Bright Young Women Quotes

‎I know you're still young but I want you to understand and learn this now. Marriage can wait, education cannot. You're a very very bright girl. Truly you are. You can be anything you want Laila. I know this about you. And I also know that when this war is over Afghanistan is going to need you as much as its men maybe even more. Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated Laila. No chance.

As the years pass, I am coming more and more to understand that it is the common, everyday blessings of our common everyday lives for which we should be particularly grateful. They are the things that fill our lives with comfort and our hearts with gladness -- just the pure air to breathe and the strength to breath it; just warmth and shelter and home folks; just plain food that gives us strength; the bright sunshine on a cold day; and a cool breeze when the day is warm.

They will call you hysterical no matter how much dignity you have. So you might as well do whatever the hell you want.

Time does not heal all wounds. Grief is just like a sink full of dirty dishes or a pile of soiled laundry. Grief is a chore you have to do and it's a messy one at that.

anger in women is treated as a character disorder, as a problem to be solved, when oftentimes it is entirely appropriate, given the circumstances that trigger it.

Law enforcement would rather we remember a dull man as brilliant than take a good hard look at the role they played in this absolute sideshow, and I am sick to death of watching them in their pressed shirts and cowboy boots, in their comfortable leather interview chairs, in hugely successful and critically acclaimed crime documentaries, talking about the intelligence and charm and wiliness of an ordinary misogynist. This story is not that. The story is not that.

There were men who cracked their knuckles while divulging to me what they would do to the defendant if they got the chance, thinking this was somehow reassuring for me to hear. But all it did was make me realize that there wasn't so big a difference between the man who brutalized Denise and half the men I passed every day on the street.

Women got that feeling about him, that funny one we all get when we know something isn't right, but we don't know how to politely extricate ourselves from the situation without escalating the threat of violence or harassment. That is not a skill women are taught, the same way men are not taught that it is okay to leave a woman alone if what she wants is to be left alone.

I have faith, because nature is the very best example of integration. Things grow differently when they’re damaged, showing us how to occupy strange new ground to bloom red instead of green. We can be found, brighter than before.

Right here, right now, I want you to forget two things: he was nothing special, and what happened was not random.

I've tried to make sense of how someone who didn't stalk his victims in advance ended up going after the best and the brightest. And I think that's it, the thing they all had in common - a light that outshone his. He targets college campuses and sorority houses because he's looking for the cream of the crop. He wants to extinguish us - we are the ones who remind him that he's not that smart, not that good-looking, and there's nothing particularly special about him.

…what splendid dreams young people build upon a word, and how bitter is the pain when the bright bubbles burst.

life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you react to it.

Old souls are just people who had to fend for themselves ahead of their time.

Things grow differently when they’re damaged, showing us how to occupy strange new ground to bloom red instead of green. We can be found, brighter than before.

The truth is something people will go to great lengths to keep for themselves. It shouldn't feel like a gift when you get it, but it is.

His world closes in. The sky is endless no longer but pieced into squares of brick and bright cloths hanging down to dry. Underfoot, no longer stone but rubble, earth, the peelings and rotted scraps of the inedible. He smells the smoke of cooking fires, he hears men arguing and babies screaming like seagulls, he sees young women looking shyly down from high windows, exchanging glances. Now, he is no longer the watcher. Watched. Shouts echo in the dark between twisted walls and back alleys. A twisted smile in a doorway. A stranger’s voice. A stranger’s language.

I should be prettier or less, depending on who was looking and when.

First came bright Spirits, not the Spirits of men, who danced and scattered flowers. Then, on the left and right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys upon one hand, and girls upon the other. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after these a lady in whose honour all this was being done. I cannot now remember whether she was naked or clothed. If she were naked, then it must have been the almost visible penumbra of her courtesy and joy which produces in my memory the illusion of a great and shining train that followed her across the happy grass. If she were clothed, then the illusion of nakedness is doubtless due to the clarity with which her inmost spirit shone through the clothes. For clothes in that country are not a disguise: the spiritual body lives along each thread and turns them into living organs. A robe or a crown is there as much one of the wearer's features as a lip or an eye. But I have forgotten. And only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face. “Is it?...is it?” I whispered to my guide. “Not at all,” said he. “It's someone ye'll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.” “She seems to be...well, a person of particular importance?” “Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.” “And who are these gigantic people...look! They're like emeralds...who are dancing and throwing flowers before here?” “Haven't ye read your Milton? A thousand liveried angels lackey her.” “And who are all these young men and women on each side?” “They are her sons and daughters.” “She must have had a very large family, Sir.” “Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.” “Isn't that a bit hard on their own parents?” “No. There are those that steal other people's children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.” “And how...but hullo! What are all these animals? A cat-two cats-dozens of cats. And all those dogs...why, I can't count them. And the birds. And the horses.” “They are her beasts.” “Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.” “Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.” I looked at my Teacher in amazement. “Yes,” he said. “It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end? Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough int the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.

Grief is just like a sink full of dirty dishes or a pile of soiled laundry. Grief is a chore you have to do, and it's a messy one, at that.

It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.

The Defendant did not like to be told what to do and when to do it and once jammed his jail cell keyhole with toilet paper so the guards couldn’t get in when they arrived to escort him to his arraignment. For this he was called cunning and clever, though I had a dog who also tore up toilet paper when he didn’t get enough attention

It sometimes feels as though young women are trained from birth never to contribute anything original to a conversation.

There are rituals around dying. They’re not for the dead, they’re for those of us who are left behind.

the most effective response to any argument is the question How do you know? Shift the burden of proof to your opponent and force them to back up their position with mountains of evidence.

Girls took to dressing like boys, and though women had obtained the vote, we had swiftly moved on to pursuing flashier freedoms: necking in cars and smoking cigarettes and walking down city streets in flesh colored stockings.

We had been performing the same dance all our lives—one in which I asked for little and received even less

But mostly, I continue to be drawn to mediation because I know better than anyone that All-American Sex Killers are not born, that they come from broken and battered homes, human systems that fail them well before they reach the penal ones, and then they go out into a world that tells them that women are deserving depositories for their impotence and rage.

women who wish to advance in their career face an insidious kind of discrimination, one that is not active, in-your-face sexism but, rather, no response at all. It was subtle discouragement by neglect, what the author called “motivational malnutrition.

Impossible grief is grief that does not adhere to a social contract of justice or human rituals that have existed since the dawn of time.

The haunted look on my father’s face as he recalled that night taught me a formative lesson. Other people’s pain mattered more than my own discomfort.

I don’t have a problem pitying rich people. There are a lot of sad things in this world, and getting everything you want only to realize you are still empty inside is certainly one of them.

Give me twenty minutes alone in a room with him,” Brian agreed, in a ravenous, juicy way that churned my stomach. This became something of a Rorschach test over the years. There were men who cracked their knuckles while divulging to me what they would do to The Defendant if they got the chance, thinking this was somehow reassuring for me to hear. But all it did was make me realize that there wasn’t so big a difference between the man who’d brutalized Denise and half the men I passed every day on the street.

