It was her mother. ‘Happy Christmas,’ she said.

This was a different, more affable energy, with the pills: a combination of sluggishness and brightness, a bemused, goofy, floating quality. His walk was looser. He napped more, nodded agreeably, lost the thread of his arguments, ambled about barefoot with his bathrobe halfway open.

Her kiss is hungry, as if long deprived. As if they didn’t already spend the morning doing just exactly this, making up for the lost time they were apart. Triton’s trident, I could do this all day. Then he catches himself. No, I couldn’t. Not without wanting more. Which is why we need to stop. Instead, he entwines his hands in her hair, and she teases his lips with her tongue, trying to get him to fully open his mouth to her. He gladly complies. Her fingers sneak their way under his shirt, up his stomach, sending a trail of fire to his chest. He is about to lose his shirt altogether. Until Antonis’s voice booms from the doorway. “Extract yourself from Prince Galen, Emma,” he says. “You two are not mated. This behavior is inappropriate for any Syrena, let alone a Royal.” Emma’s eyes go round as sand dollars. He can tell she’s not sure what to think about her grandfather telling her what to do. Or maybe she’s caught off guard that he called her a Royal. Either way, like most people, Emma decides to obey. Galen does, too. They stand up side by side, not daring to be close enough to touch. They behold King Antonis in a polka-dot bathrobe, and though he’s the one who looks silly, they are the ones who look shamed. Galen feels like a fingerling again. “I apologize, Highness,” he says. It seems like all he does lately is apologize to the Poseidon king. “It was my fault.” Antonis gives him a reproving look. “I like you, young prince. But you well know the law. Do not disappoint me, Galen. My granddaughter is deserving of a proper mating ceremony.” Galen can’t meet his eyes. He’s right. I shouldn’t be flirting with temptation like this. With the Archives on their way-or possibly here already-there is a distant but small chance that he and Emma can still live within the confines of the law. That they can still live as mates under the Syrena tradition. And he almost just blew it. What if it had gone too far? Then his mating with Emma would forever be blemished by breaking the law. “It won’t happen again, Highness.” Not until we’re mated, anyway. “Um. Did you just promise not to kiss me ever again?” Emma whispers. “Can we talk about this later? The Archives are obviously here, angelfish.” She’s on the verge of a fit, he can tell. “He’s just looking out for us,” Galen says quickly. “I agree, we need to respect the law-“ At this her fit subsides as if it was never there. She smiles wide at him. He can’t decide if it’s genuine, or if it’s the kind of smile she gives him when he’ll pay for something later. “Okay, Galen.” “Galen, Emma,” Nalia calls from the dining room, saving him from making a fool of himself. “Everyone is here.” Emma gives him a look that clearly says, “We’re so not done with this conversation.” Then she turns and walks away. Galen takes a second to regain a little bit of composure-which kissing Emma tends to steal from him. Then there’s the mortification of being interrupted by-Get it together, idiot.

Her bathrobe came off with one sweep, exposing her silky skin, fragrant from the bath. Perfect, he marveled, even as part of him wondered when his tastes had changed so radically. Small breasts, boyishly slender hips, long, long legs. Mine! On that fierce thought, he proceeded to brand her with his mouth.

September Day sloshed another half cup of coffee into the giant #1-Bitch mug, and glared out the frosty breakfast nook windows. North Texas didn’t get snow. That’s why she’d moved back home—well, one of several reasons. She shivered, relishing the warmth of the beverage, and toasted the storm with a curse. “Damn false advertising.” Her cat Macy meowed agreement. The blizzard drove icy wind through cracks in the antique windows and made the just-in-case candles on the dark countertop sputter. She pulled the fuzzy bathrobe closer around her neck. Normally the kitchen’s stained glass spilled peacock-bright color into the kitchen.