I carry you like my own personal Time Machine, as I put on my lipstick, smile, and head out to the party. It’s a line by one of her favorite poets, a woman named Donna Carnes, whose husband went out for a sail in San Francisco Bay and has not been seen since. I love it too. How many parties have I gone to over the years, and laughed, and had a good time, while still managing to hold Denise close?

It made me feel diseased, how little I seemed to want the things that other women my age did without complication

But young women don’t want bone china anymore. They’ve no use for old Swedish things. They have their own dinnerware, probably from Ikea. New Swedish things.

In seventeen months, I would relish repeating this description for a courtroom. I’d had about enough of hearing how handsome he was, and no man likes to be called small.

At no moment in history has a bright young girl with plenty of food and a good constitution perished from too much learning.

Psychiatry is one of the patriarchy’s favored tools to control women.

My parents spent a lot of money to neglect me, and I was always fantasizing about something awful happening that would force them to take care of me in ways money cannot.

But still I loved her. Still I wanted her to have the big, swaggering life she was destined to have, though I had come to accept it would likely not involve me.

With a mind as bright as yours you will want to find a proper school to continue your education. ..... You must continue the education your mother began. Young women must have an education.

Impossible grief is grief that does not adhere to a social contract of justice or human rituals that have existed since the dawn of time. A death with no body, a violation by someone who is not seen as the transgressor.

Sleep, the unreachable finish line.

It was comforting to think that the earth always found a place for us.

His act was so transparent, his character so fundamentally hollow, that it should have been an affront to the court, a place that was venerated and inviolable to me.

I stood staring at the freshly made bed, thinking about how much of my life I'd spent feeling simultaneously like a child and the only adult in the room.

But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: 'Of course I know nothing about German literature.' It is the mode. The Victorians knew everything about German literature, but were able with a clear conscience not to know much about the French.

what mattered was that people who really loved their children were acutely attuned to their distress signals, and I would have to accept that my parents’ antennae would never arc in my direction.

There was something about Denise’s excitement for a future she would never get to experience that made me murderous with grief. I couldn’t stand the idea of anyone coming into her room and pitying her, or, worse, judging her for having the audacity to make plans when she should have known God would laugh. That was a real thing people said down here, but fuck God for laughing and fuck Cosmopolitan too.

The Defendant flaunted his true nature with audacious displays of ineptitude time and time again, and I wanted to tell these girls, I wanted to tell everyone in that Starbucks, that they should be irate that effort and money had gone into dusting off the story and telling it again for a new generation, only for the filmmaker to wear the same blinders as the men who wrote the headlines forty years ago.

I despised Judge Lambert with every fiber of my being, the way he addressed me as ma’am and The Defendant as young man, then later as cowboy, compadre, partner. I was twenty-three years old to The Defendant’s thirty-two. I had earned top marks in my first year of law school. I was the young woman, the compadre, closer to his equal than The Defendant, but you never would have known it by the way the judge spoke to him.

On Saturday afternoons I used to go for a walk with my mother. From the dusk of the hallway, we stepped at once into the brightness of the day. The passerby, bathed in melting gold, had their eyes half-closed against the glare, as if they were drenched with honey, upper lips were drawn back, exposing the teeth. Everyone in this golden day wore that grimace of heat–as if the sun had forced his worshippers to wear identical masks of gold. The old and the young, women and children, greeted each other with these masks, painted on their faces with thick gold paint; they smiled at each other's pagan faces–the barbaric smiles of Bacchus.

It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.

Hell, I’ll take him,” the driver said. “Give me fifteen minutes with the son of a bitch.” I stared at the back of his head in utter disbelief. Was there some sort of script men were instructed to follow in these kinds of situations? It was exactly the language Brian and Mr. McCall had used over dinner at the mansion in Red Hills.

Because I am not your shrink, I get to say that you do a disservice to them, to every woman who was interrupted in the middle of something good, if you don’t tell this fiancé who lets you do what you want to go to hell, because you’re going to Columbia.

members of our support team don’t need to understand every dark corner of our grief in order to provide us support.

Eventually, I’m sure. Yes. We are trying not to upset her for the time being. Her jaw is wired shut, and she can’t scream.

It was subtle discouragement by neglect, what the author called “motivational malnutrition.” I thought about that phrase—motivational malnutrition

Tina turned the key, put the car back in reverse, and bulldozed Carl’s mailbox cleanly to the ground before driving off at a leisurely Sunday speed.

There was no way to tell which of us was there to ogle the Kennedy of Killers and which to testify against the booger-eating alcoholic who had picked up a heroin habit on the inside.

Don’t remind me of that,” Blackwood snapped. “I’m not in love with her, but I can see her value.” “Always about value with you, isn’t it? Why don’t you grow a personality? You’re like a shambling ghost, curdling everyone’s blood whenever you walk into a room.” “At least I don’t spend my time seducing innocent young women.” “Someone’s been reading novels again. What’s the title of this one? The Poxy Lordling and the Aggressive Milkmaid?” Magnus sighed. “I tried to leave her alone, but I can’t help myself. She teases me in just the right way—” Blackwood made a disgusted noise. “I don’t care. Unless you want an enemy, Magnus, leave her alone.

You think you're going to come here and you're going to get advice, and then if you just follow that advice, it will get better. Instead, what you learn is how to take responsibility for it.

On Tina’s wedding day, her mother pulled her great-grandmother’s veil over her daughter’s face and compared the whole thing to punching in at an undesirable job for a solid retirement package.

-when he thinks of the starry-eyed puerility and narcissism of these fantasies now, a rough decade later, Schmidt experiences a kind of full-framed internal wince, that type of embarrassment-before-self that makes our most mortifying memories objects of fascination and repulsion at once, though in Terry Schmidt's case a certain amount of introspection and psychotherapy had enabled him to understand that his professional fantasies were not in the main all that unique, that a large percentage I bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful--what else could explain the fact that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact that thy themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives?

There have always been serial killers—in the sixteenth century, they were put on trial as werewolves. There are women serial killers who amass their victims by manipulating others to do their dirty work, and Black serial killers whom we rarely hear about not because they are Black but because their victims are.

You know, all poetry may be a cry of generalised love, for this, or that, or the universe - which must be loved in its particularity, not its generality, but for its universal life in every minute particular. I have always supposed it to be a cry of ;unsatisfied love; - and so it may be indeed - for satisfaction may surfeit it and so it may die. I know many poets who write only when in an exalted state of mind which they compare to ;being in love;,when they do not simply state, that they are in love, that they seek love - for this fresh damsel - or that lively young woman - in order to find a fresh metaphor, or a new bright vision of things in themselves. And to tell you the truth, I have always believed I could diagnose this state of ;being in love; which they regard as ;most particular;, as inspired by item, one pair of black eyes or indifferent blue, ;item;, one graceful attitude of body or mind, ;item;, one female history of some twenty-two years from, shall we say 1821-1844 – I have always believed this ;in love; to be of something of the most abstract masking itself under the particular forms of both lover and beloved. And Poet who assumes and informs both.

When he arrived, he found that the two most important women in his life—his mother and his young wife—were dying. At 3:00 a.m. on February 14, Valentine’s Day, Martha Roosevelt, still a vibrant, dark-haired Southern belle at forty-six, died of typhoid fever. Eleven hours later, her daughter-in-law, Alice Lee Roosevelt, who had given birth to Theodore’s first child just two days before, succumbed to Bright’s disease, a kidney disorder. That night, in his diary, Roosevelt marked the date with a large black “X” and a single anguished entry: “The light has gone out of my life.

Tina and I stared at each other for a long time after Shirley left, incredulous but also not. There should be a word for that. How very little people can surprise you. I suppose the word is jaded, but that’s not what I am. Because on the other side of this is someone like Tina, who taught me not to be surprised that people can be so good you will miss a week of work, drive through the night, and put yourself in harm’s way for them. Some people are your black swan event.

I stood staring at the freshly made bed, thinking about how much of my life I'd spent feeling simultaneously like a child and the only adult in the room. Why couldn't people just do their jobs? Why was it that I could rely only on myself?

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. ...

Absurdly, I placed an order for a Venti Chai Latte while Judge Lambert famously told The Defendant that someday soon a current of electricity would pass through his body until he was pronounced dead by the warden, and that he should, even more absurdly, take care of himself.

Currents of cigarette fumes wafted through what passed for air. Attractive young women in bright-hued gowns glided through the streams of smoke, like tropical fish in an aquarium. Detecting the white uniforms and leathery faces, they promptly approached the Navy men. Very pretty, Ed thought, but hungry, a school of piranha. Just what the doctor ordered: fun and games with no complications. Right: no complications.

Law enforcement would rather we remember a dull man as brilliant than take a good hard look at the role they played in this absolute sideshow, and I am sick to death of watching them in their pressed shirts and cowboy boots, in their comfortable leather interview chairs, in hugely successful and critically acclaimed crime documentaries, talking about the intelligence and charm and wiliness of an ordinary misogynist.

I’ve tried to make sense of how someone who didn’t stalk his victims in advance ended up going after the best and the brightest. And I think that’s it, the thing they all had in common—a light that outshone his. He targets college campuses and sorority houses because he’s looking for the cream of the crop. He wants to extinguish us—we are the ones who remind him that he’s not that smart, not that good-looking, that there’s nothing particularly special about him.

He wandered over them again. He had called them into view, and it was not easy to replace the shroud that had so long concealed them. There were the faces of friends, and foes, and of many that had been almost strangers peering intrusively from the crowd; there were the faces of young and blooming girls that were now old women; there were faces that the grave had changed and closed upon, but which the mind, superior to its power, still dressed in their old freshness and beauty, calling back the lustre of the eyes, the brightness of the smile, the beaming of the soul through its mask of clay, and whispering of beauty beyond the tomb, changed but to be heightened, and taken from earth only to be set up as a light, to shed a soft and gentle glow upon the path to Heaven...

The Defendant did not like to be told what to do and when to do it and once jammed his jail cell keyhole with toilet paper so the guards couldn’t get in when they arrived to escort him to his arraignment. For this he was called cunning and clever, though I had a dog who also tore up toilet paper when he didn’t get enough attention.

Kids who are raised in hostile environments are seven times more likely to become violent perpetrators as adults, and I’ve been given the unique opportunity to disrupt that pattern. For the small curve in the road where I get to stand, holding my traffic sign that indicates a better way, I have no choice but to feel belligerent gratitude.

Sometimes I think The Defendant is just another old wives’ tale. That law enforcement backed up his self-purported claims of brilliance to cover up their own incompetence—in interviews they gave the media, in testimonies they made before the judge—and it all cemented from there, hardening into a generational truth passed down from mother to daughter. Consider this my own warning: The man was no diabolical genius. He was your run-of-the-mill incel whom I caught picking his nose in the courtroom. More than once.

You are a bright young man,” Judge Lambert continued solemnly. One of the girls muttered “ass-munch” and was loudly shushed by her friend. “You’d have made a good lawyer, and I’d have loved to have you practice in front of me. But you went another way, partner. Take care of yourself. I don’t have any animosity, and I want you to understand that.

My father, whom I loved more than anything in this world, had made me very angry right before he died.

Time does not heal all wounds. Grief is just like a sink full of dirty dishes or a pile of soiled laundry. Grief is a chore you have to do, and it’s a messy one, at that.

Grief is just like a sink full of dirty dishes or a pile of soiled laundry. Grief is a chore you have to do, and it’s a messy one, at that.

someone who likes to mull, to talk things over, before he arrives at a solution to a problem, and he felt law school penalized this quality.

People can be good, you will miss a week of work, drive through the night and put yourself in harm's way for them. Some people are your black swan event.

Impossible grief applies to cases where the grief-processing mechanism has been obstructed, like a clog in a drain.

Eileen could have chosen to view the world as an ugly and hostile place, but instead she was nimble in her life in a way that most everyday people can’t manage.

Time does not heal all wounds. Grief is just like a sink full of dirty dishes or a pile of soiled laundry. Grief is a chore you have to do, and it's a messy one, at that.

I would never shake the image of them lying in bed with the covers over their heads when I needed them most.

The Oak was two blocks away. All this time, he had been my neighbor.

Tina told him to go to hell, and all these years later, that’s exactly where he is.

I am blazing with contempt for Rebecca. You had your chance, I think, to make room for yourself, but you were too much of a coward.

How do you know he’s the one who killed Robbie and Denise?” “Because I saw him with my own two eyes.

Cooking was one of my favorite hobbies, but it had died along with the only other person in my family who appreciated good food.

Everyone would see that I’d come a long way over the last few years, and maybe they’d stop looking at me like that. Like I was fragile but also frightening.

I couldn’t decide which version of her made me crazier, the girl who had to be taught or the girl who just knew.

I didn’t know,” my mother said, stroking my hair. It would not have been fair to call her a liar. Few things were worth remembering, in her world. For weeks,

That weekend, in the house where I was once as much a stranger to myself as I was to the man I thought I would marry, I got to know the one I did.

My stomach made a sickly sound in protest.

I felt an extreme revulsion rise up in me.

wriggling his meaty fingers

There should be a word for that. How very little people can surprise you.

Stop saying bribe, Pamela,” Carl said in a passionate way that made my toes curl in my ugly white sneakers. “It’s reward money for the truth.

the air was sick with a fetid bathroom smell.

primordial olfactory nerve

looking tremendously self-satisfied for doing fuck all but attach himself to a woman who was good at her job.