I am constantly mystified by what John ends up remembering… I just don’t understand why he’s able to hang on to information like that, while so many other more important memories evaporate. Then again, I suppose so much of what stays with us is often insignificant. The memories we take to the ends of our lives have no real rhyme or reason, especially when you think of the endless things that you do over the course of a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. All the cups of coffee, hand-washings, changes of clothes, lunches, goings to the bathroom, headaches, naps, walks to school, trips to the grocery store, conversations about the weather—all the things so unimportant they should be immediately forgotten. Yet they aren’t. I often think of the Chinese red bathrobe I had when I was twenty-seven years old; the sound of our first cat Charlie’s feet on the linoleum of our old house; the hot rarefied air around aluminum pot the moment before the kernels of popcorn burst open. I think of these things as often as I think about getting married or giving birth or the end of the Second World War. What is truly amazing is that before you know it, sixty years go by and you can remember maybe eight or nine important events, along with a thousand meaningless ones. How can that be? You want to think there’s a pattern to it all because it makes you feel better, gives you some sense of a reason why we’re here, but there really isn’t any. People look for God in these patterns, these reasons, but only because they don’t know where else to look. Things happen to us: some of it important, most of it not, and a little of it stays with us till the end. What stays after that? I’ll be damned if I know. (pp.174-175)

I forgot to take off the inside lens cap cap... P.S. I quit." Dad threw off the covers and reached for his bathrobe. For the first time in two weeks he spoke: "I'll track him down to the ends of the earth," he croaked. "I'll take a blunt hook and pull his tonsils out by the byjingoed roots, just like I promised him. He doesn't quit. He's fired.

The Internet was known for having more gender benders than a drag race without cars.

Kass dragged home a stray kitten she found when she was a little girl. I would do anything to make that girl happy. But not a cat. She doesn't deserve that. No one does.

Just because we haven't charted a logical path to the conclusion yet doesn't preclude it from existing.

he threw the Golden Gilded Dragon Spoon of +10 SHUT THE HELL UP right at the bald Axe Knight.

Let the monsters in their minds and the beer in their guts tell them the words they need to find courage,

Then I dried myself in my soft bathrobe, shaved very carefully, put on fresh underwear and a shirt, a perfectly pressed gray suit, shiny shoes, my nicest tie and in this way, drawing on all the best things I had available, I started to feel the courage to move forward. It was a way of fooling myself, of course, but it worked : you can judge a book by its cover.

The door opened all the way. The man in the dusty bathrobe was short, with iron-gray hair and craggy features. He wore gray pinstripe pants, shiny from age, and slippers. He held an unfiltered cigarette with square-tipped fingers, sucking the tip while keeping it cupped in his fist—like a convict, thought Shadow, or a soldier. He extended his left hand to Wednesday.

I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious--for instance, the nuns who never take a bath without wearing a bathrobe all the time. When asked why, since no man can see them, they reply: "Oh, but you forget the good God." Apparently they conceive of the Deity add a Peeping Tom, whose omnipotence enables Him to see through bathroom walls, but who is foiled by bathrobes.

Very quietly, James slipped out of bed and shrugged into his bathrobe. The stone floor was cool under his feet as he stood and listened, tilting his head. He turned slowly, and as he looked toward the door, the figure there moved. He hadn’t seen it appear, it was simply there, floating, where a moment before there had been darkness. James startled and backed into his bed, almost falling backwards onto it. Then he recognized the ghostly shape. It was the same wispy, white figure he’d seen chase the interloper off the school grounds, the ghostly shape that had come to look like a young man as it came back to the castle. In the darkness of the doorway, the figure seemed much brighter than it had appeared in the morning sunlight. It was wispy and shifting, with only the barest suggestion of its human shape. It spoke again without moving.

At one-thirty in the deep dark morning, the cooking odors blew up through the windy corridors of the house. Down the stairs, one by one, came women in curlers, men in bathrobes, to tiptoe and peer into the kitchen- lit only by fitful gusts of red fire from the hissing stove. And there in the black kitchen at two of a warm summer morning, Grandma floated like an apparition, amidst bangings and clatterings, half blind once more, her fingers groping instinctively in the dimness, shaking out spice clouds over bubbling pots and simmering kettles, her face in the firelight red, magical, and enchanted as she seized and stirred and poured the sublime foods. Quiet, quiet, the boarders laid the best linens and gleaming silver and lit candles rather than switch on electric lights and snap the spell. Grandfather, arriving home from a late evening's work at the printing office, was startled to hear grace being said in the candlelit dining room. As for the food? The meats were deviled, the sauces curried, the greens mounded with sweet butter, the biscuits splashed with jeweled honey; everything toothsome, luscious, and so miraculously refreshing that a gentle lowing broke out as from a pasturage of beasts gone wild in clover. One and all cried out their gratitude for their loose-fitting night clothes.

Son of Neptune!” Phineas exclaimed. “I thought I smelled the ocean on you, Percy Jackson. I’m also a son of Neptune, you know.” “Hey…yeah. Okay.” Percy rubbed his eyes. Just his luck he was related to this grubby old dude. He hoped all sons of Neptune didn’t share the same fate. First, you start carrying a man satchel. Next thing you know, you’re running around in a bathrobe and pink bunny slippers, chasing chickens with a weed whacker.

Go away,” she said voicelessly. Aureliano, smiled, picked her up by the waist with both hands like a pot of begonias, and dropped her on her back on the bed. With a brutal tug he pulled off her bathrobe before she had time to resist and he loomed over an abyss of newly washed nudity whose skin color, lines of fuzz, and hidden moles had all been imagined in the shadows of the other rooms. Amaranta Úrsula defended herself sincerely with the astuteness of a wise woman, weaseling her slippery, flexible, and fragrant weasel’s body as she tried to knee him in the kidneys and scorpion his face with her nails, but without either of them giving a gasp that might not have been taken for that”“breathing of a person watching the meager April sunset through the open window. It was a fierce fight, a battle to the death, but it seemed to be without violence because it consisted of distorted attacks and ghostly evasions, slow, cautious, solemn, so that during it all there was time for the petunias to bloom and for Gaston to forget about his aviator’s dream in the next room, as if they were two enemy lovers seeking reconciliation at the bottom of an aquarium. In the heat of that savage and ceremonious struggle, Amaranta Úrsula understood that her meticulous silence was so irrational that it could awaken the suspicions of her nearby husband much more than the sound of warfare that they were trying to avoid. Then she began to laugh with her lips tight together, without giving up the fight, but defending herself with false bites and deweaseling her body little by little until they both were conscious of being adversaries and accomplices at the same time and the affray degenerated into a conventional gambol and the attacks became”“caresses. Suddenly, almost playfully, like one more bit of mischief, Amaranta Úrsula dropped her defense, and when she tried to recover, frightened by what she herself had made possible, it was too late. A great commotion immobilized her in her center of gravity, planted her in her place, and her defensive will was demolished by the irresistible anxiety to discover what the orange whistles and the invisible globes on the other side of death were like. She barely had time to reach out her hand and grope for the towel to put a gag between her teeth so that she would not let out the cat howls that were already tearing at her insides.

Then I didn’t think much about it, I just did it. I started wearing some of the things he left behind, especially his bathrobe, some shirts too, but only in the house. I read his books, I am embarrassed at this. I also did some things to the place I knew he would like. He always complained about my plants, so I got rid of them. It seems strange to think about it now, but at the time I found some comfort in it. [ACCOUNTANT, AGE 38, SEPARATED AFTER LIVING TOGETHER 13 YEARS]

My closet door wouldn't close. I pushed. I leaned on it. I eventually realized that my bathrobe sleeve was blocking the latch. When I opened the door to deal with the problem, most of the clothing I had tried and rejected tumbled out onto my feet. I shoveled my jeans,two of Sienna's sweaters, and one of her skirts back in.She would have a fit if she saw, but I reasoned she would have more of a fit if I shoved her things under the bed, with its resident dust wombats and lost charcoal pencils.

Whether you can kill a spider or not. Whether the one-size-fits-all bathrobe swallows you or won’t cover you. Whether you are having victory in every area of your life or not. Whether you just lost your temper (again) or indulged in a fantasy, another cookie, or thoughts of self-contempt. You are loved. Right here in this very moment, you are loved and pursued and seen by the One who sees everything. He knows you better than you know yourself, and you have never been a disappointment to him.