They wouldn’t have wanted people to pity them or think they were complaining. Nobody liked a complainer, and we wanted so much for people to think well of us

But young women don’t want bone china anymore. They’ve no use for old Swedish things. They

On the hearth, in front of a back-brand to give substance, blazed a fire of thorns, that crackled 'like the laughter of the fool.' Nineteen persons were gathered here. Of these, five women, wearing gowns of various bright hues, sat in chairs along the wall; girls shy and not shy filled the window-bench; four men, including Charley Jake the hedge-carpenter, Elijah New the parish-clerk, and John Pitcher, a neighboring dairyman, the shepherd's father-in-law, lolled in the settle; a young man and maid, who were blushing over tentative pourparlers on a life companionship, sat beneath the corner-cupboard; and an elderly engaged man of fifty or upward moved restlessly about from spots where his betrothed was not to the spot where she was. Enjoyment was pretty general, and so much the more prevailed in being unhampered by conventional restrictions. Absolute confidence in each other's good opinion begat perfect ease, while the finishing stroke of manner, amounting to a truly princely serenity, was lent to the majority by the absence of any expression or trait denoting that they wished to get on in the world, enlarge their minds, or do any eclipsing thing whatever - which nowadays so generally nips the bloom and bonhomie of all except the two extremes of the social scale. ("The Three Strangers")

You can put her in our room,” Tina said to Rebecca. I registered the seriousness of the words our room, but it didn’t seem as though anyone else did. Everyone was too full, too tipsy, too happy for me.

Marrying Brian was something I should want, and it made me feel diseased, how little I seemed to want the things that other women my age did without complication. “This is a good option for me,” I concluded.

Nothing you ever learn is really wasted,” Julia had said with a chicken neck in one fist, “and will sometime be used.” I was thinking about this when Gail called to let me know she’d gotten back in one piece.

The point is that nothing can be predicted, really, and so you want to be sure to expose yourself to luck too. Things can go catastrophically wrong, but they can also go so right as to be profoundly transformative.

That night the Salt Fish Girl came back looking exhausted and dishevelled. A Malaysian girl who worked at her factory had been stricken with hysteria, had gone to the toilet and begun screaming and tearing at her hair. She had been working at the factory for nearly three years and was half blind and bored out of her wits with the tedious repetitiveness of the work. Her hysteria had provoked others, until half the women in the factory were screaming and howling and throwing themselves against the walls in sheer frustration with the dreariness of their toil and the damage it was exacting from their once young bodies and once bright faces.

they should be irate that effort and money had gone into dusting off the story and telling it again for a new generation, only for the filmmaker to wear the same blinders as the men who wrote the headlines forty years ago.

Time hangs heavy on us and I find that I am waiting, waiting for her days to pass, trying to meet the bare qualification of life which is for her to have existed in time. In this lonely place I am indeed not free: the kitchen is a cell, a place of no possibility. I have given up my membership of the world I used to live in. Sometimes I listen to music or read, and it is like a ray of light coming in from outside, bright and painful, making me screw up my eyes. When we go for a walk I see young women in the street, beautiful and careless, and a pang of mourning for some oblique, lost self makes my heart clench. I look down at my daughter sleeping in her pushchair, the dark fringe of her lashes forming arcs on her pale skin, and a contrary wind of love gusts over me; and for some time this is how I am, blown this way and that, careering around like a crazy, febrile gauge trying to find north.

We knew lots of couples who split up and got back together, rinse and repeat, but that had never been us. We did not know how the other would act, would be, in this scenario. I was standing at the curb with a perfect stranger.

processing grief is some of the hardest work you’ll ever do. Time does not heal all wounds. Grief is just like a sink full of dirty dishes or a pile of soiled laundry. Grief is a chore you have to do, and it’s a messy one, at that.

The universe and its mysterious ways made for a convenient scapegoat for a woman like Marion Young, a woman who was always talking about going with the flow, as though her actions and choices did not impart a tidal force of consequence.

I think, in retrospect, that it would have been better if I had denied that I had pains in my legs, if I had taken it all back, or brightly said that I was well now. But because I didn’t, the whole business began to spiral out of control. I still believed that honesty was the best policy; but the brute fact was, I was an invalid now, and I wasn’t entitled to a policy, not a policy of my own. I feared that if I didn’t tell the strict truth, my integrity would be eroded; I would have nothing then, no place to stand. The more I said that I had a physical illness, the more they said I had a mental illness. The more I questioned the nature, the reality of the mental illness, the more I was found to be in denial, deluded. I was confused; when I spoke of my confusion, my speech turned into a symptom. No one ventured a diagnosis: not out loud. It was in the nature of educated young women, it was believed, to be hysterical, neurotic, difficult, and out of control, and the object was to get them back under control, not by helping them examine their lives, or fix their practical problems—in my case, silverfish, sulking family, poverty, cold—but by giving them drugs which would make them indifferent to their mental pain—and in my case, indifferent to physical pain too.

I knew law enforcement was trained to fixate on that first gut impression, but I wrongly assumed they possessed an appreciation for the nuance of a mind, for the ten car pile-up of neurons and chemical messaging that occurs in the moment your whole world goes sideways.

For the time being, there was only one thing I could say to my mother. The truth is something people will go to great lengths to keep for themselves. It shouldn’t feel like a gift when you get it, but it is. I looked her in the eyes, and I thanked her for giving it to me.

We followed him into the kitchen, sun-warmed via a sliding glass door that would be so easy to shatter. I stared at that glass door, quietly seething at the discrepancy in our threat levels, that Carl could write the fawning twaddle he did only because his was tuned so low.

We’d never spent the night together, and I was aghast to learn what his mouth tasted like in the morning. I parted my lips and accepted the dry slug of his tongue, realizing you have two choices in life. You either wake up to someone’s fusty kiss or you wake up alone. Pick your poison.

Then he placed his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of the street alone, giving the silent roaring rage inside him time to ease down and out, and after several long minutes he once again became who he was, a solitary middle-aged man in the August of life looking for a few more Aprils, an aging bachelor in a floppy suit standing on a tired, worn Brooklyn street in the shadow of a giant housing project built by a Jewish reformer named Robert Moses who forgot he was a reformer, building projects like this all over, which destroyed neighborhoods, chasing out the working Italians, Irish, and Jews, gutting all the pretty things from them, displacing them with Negroes and Spanish and other desperate souls clambering to climb into the attic of New York life, hoping that the bedroom and kitchen below would open up so they could drop in, and at minimum join the club that to them included this man, an overweight bachelor in an ill-fitting suit, watching a shiny car roaring away, the car driven by a handsome young man who was pretty and drove away as if he were barreling into a bright future, while the dowdy heavyset man watched him jealously, believing the man so pretty and handsome had places to go and women to meet and things to do, and the older heavyset man standing behind eating his fumes on a sorry, dreary, crowded old Brooklyn street of storefronts and tired brownstones had nothing left but the fumes of the pretty sports car in his face.

Between the brown hands of a server-lad The silver cross was offered to be kissed. The men came up, lugubrious, but not sad, And knelt reluctantly, half-prejudiced. (And kissing, kissed the emblem of a creed.) Then mourning women knelt; meek mouths they had, (And kissed the Body of the Christ indeed.) Young children came, with eager lips and glad. (These kissed a silver doll, immensely bright.) Then I, too, knelt before that acolyte. Above the crucifix I bent my head: The Christ was thin, and cold, and very dead: And yet I bowed, yea, kissed - my lips did cling. (I kissed the warm live hand that held the thing.)

Timepieces are meant to be sturdy, solid, orienting us in the world in a reliable, man-made way. But look, Pamela, she said, gesturing, see how Dalí’s clocks are soft and pliant? Time is illogical, subjective, was the interpretation. What feels like forever for one may feel like a blink of an eye for another,

The human society has evolved war as a cultural institution, like the science of astronomy, or mathematics. War is a part of our lives, a career, a respected vocation. Bright, alert young men and women move into it, putting their shoulders to the wheel as they did in the time of Nebuchadnezzar. It has always been so.

But it wouldn’t go to waste—Tina would see me. Tina, who wouldn’t struggle to tell me I looked beautiful, whose mind was not barbed but curved in the way of a prescription lens, focusing the light and rendering things clearly. “I’m sorry, Mom,” I said, taking a small step away from her, “but this doesn’t feel good to me.

My eyes flashed at the word coward. “Fuck you.” Tina nodded as though I’d gotten the answer to some unasked question right. “That’s good. You’re mad. You should be mad, but not at me. You can be mad at your father and still love him. Hell, you can be mad at your mother and still love her. But they’re the ones you need to get mad at.

I was grateful to her for giving me such a hammy display of her cruelty, which up until that point she had doled out discerningly, at a rate meant to keep me coming back for more. She had made it so easy—not just easy, but pleasurable—to walk away from her. I got on my bike, and I rode to the water, where the breeze was, and Tina too.

There were men who cracked their knuckles while divulging to me what they would do to The Defendant if they got the chance, thinking this was somehow reassuring for me to hear. But all it did was make me realize that there wasn’t so big a difference between the man who’d brutalized Denise and half the men I passed every day on the street.

Timepieces are meant to be sturdy, solid, orienting us in the world in a reliable, man-made way. But look, Pamela, she said, gesturing, see how Dalí’s clocks are soft and pliant? Time is illogical, subjective, was the interpretation. What feels like forever for one may feel like a blink of an eye for another, Denise said, laughing in this sort of astonished way.

Women got that feeling about him, that funny one we all get when we know something isn’t right, but we don’t know how to politely extricate ourselves from the situation without escalating the threat of violence or harassment. That is not a skill women are taught, the same way men are not taught that it is okay to leave a woman alone if what she wants is to be left alone.

Margaret, the eldest of the four, was sixteen, and very pretty, being plump and fair, with large eyes, plenty of soft brown hair, a sweet mouth, and white hands, of which she was rather vain. Fifteen-year-old Jo was very tall, thin, and brown, and reminded one of a colt, for she never seemed to know what to do with her long limbs, which were very much in her way. She had a decided mouth, a comical nose, and sharp, gray eyes, which appeared to see everything, and were by turns fierce, funny, or thoughtful. Her long, thick hair was her one beauty, but it was usually bundled into a net, to be out of her way. Round shoulders had Jo, big hands and feet, a flyaway look to her clothes, and the uncomfortable appearance of a girl who was rapidly shooting up into a woman and didn't like it. Elizabeth, or Beth, as everyone called her, was a rosy, smooth-haired, bright-eyed girl of thirteen, with a shy manner, a timid voice, and a peaceful expression which was seldom disturbed. Her father called her 'Little Miss Tranquility', and the name suited her excellently, for she seemed to live in a happy world of her own, only venturing out to meet the few whom she trusted and loved. Amy, though the youngest, was a most important person, in her own opinion at least. A regular snow maiden, with blue eyes, and yellow hair curling on her shoulders, pale and slender, and always carrying herself like a young lady mindful of her manners. What the characters of the four sisters were we will leave to be found out.

I once had a doctor tell me there are a certain number of catastrophically bad things that, statistically speaking, must happen every year to a certain number of people—rare diseases, freak accidents, and, yes, serial killer attacks. Little grains of tragedy carried by the wind. I could make peace with the idea that one of those currents happened to catch my corner of the world.

Duroy, who felt light hearted that evening, said with a smile: "You are gloomy to-day, dear master." The poet replied: "I am always so, young man, so will you be in a few years. Life is a hill. As long as one is climbing up one looks towards the summit and is happy, but when one reaches the top one suddenly perceives the descent before one, and its bottom, which is death. One climbs up slowly, but one goes down quickly. At your age a man is happy. He hopes for many things, which, by the way, never come to pass. At mine, one no longer expects anything - but death." Duroy began to laugh: "You make me shudder all over." Norbert de Varenne went on: "No, you do not understand me now, but later on you will remember what I am saying to you at this moment. A day comes, and it comes early for many, when there is an end to mirth, for behind everything one looks at one sees death. You do not even understand the word. At your age it means nothing; at mine it is terrible. Yes, one understands it all at once, one does not know how or why, and then everything in life changes its aspect. For fifteen years I have felt death assail me as if I bore within me some gnawing beast. I have felt myself decaying little by little, month by month, hour by hour, like a house crumbling to ruin. Death has disfigured me so completely that I do not recognize myself. I have no longer anything about me of myself - of the fresh, strong man I was at thirty. I have seen death whiten my black hairs, and with what skillful and spiteful slowness. Death has taken my firm skin, my muscles, my teeth, my whole body of old, only leaving me a despairing soul, soon to be taken too. Every step brings me nearer to death, every movemebt, every breath hastens his odious work. To breathe, sleep, drink, eat, work, dream, everything we do is to die. To live, in short, is to die. Oh, you will realize this. If you stop and think for a moment you will understand. What do you expect? Love? A few more kisses and you will be impotent. Then money? For what? Women? Much fun that will be! In order to eat a lot and grow fat and lie awake at night suffering from gout? And after that? Glory? What use is that when it does not take the form of love? And after that? Death is always the end. I now see death so near that I often want to stretch my arms to push it back. It covers the earth and fills the universe. I see it everywhere. The insects crushed on the path, the falling leaves, the white hair in a friend's head, rend my heart and cry to me, 'Behold it!' It spoils for me all I do, all I see, all that I eat and drink, all that I love; the bright moonlight, the sunrise, the broad ocean, the noble rivers, and the soft summer evening air so sweet to breath." He walked on slowly, dreaming aloud, almost forgetting that he had a listener: "And no one ever returns - never. The model of a statue may be preserved, but my body, my face, my thoughts, my desires will never reappear again. And yet millions of beings will be born with a nose, eyes, forehead, cheeks, and mouth like me, and also a soul like me, without my ever returning, without even anything recognizable of me appearing in these countless different beings. What can we cling to? What can we believe in? All religions are stupid, with their puerile morality and their egotistical promises, monstrously absurd. Death alone is certain." "Think of that, young man. Think of it for days, and months and years, and life will seem different to you. Try to get away from all the things that shut you in. Make a superhuman effort to emerge alive from your own body, from your own interests, from your thoughts, from humanity in general, so that your eyes may be turned in the opposite direction. Then you understand how unimportant is the quarrel between Romanticism and Realism, or the Budget debates.