I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's "control" not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the warm skin of which he felt a "teleplastic" mass that appeared to the touch uncommonly like cold, uncooked liver. ("The Vane Sisters")

...this so-called animisn that not so much the Fan Nannies but everybody else around here subscribes to. can we really just write it off as primitive superstition run amok? Do only human beings have souls, or is that a narcissistic, chauvinistic piece of self-flattery? I mean, can't we look at that great old teak tree over there or at this gulch, and see as much of the divine in them as in some ol' anthropomorphic Sunday school Boom Daddy with imaginary long gray whiskers and a platinum bathrobe? Are we capable of entertaining the possibility that there may have been a holy entity in the cross as well as on it?

Paterson was not a member of the club. [..] When Paterson wanted to swim he took a towel and swam in the river naked and his Burmese boy stood on the bank with his bath-robe and waited to rub him down. 'I like to swim in water, not people,' was a remark of Paterson's that for a long time went round the club.

That's point one," I said, affecting unaffectedness. "Points two through ten have to do with that ridiculous list your father made you as to how to deal with ... me." Watson had the grace to wince. His father had given him a strange little journal into which he had compiled a list of suggestions for how to handle one's Holmes (as though I were a small-breed dog or similar), drawing not only from Dr. Watson's own accounts but also from his own efforts with my uncle Leander back when they'd been flatmates. This was absurd on many levels. Leander was very easy to live with. He hardly ever stalked around anymore with a pistol in his bathrobe pocket.

I had to ask Scottie what TYVM meant, because now that I’ve narrowed into her activities, I notice she is constantly text-messaging her friends, or at least I hope it’s her friends and not some perv in a bathrobe. “Thank you very much,” Scottie said, and for some reason, the fact that I didn’t get this made me feel completely besieged. It’s crazy how much fathers are supposed to know these days. I come from the school of thought where a dad’s absence is something to be counted on. Now I see all the men with camouflage diaper bags and babies hanging from their chests like little ship figureheads. When I was a young dad, I remember the girls sort of bothered me as babies, the way everyone raced around to accommodate them. The sight of Alex in her stroller would irritate me at times—she’d hang one of her toddler legs over the rim of the safety bar and slouch down in the seat. Joanie would bring her something and she’d shake her head, then Joanie would try again and again until an offering happened to work and Alex would snatch it from her hands. I’d look at Alex, finally complacent with her snack, convinced there was a grown person in there, fooling us all. Scottie would just point to things and grunt or scream. It felt like I was living with royalty. I told Joanie I’d wait until they were older to really get into them, and they grew and grew behind my back.

She sorted through the clothes. “Do you mind wearing Emilio’s underwear?” She turned back to him with the two different styles that she’d found. “You’re about the same size. And they’re clean. They were wrapped in a paper package, like from a laundry service.” Max gave her a look, because along with the very nice, very expensive pair of black silk boxers she’d pilfered from Emilio, she’d also borrowed one of his thongs. “What?” Gina said. It was definitely a man-thong. It had all that extra room for various non-female body parts. “Don’t be ridiculous.” “I’m not,” she said, trying to play it as serious. “One, it’s been a while, maybe your tastes have changed. And two, these might actually be more comfortable, considering the placement of your bandage and—” He took the boxers from her. “Apparently I was wrong.” She turned away and started sorting through the pairs of pants and Bermuda shorts she’d grabbed, trying not to be too obvious about the fact that she was watching him out of the corner of her eye. To make sure he didn’t fall over. Right. After he got the boxers on, he took off the bathrobe and . . . Okay, he definitely wasn’t as skinny as he’d been after his lengthy stint in the hospital. Emilio’s pants probably weren’t going to fit him, after all. Although, there was one pair that looked like they’d be nice and loose . . . There they were. The Kelly green Bermuda shorts. Max gave her another one of those you’ve-got-to-be-kidding glances as he put the bathrobe over the back of another chair. “Do I really look as if I’ve ever worn shorts that color in my entire life?” She tried not to smile. “I honestly don’t think you have much choice.” She let herself look at him. “You know, you could just go with the boxers. At least until your pants dry. You know what would really work with that, though? A bowtie.” She turned, as if to go back to the closet. “I’m sure Emilio has a tux. Judging from his other clothes, it’s probably polyester and chartreuse, but maybe the bowtie is—” “Gina.” Max stopped her before she reached the door. He motioned for her to come back. She held out the green shorts, but instead of taking them, he took her arm, pulled her close. “I love you,” Max said, as if he were dispatching some terrible, dire news that somehow still managed to amuse him at least a little. Gina had been hoping that he’d say it, praying even, but the fact that he’d managed to smile, even just a bit while he did, was a miracle. And then, before her heart even had a chance to start beating again, he kissed her. And oh, she was also beyond ready for that particular marvel, for the sweet softness of his mouth, for the solidness of his arms around her. There was more of him to hold her since he’d regained his fighting weight—and that was amazing, too. She skimmed her hands across the muscular smoothness of his back, his shoulders, as his kiss changed from tender to heated. And, God. That was a miracle, too. Except she couldn’t help but wonder about those words, wrenched from him, as if it cost him his soul to speak them aloud. Why tell her this right now? Yes, she’d been waiting for years for him to say that he loved her, but . . . Max laughed his surprise. “No. Why do you . . .?” He figured it out himself. “No, no, Gina, just . . . I should’ve said it before. I should have said it years ago, but I really should have said it, you know, instead of hi.” He laughed again, clearly disgusted with himself. “God, I’m an idiot. I mean, hi? I should have walked in and said, ‘Gina, I need you. I love you, don’t ever leave me again.’” She stared at him. It was probably a good thing that he hadn’t said that at the time, because she might’ve fainted. It was obvious that he wanted her to say something, but she was completely speechless.