The life of a military wife is so subordinated to her husband’s career that when he receives transfer orders, she says, “We received orders.” The status of a military wife is directly related to her husband’s rank, and she must show the same deference to the wife of a superior officer that her husband shows to the officer. She must master the intricacies of entertaining in a hierarchal society, knowing that a single misstep could affect her husband’s career. But most of all—and this is always mentioned by nonmilitary people—the military wife has no life of her own; her entire existence revolves around her husband’s career. Having a job is frowned upon because her full-time job is being a military wife. To many bright young women who marry military officers, the challenges are enormous.

...] and there, retiring into a corner, called up before his mind’s eye a vast amphitheatre of faces over which a dusky curtain had hung for many years. [...] There were the faces of friends, and foes, and of many that had been almost strangers peering intrusively from the crowd; there were the faces of young and blooming girls that were now old women; there were faces that the grave had changed and closed upon, but which the mind, superior to its power, still dressed in their old freshness and beauty, calling back the lustre of the eyes, the brightness of the smile, the beaming of the soul through its mask of clay, and whispering of beauty beyond the tomb, changed but to be heightened, and taken from earth only to be set up as a light, to shed a soft and gentle glow upon the path to Heaven.

How many more? Because Ted murdered so many women, he did more than rob them of their lives. He robbed them of their specialness too. It is too easy, and expedient, to present them as a list of names. It is impossible to tell each victim’s story within the confines of one book. All those bright, pretty, beloved young women became, of necessity, “Bundy victims.” And only Ted stayed in the spotlight.

It is never lost on me that the women in the waiting room have had to walk past these protesters, too. Even if they were escorted to the door by a cheerful young pro-choice activist with bright pink hair who carries a protective rainbow umbrella, they’ve heard the vitriol—different from the insults hurled at me, but no less offensive. “Think twice!” “Don’t murder your baby!” The antis shout these things, as if these women had not minds of their own. As if their decision fails to merit respect. As if they were not, as most of them are, adults exercising a legal right to make a private health-care decision for themselves. (Imagine, if you will, these verbal assaults being hurled at any other person for having made any other consequential health-care choice: the decision to pursue a potentially fatal course of chemotherapy, for example. “Don’t risk your life! Suicide!”)

Her lips are moving silently around words I recognize. 'I carry you like my own personal Time Machine, as I put on my lipstick, smile, and head out to the party.' It's a line by one of her favourite poets, a woman named Donna Carnes, whose husband went out to sail in San Francisco Bay and had not been seen since. I love it too. How many parties have I gone to over the years, and laughed, and had a good time, while still managing to hold Denise close?

You’re fed up and you’re exhausted, and no one is listening to your pleas for help. Anger in that case is very much appropriate.” The patient sighed begrudgingly. “I don’t know that I agree, but say it’s true. I still don’t want to go around breaking things.” “No,” Tina agreed, “that’s not a productive outlet for your anger, though it is one less dish to wash.” The patient let out a yip of involuntary laughter, and the man in front of me turned to his friend and inquired casually about lunch.

Give me twenty minutes alone in a room with him," Brian agreed, in a ravenous, juicy way that churned my stomach. This became something of a Rorschach test over the years. There were men who cracked their knuckles while divulging to me what they would do to The Defendant if they got the chance, thinking this was somehow reassuring for me to hear. But all it did was make me realize that there wasn't so big a difference between the man who'd brutalized Denise and half the men I passed every day on the street.

There was just enough room for the tonga to get through among the bullock-carts, rickshaws, cycles and pedestrians who thronged both the road and the pavement--which they shared with barbers plying their trade out of doors, fortune-tellers, flimsy tea-stalls, vegetable-stands, monkey-trainers, ear-cleaners, pickpockets, stray cattle, the odd sleepy policeman sauntering along in faded khaki, sweat-soaked men carrying impossible loads of copper, steel rods, glass or scrap paper on their backs as they yelled 'Look out! Look out!' in voices that somehow pierced though the din, shops of brassware and cloth (the owners attempting with shouts and gestures to entice uncertain shoppers in), the small carved stone entrance of the Tinny Tots (English Medium) School which opened out onto the courtyard of the reconverted haveli of a bankrupt aristocrat, and beggars--young and old, aggressive and meek, leprous, maimed or blinded--who would quietly invade Nabiganj as evening fell, attempting to avoid the police as they worked the queues in front of the cinema-halls. Crows cawed, small boys in rags rushed around on errands (one balancing six small dirty glasses of tea on a cheap tin tray as he weaved through the crowd) monkeys chattered in and bounded about a great shivering-leafed pipal tree and tried to raid unwary customers as they left the well-guarded fruit-stand, women shuffled along in anonymous burqas or bright saris, with or without their menfolk, a few students from the university lounging around a chaat-stand shouted at each other from a foot away either out of habit or in order to be heard, mangy dogs snapped and were kicked, skeletal cats mewed and were stoned, and flies settled everywhere: on heaps of foetid, rotting rubbish, on the uncovered sweets at the sweetseller's in whose huge curved pans of ghee sizzled delicioius jalebis, on the faces of the sari-clad but not the burqa-clad women, and on the horse's nostrils as he shook his blinkered head and tried to forge his way through Old Brahmpur in the direction of the Barsaat Mahal.

Just as summer-killed meat draws flies, so the court draws spurious sages, philosophists, and acosmists who remain there as long as their purses and their wits will maintain them, in the hope (at first) of an appointment from the Autarch and (later) of obtaining a tutorial position in some exalted family. At sixteen or so, Thecla was attracted, as I think young women often are, to their lectures on theogony, thodicy, and the like, and I recall one particularly in which a phoebad put forward as an ultimate truth the ancient sophistry of the existence of three Adonai, that of the city (or of the people), that of the poets, and that of the philosophers. Her reasoning was that since the beginning of human consciousness (if such a beginning ever was) there have been vast numbers of persons in the three categories who have endeavored to pierce the secret of the divine. If it does not exist, they should have discovered that long before; if it does, it is not possible that Truth itself should mislead them. Yet the beliefs of the populace, the insights of the rhapsodists, and the theories of the metaphysicians have so far diverged that few of them can so much as comprehend what the others say, and someone who knew nothing of any of their ideas might well believe there was no connection at all between them. May it not be, she asked (and even now I am not certain I can answer), that instead of traveling, as has always been supposed, down three roads to the same destination, they are actually traveling toward three quite different ones? After all, when in common life we behold three roads issuing from the same crossing, we do not assume they all proceed toward the same goal. I found (and find) this suggestion as rational as it is repellent, and it represents for me all that monomaniacal fabric of argument, so tightly woven that not even the tiniest objection or spark of light can escape its net, in which human minds become enmeshed whenever the subject is one in which no appeal to fact is possible. As a fact the Claw was thus an incommensurable. No quantity of money, no piling up of archipelagoes or empires could approach it in value any more than the indefinite multiplication of horizontal distance could be made to equal vertical distance. If it was, as I believed, a thing from outside the universe, then its light, which I had seen shine faintly so often, and a few times brightly, was in some sense the only light we had. If it were destroyed, we were left fumbling in the dark.

Brightly and merrily swaying, like an April shower, came the young lady. Perhaps if she had been sad and conscience stricken, like certain dames of old who left the site of their illicit love as woe-begone as the passing moment that never returns; if the lady had approached in full cognizance of her frailty, ready to forego a man's respectful handkisses of greeting, and trembling in shame at the tryst exposed in broad daylight, like Risoulette, sixty-six times, whenever having misbehaved, she hastened back home teary-eyed to her Captain; or if a lifelong memory's untearable veil had floated over her fine features, like the otherworldly wimple of a nun . . . Then Pistoli would have stood aside, closed his eyes, swallowed the bitter pill, and come next winter, might have scrawled on the wall something about women's unpredictability. Then he would have glimpsed ghostly, skeletal pelvic bones reflected in his wine goblet, and strands of female hair, once wrapped around the executioner's wrist, hanging from his rafters; and would have heard wails and cackles emanating from the cellar's musty wine casks, but eventually Pistoli would have forgiven this fading memory, simply because women are related to the sea and the moon, and that is why at times they know not what they do.

TIA OR TARA has stopped applying makeup to my wife’s face and is looking at Scottie with disapproval. The light is hitting this woman’s face, giving me an opportunity to see that she should perhaps be working on her own makeup. Her coloring is similar to a manila envelope. There are specks of white in her eyebrows, and her concealer is not concealing. I can tell my daughter doesn’t know what to do with this woman’s critical look. “What?” Scottie asks. “I don’t want any makeup.” She looks at me for protection, and it’s heartbreaking. All the women who model with Joanie have this inane urge to make over my daughter with the notion that they’re helping her somehow. She’s not as pretty as her older sister or her mother, and these other models think that slapping on some rouge will somehow make her feel better about her facial fate. They’re like missionaries. Mascara thumpers. “I was just going to say that I think your mother was enjoying the view,” Tia or Tara says. “It’s so pretty outside. You should let the light in.” My daughter looks at the curtain. Her little mouth is open. Her hand reaches for a tumbleweed of hair. “Listen here, T. Her mother was not enjoying the view. Her mother is in a coma. And she’s not supposed to be in bright light.” “My name is not T,” she says. “My name is Allison.” “Okay, then, Ali. Don’t confuse my daughter, please.” “I’m turning into a remarkable young lady,” Scottie says. “Damn straight.” My heart feels like one of Scottie’s clogs clomping down the hall. I don’t know why I became so angry.

Standing waist deep in the swimming pool at Yaddo, I received a gift—it was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my twenty-five years of life. “Does your husband make you a better person?” Edra asked. There I was in that sky-blue pool beneath a bright blue sky, my fingers breaking apart the light on the water, and I had no idea what she was talking about. “Are you smarter, kinder, more generous, more compassionate, a better writer?” she said, running down her list. “Does he make you better?” “That’s not the question,” I said. “It’s so much more complicated than that.” “It’s not more complicated than that,” she said. “That’s all there is: Does he make you better and do you make him better?” Look at this moment closely, two young women in a swimming pool on a beautiful day in upstate New York, because this is where the story starts to turn.

adapt the concept of complex grief into its current iteration—impossible grief applies to cases where the grief-processing mechanism has been obstructed, like a clog in a drain. Family members of people who were in the towers the day they fell, who were never given remains to bury. Women who were assaulted by a classmate, a boyfriend, a friend, who are told by almost everyone that what they experienced does not qualify as assault. Impossible grief is grief that does not adhere to a social contract of justice or human rituals that have existed since the dawn of time. A death with no body, a violation by someone who is not seen as the transgressor. A woman whose relationship wasn’t recognized as legitimate at the time she lost her partner. Tina teaches people how to snare the obstruction so that grief can make its way through the proper channels unencumbered. It’s always running in your veins, but better that than a life-threatening clot.

Hearth to hearth, the Flame of War went. Over snow-blasted mountains and amongst the trees of tangled forests, hiding from the enemies that prowled the skies. Through long, bitterly cold nights where the wind howled as it tried to wipe out any trace of that flame. But the wind did not succeed, not against the flame of the queen. So hearth to hearth, it went. To remote villages where people screamed and scattered as a young-faced woman descended from the skies on a broom, waving her torch high. Not to signal them, but the few women who did not run. Who walked toward the flame, the rider, as she called out, “Your queen summons you to war. Will you fly?” Trunks hidden in attics were thrown open. Folded swaths of red cloth pulled from within. Brooms left in closets, beside doorways, tucked under beds, were brought out, bound in gold or silver or twine. And swords—ancient and beautiful—were drawn from beneath floorboards, or hauled down from haylofts, their metal shining as bright and fresh as the day they had been forged in a city now lying in ruin. Witches, the townsfolk whispered, husbands wide-eyed and disbelieving as the women took to the skies, red cloaks billowing. Witches amongst us all this time. Village to village, where hearths that had never once gone fully dark blazed in answer. Always one rider going out, to find the next hearth, the next bastion of their people. Witches, here amongst us. Witches, now going to war. A rising tide of witches, who took to the skies in their red cloaks, swords strapped to their backs, brooms shedding years of dust with each mile northward. Witches who bade their families farewell, offering no explanation before they kissed their sleeping babes and vanished into the starry night. Mile after mile, across the darkening world, the call went out, ceaseless and unending as the eternal flame that passed from hearth to hearth. “Fly, fly, fly!” they shouted. “To the queen! To war!” Far and wide, through snow and storm and peril, the Crochans flew.

Our team walked through the women’s empowerment center, which was operating in a multistory building, one of the stops we were contemplating for the First Lady. The young man and woman escorting us took us to the roof as part of the tour. I looked out over the city, and other than the bright blue sea, most everything I saw was dusty, arid, and brown except, off in the distance, where I noticed a patch of vibrant green. There were nice buildings and what appeared to be trees and grass. It looked like a desert oasis, or a mirage. “What’s that?” I asked. “That,” our consul general said, “is an Israeli settlement.” “But it’s so green. I thought you said there was very little running water here.” “That’s right,” he said. “There’s limited running water here. The Israelis control the water so twenty times more goes there than comes here.” It was the first time I saw up close what it was like to live under the daily humiliation Palestinians had suffered for years. There it was, a better, easier life, starting right at them.