Getting your child to sleep becomes such a blinding obsession, I myself would often lose sight of the bigger picture: What is the actual goal here? Constant sleep? No awake time? Zero consciousness? I mean, we must accept that at some point babies have to be awake. They didn’t come to the planet just to sleep. “Are we determined to get them asleep just so we can get a taste of what life was like before we had kids? Because if we are, then tell me again—why did we have a kid? Just to lie there and look soft and fuzzy? We could have just gotten, say, a peach. A St. Bernard. A narcoleptic houseguest. Or why not just get a huge chenille bathrobe? Chenille bathrobes are fuzzy and just lie there—why don’t we just get us one of those and name it Michael?

He could either move forward or go back. Simple choices in life. Choices were always simple: yes or no, backward or forward, right or wrong. Consequences were the hard part. Having to deal with the results of one's actions and what came next. Watching how it affected those around you. Living with the knowledge that it was your choice that brought you here. That's what complicated things. Choices were the easy part.

Maybe it’s not a coincidence that I’ve always been interested in heroes, starting with my dad, Phil Robertson, and my mom, Miss Kay. My other heroes are my pa and my granny, who taught me how to play cards and dominoes and everything about fishing (which was a lot), and my three older brothers, who teased me, beat me up, and sometimes let me follow them around. Not much has changed in that department. I’ve always loved movies, and when I was about seven or eight years old, I watched Rocky, Sylvester Stallone’s movie about an underdog boxer who used his fists, along with sheer will, determination, and the ability to endure pain, to make a way for himself. He fought hard but played fair and had a soft spot for his friends. I fell in love with Rocky. He was my hero, and I became obsessed. When I decide to do something, I’m all in; so I found a pair of red shorts that looked like Rocky’s boxing trunks and a navy blue bathrobe with two white stripes on the sleeve and no belt. I took off my shirt and ran around bare-chested in my robe and shorts. Most kids I knew went through a superhero phase, but they picked DC Comics guys, like Batman or Superman. Not me. I was Rocky Balboa, the Italian Stallion, and proud of it. Mom let me run around like that for a couple of years, even when we went in to town. Rocky had a girlfriend, Adrian, who was always there, always by his side. When he was beaten and blinded in a bad fight, he called out for her before anybody else. “Yo, Adrian!” he shouted in his Philly-Italian accent. He needed her. Eventually, I grew up, and the red shorts and blue bathrobe didn’t fit anymore, but I always remembered Rocky’s kindness and his courage. And that every Rocky needs an Adrian.

Her speeches were about the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home. Serena Joy didn't do this herself, she made speeches instead, but she presented this failure of hers as a sacrifice she was making for the good of all. Around that time, someone tried to shoot her and missed; her secretary, who was standing right behind her, was killed instead. Someone else planted a bomb in her car but it went off too early. Though some people said she'd put the bomb in her own car, for sympathy. That's how hot things were getting. Luke and I would watch her sometimes on the late-night news. Bathrobes, nightcaps. We'd watch her sprayed hair and her hysteria, and the tears she could still produce at will, and the mascara blackening her cheeks. By that time she was wearing more makeup. We thought she was funny. Or Luke thought she was funny. I only pretended to think so. Really she was a little frightening. She was in earnest.

his unhappiness was our fault. My mother and I got on his nerves. It was because of us he had a job he couldn’t stand. Everything we did was irritating. He particularly didn’t enjoy being around me, not that he often was: in the mornings, as I got ready for school, he sat puffy-eyed and silent over his coffee with the Wall Street Journal in front of him, his bathrobe open and his hair standing up in cowlicks, and sometimes he was so shaky that the cup sloshed as he brought it to his mouth. Warily he eyed me when I came in, nostrils flaring if I made too much noise with the silverware or the cereal bowl. Apart from this daily awkwardness, I didn’t see him much. He didn’t eat dinner with us or attend school functions; he didn’t play with me or talk to me a lot when he was at home; in fact, he was seldom home at all until after my bedtime, and some days—paydays, especially, every other Friday—he didn’t come clattering in until three or four in the morning: banging the door, dropping his briefcase, crashing and bumping around so erratically that

For five hours, he doesn't shower or change his clothes or laugh or smile or cry. It's eight in the morning when he's finally released and told to stay in the Residence and standy for further instructions. He's handed his phone, at last, but there's no answer when he calls Henry, and no response when he texts. Nothing at all. Amy walks him through the colonnade sand up the stairs, saying nothing, and when they reach the hallway between the East and West Bedrooms, he sees them. June, her hair in a haphazard knot on the top of her head and a pink bathrobe, her eyes red-rimmed. His mom, in a sharp, no-nonsense black dress and pointed heels, jaw set. Leo, barefoot in his pajamas. And his dad, a leather duffel still hanging off one shoulder, looking harried and exhausted. They all turn to look at him, and Alex feels a wave of something so much bigger than himself sweep over him like when he was a child standing bowlegged in the Gulf of Mexico, riptide sucking at his feet. A sound escapes his throat uninvited, something that he barely even recognizes, and June has him first, then the rest of them, arms and arms and hands and hands, pullin him close and touching his face and moving him until he's on the floow, the goddamn terrible hideous antique rug that he hates, sitting on the floor and staring at the rug and the threads of the rug and hearing the Gulf rushing in his ears and thinking distantly that he's having a panic attack, and that's why he can't breathe, but he's just staring at the rug and he's having a panic attack and knowing why his lungs won't work doesn't make them work again.

Eastern Standard Time Poetry speaks to all people, it is said, but here I would like to address only those in my own time zone, this proper slice of longitude that runs from pole to snowy pole down the globe through Montreal to Bogota. Oh, fellow inhabitants of this singular band, sitting up in your many beds this morning— the sun falling through the windows and casting a shadow on the sundial— consider those in other zones who cannot hear these words. They are not slipping into a bathrobe as we are, or following the smell of coffee in a timely fashion. Rather, they are at work already, leaning on copy machines, hammering nails into a house-frame. They are not swallowing a vitamin like us; rather they are smoking a cigarette under a half moon, even jumping around on a dance floor, or just now sliding under the covers, pulling down the little chains on their bed lamps. But we are not like these others, for at this very moment on the face of the earth, we are standing under a hot shower, or we are eating our breakfast, considered by people of all zones to be the most important meal of the day. Later, when the time is right, we might sit down with the boss, wash the car, or linger at a candle-lit table, but now is the hour for pouring the juice and flipping the eggs with one eye on the toaster. So let us slice a banana and uncap the jam, lift our brimming spoons of milk, and leave it to the others to lower a flag or spin absurdly in a barber's chair— those antipodal oddballs, always early or late. Let us praise Sir Stanford Fleming the Canadian genius who first scored with these lines the length of the spinning earth. Let us move together through the rest of this day passing in unison from light to shadow, coasting over the crest of noon into the valley of the evening and then, holding hands, slip into the deeper valley of night.

Geraldine nodded and headed for Mrs. Armstrong's lawn. I felt sorry for her in her carrot pajamas, having no idea what was really going on. I followed the other girls and stood behind the shrubs. Mrs. Armstrong's house was ginormous. Her house was even bigger than Aunt Jeanie's. There was one light on upstairs. I figured that was the bedroom. The rest of the house was dark. Geraldine went to the far end of the yard and removed a can of spray paint from the bag. She shook it and began to spray. "She's such an idiot," Ava said, taking out her phone to record Geraldine's act of vandalism. "You guys are going to get her into so much trouble," I said. "So what?" Hannah replied. "She got us in trouble at the soup kitchen, it's not like she's ever going to become a Silver Rose anyway. She's totally wasting her time." Geraldine slowly made her way up and down the huge yard carefully spraying the grass. It would take her forever to complete it and there wasn't nearly enough spray paint. "Hey, guys!" Geraldine yelled from across the lawn. "How about I spray a rose in the grass? That would be cool, right?" I cringed. The light on upstairs meant the Armstrongs were still awake. Geraldine was about to get us all caught. "O-M-G," Hannah moaned. "Shhhh," Summer hissed, but Geraldine kept screaming at the top of her lungs. "Well, what do you guys think?" My heart dropped into my stomach as a light from downstairs clicked on. We ducked behind the hedges and froze. "Who's out there?" called a man's voice. I couldn't see him and I couldn't see Geraldine. I heard the door close and I peeked over the hedges. "He went back inside," I whispered, ducking back down. At that moment something went shk-shk-shk and Geraldine screamed. We all stood to see what was happening. Someone had turned the sprinklers on and Geraldine was getting soaked. The door flew open and I heard Mrs. Armstrong's voice followed by a dog's vicious barking. "Get 'em, Killer!" "Killer!" Ava screamed and we all took off running down the street with a soggy Geraldine trailing behind us. I was faster than all the other girls. I had no intentions of being gobbled up by a dog named Killer. We stopped running when we got to Ava's street and Killer was nowhere in sight. We walked back to the house at a normal pace. "So, did I prove myself to the sisterhood?" Geraldine asked. Hannah turned to her. "Are you kidding me? Your yelling woke them up, you moron. We got chased down the street by a dog because of you." Geraldine frowned and looked down at the ground. Hopefully what I had told her before about the girls not being her friends was starting to settle in. Inside all the other girls wanted to know what had happened. Ava was giving them the gory details when a knock on the door interrupted her. It was Mrs. Armstrong. She had on a black bathrobe and her hair was in curlers. I chuckled to myself because I was used to seeing her look absolutely perfect. We all sat on our sleeping bags looking as innocent as possible except for Geraldine who still stood awkwardly by the door, dripping wet. Mrs. Armstrong cleared her throat. "Someone has just vandalized my lawn with spray paint. Silver spray paint. Since I know it's a tradition for the Silver Roses to pull a prank on me on the night of the retreat, I'm going to assume it was one of you. More specifically, the one who's soaking wet right now." All eyes went to Geraldine. She looked at the ground and said nothing. What could she possibly say to defend herself? She even had silver spray paint on her fingers. Mrs. Armstrong looked her up and down. "Young lady, this is your second strike and that's two strikes too many. Your bid to become a Junior Silver Rose is for the second time hereby revoked." Geraldine's shoulders drooped, but most of the girls were smirking. This had been their plan all along and they had accomplished it.

Nonna tucked each of her hands into the opposite sleeve, a wizened Confucius in a leopard bathrobe. "Michelangleo, he goes. For days and days he stays away from Elisabetta. The other girls, the prettier girls, have hope again. And then, there he goes once more, carrying only his nonno's ugly old glass-his telescope-and a bag of figs. These he lays at her feet. "'I see you,' he tells her. 'Every day for months, I watch. I see you. Where you sit, the sea is calm and dolphins swim near you. I see your mended net looks like a lady's lace. I see you dance in the rain before you run home. I see the jewel mosaic you leave to be scattered and remade again and again, piu bella than gold and pearls. You are piu bella than any other, queen of the sea. "'You do not need silk or pearls. I see that. But they are yours if you wish. I am yours if you wish.If you like what you see.' He gives her the glass. She takes it. Then she asks, 'What about the figs? My bisnonno, he laughs. 'It might take time, your looking to see if you like me. I bring lunch.'" Nonna slapped her knee again, clearly delighted with little Michelangelo's humor. "There is the love story. You like it?" I swallowed another yawn. "Si, Nonna.It's a good story." I couldn't resist. "But...a talking seagull? A dolphin guide? That kinda stretches the truth, dontcha think?" Nonna shrugged. "All truth, not all truth, does it matter? My nonno Guillermo came to Michelangelo and Elisabetta, then my papa Euplio to him, then me, your papa, you." She lowered her feet to the floor. Then pinched my cheek. Hard. Buona notte, bellissima." "Okay,Nonna." I yawned and pulled the white eyelet quilt up.I'd inked abstract swirl-and-dot patterns all over it when I redecorated my room. They're a little optic when I'm that tired. "Buona notte." As I was dozing off,I heard her rummaging in the linen cupboard next to my door. Reorganizing again, I though. She does that when Mom can't see her. They fold things completely different ways.

We turned off the path then, following a line of red, cup-shaped wildflowers that I had not seen before. And then abruptly, we came to a door-- an actual door, because the Folk are maddeningly inconsistent, even when it comes to their inconsistencies--- tucked into a little hollow. It was only about two feet tall and painted to look like the mountainside, a scene of grey-brown scree with a few splashes of green, so realistic that it was like a reflection on still water. The only thing that gave it away was the doorknob, which looked like nothing that I can put into human terms; the best I can do is compare it to a billow of fog trapped in a shard of ice. "It has the look of a brownie house," Wendell said. "But perhaps I should make sure." He shoved the door open and vanished into the shadows within--- I cannot relate how he accomplished this; it seemed for a moment as if the door grew to fit him, but I was unable to get a handle on the mechanics as not one second later he was racing out again and the door had shrunk to its old proportions. Several porcelain cups and saucers followed in his wake, about the right size for a doll, and one made contact, smashing against his shoulder. Behind the hail of pottery came a little faerie who barely came up to my knee, wrapped so tightly in what looked like a bathrobe made of snow that I could see only its enormous black eyes. Upon its head it wore a white sleeping cap. It was brandishing a frying pan and shouting something--- I think--- but its voice was so small that I could only pick out the odd word. It was some dialect of Faie that I could not understand, but as the largest difference between High Faie and the faerie dialects lies in the profanities, the sentiment was clear. "Good Lord!" Rose said, leaping out of range of the onslaught. "I don't--- what on--- would you stop?" Wendell cried, shielding himself with his arm. "Yes, all right, I should have knocked, but is this really necessary?" The faerie kept on shrieking, and then it launched the frying pan at Wendell's head--- he ducked--- and slammed its door. Rose and I stared at each other. Ariadne looked blankly from Wendell to the door, clutching her scarf with both hands. "Bloody Winter Folk," Wendell said, brushing ceramic shards from his cloak. "Winter Folk?" I repeated. "Guardians of the seasons--- or anyway, that is how they see themselves," he said sourly. "Really I think they just want a romantic excuse to go about blasting people with frost and zephyrs and such. It seems I woke him earlier than he desired." I had never heard of such a categorization, but as I was somewhat numb with surprise, I filed the information away rather than questioning him further. I fear that working with one of the Folk is slowly turning my mind into an attic of half-forgotten scholarly treasures.

This book is for a black light, a bottom bunk and a hug, For a doorway, a pair of kicked-off shoes and the width of a kitchen table, And as ever and always, for a blue bathrobe, a million miles of legs and a whole lot of hair. Everything that came before you is a memory, but you are the real and constant thing.

In Caracas I sleep under a bridge. A youth hostel in Brussels. Sometimes I splurge and rent a room in a nice hotel, take long hot showers, shave, eat meals in bathrobe. I watch color TB, the eighties, the roads, the countryside, the people I meet- they all begin to blur. I tell myself I am searching for something. But more am more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to.