The reason was not hard to discern. The head of the body was also shaven with the tonsure of Columba. What remained of his clothing proclaimed it to have once consisted of the habit of a religieux, though there was no sign of the crucifix, leather belt and satchel that a peregrinus pro Christo would have carried. The leading traveller had drawn near on his mule and gazed up with a terrified expression on his white features. Another of the party, one of the two women, urged her mount nearer and gazed up at the corpse with a steady eye. She rode a horse, a fact that signified that she was no ordinary religieuse but a woman of rank. There was no fear on her pale features, just a slight expression of repulsion and curiosity. She was a young woman, tall but well proportioned, a fact scarcely concealed by her sombre dress. Rebellious strands of red hair streaked from beneath her headdress. Her pale-skinned features were attractive and her eyes were bright and it was difficult to discern whether they were blue or green, so changeable with emotion were they. ‘Come away, Sister Fidelma,’ muttered her male companion in agitation. ‘This is not a sight for your eyes.

the walls came alive with brightly hued paintings of ibis-headed men and lion-headed women. We moved along a dazzling corridor covered with Gods, Goddesses, solar disks, and all-seeing eyes. There were boats, birds, chariots, harps, plows, and rainbow wings—thousands of glyphs. I had the sensation of floating through a storied world. When we arrived in the first hall, I could barely take in the sprawling room with its cubicles reaching toward the ceiling, each one labeled and stuffed with scrolls and leather-bound codices. Enheduanna’s exaltation to Inanna was likely in here, as well as at least a few works by female Greek philosophers. It seemed absurd to think my own writings might be housed here one day, too, but I stood there and let myself imagine it. As we moved from hall to hall, I became aware of young men in short white tunics dashing about, some carrying armloads of papyri, others on ladders arranging scrolls in cubicles or dusting them with tufts of feathers. I noticed that Lavi watched them intently. “You are very quiet,” Yaltha said, sidling next to me. “Is the library all you hoped?” “It’s a holy of holies,” I said. And it was, but I could feel the tiny lump of anger tucked beneath my awe. A half million scrolls and codices were within these walls, and all but a handful were by men. They had written the known world.

She knew how to play him so very well. He slipped his hand around hers. "Friends," he repeated roughly. Her smile was bright enough to light up the room-and make him see stars. "Excellent! I'm so pleased. And now I really should go. I don't want to keep your family waiting." His family. She was going out with his family. His mother and sister, who would no doubt think her absolutely perfect. Perfect for Archer, who his mother was determined to see married, now that she had given up all hopes for Grey. Or perhaps they'd want her for Trystan, although he was still living the life of an adventurous young man. "Have fun," he encouraged with all the false enthusiasm he could muster. She flashed a quick grin at him over her shoulder as she made for the door. "I'm sure I will. Your brother will see to that." As far as parting shots went, it wasn't bad. By no means mortal, but deep enough to wound never the less. Alone once more, Grey returned to his chair and pulled the copy of Voluptuous out from underneath the cushion of the other. He stared at it for a moment, contemplating finishing the article on pleasing a woman orally. And then, with a snarl, he flung the pages into the fire, watching ash and embers fly up in the assault. The paper caught quickly, giving off a sudden bloom of heat. Women, he thought as he watched the magazine's mocking text blacken and char. He would be much happier in his misery without them.

Marcelina loved that miniscule, precise moment when the needle entered her face. It was silver; it was pure. It was the violence that healed, the violation that brought perfection. There was no pain, never any pain, only a sense of the most delicate of penetrations, like a mosquito exquisitely sipping blood, a precision piece of human technology slipping between the gross tissues and cells of her flesh. She could see the needle out of the corner of her eye; in the foreshortened reality of the ultra-close-up it was like the stem of a steel flower. The latex-gloved hand that held the syringe was as vast as the creating hand of God: Marcelina had watched it swim across her field of vision, seeking its spot, so close, so thrillingly, dangerously close to her naked eyeball. And then the gentle stab. Always she closed her eyes as the fingers applied pressure to the plunger. She wanted to feel the poison entering her flesh, imagine it whipping the bloated, slack, lazy cells into panic, the washes of immune response chemicals as they realized they were under toxic attack; the blessed inflammation, the swelling of the wrinkled, lined skin into smoothness, tightness, beauty, youth. Marcelina Hoffman was well on her way to becoming a Botox junkie. Such a simple treat; the beauty salon was on the same block as Canal Quatro. Marcelina had pioneered the lunch-hour face lift to such an extent that Lisandra had appropriated it as the premise for an entire series. Whore. But the joy began in the lobby with Luesa the receptionist in her high-collared white dress saying “Good afternoon, Senhora Hoffman,” and the smell of the beautiful chemicals and the scented candles, the lightness and smell of the beautiful chemicals and the scented candles, the lightness and brightness of the frosted glass panels and the bare wood floor and the cream-on-white cotton wall hangings, the New Age music that she scorned anywhere else (Tropicalismo hippy-shit) but here told her, “you’re wonderful, you’re special, you’re robed in light, the universe loves you, all you have to do is reach out your hand and take anything you desire.” Eyes closed, lying flat on the reclining chair, she felt her work-weary crow’s-feet smoothed away, the young, energizing tautness of her skin. Two years before she had been to New York on the Real Sex in the City production and had been struck by how the ianqui women styled themselves out of personal empowerment and not, as a carioca would have done, because it was her duty before a scrutinizing, judgmental city. An alien creed: thousand-dollar shoes but no pedicure. But she had brought back one mantra among her shopping bags, an enlightenment she had stolen from a Jennifer Aniston cosmetics ad. She whispered it to herself now, in the warm, jasmine-and vetiver-scented sanctuary as the botulin toxins diffused through her skin. Because I’m worth it.

She hadn’t always been obsessed with babies. There was a time she believed she would change the world, lead a movement, follow Dolores Huerta and Sylvia Mendez, Ellen Ochoa and Sonia Sotomayor. Where her bisabuela had picked pecans and oranges in the orchards, climbing the tallest trees with her small girlbody, dropping the fruit to the baskets below where her tías and tíos and primos stooped to pick those that had fallen on the ground, where her abuela had sewn in the garment district in downtown Los Angeles with her bisabuela, both women taking the bus each morning and evening, making the beautiful dresses to be sold in Beverly Hills and maybe worn by a movie star, and where her mother had cared for the ill, had gone to their crumbling homes, those diabetic elderly dying in the heat in the Valley—Bianca would grow and tend to the broken world, would find where it ached and heal it, would locate its source of ugliness and make it beautiful. Only, since she’d met Gabe and become La Llorona, she’d been growing the ugliness inside her. She could sense it warping the roots from within. The cactus flower had dropped from her when she should have been having a quinceañera, blooming across the dance floor in a bright, sequined dress, not spending the night at her boyfriend’s nana’s across town so that her mama wouldn’t know what she’d done, not taking a Tylenol for the cramping and eating the caldo de rez they’d made for her. They’d taken such good care of her. Had they done it for her? Or for their son’s chance at a football scholarship? She’d never know. What she did know: She was blessed with a safe procedure. She was blessed with women to check her for bleeding. She was blessed with choice. Only, she hadn’t chosen for herself. She hadn’t. Awareness must come. And it did. Too late. If she’d chosen for herself, she would have chosen the cactus spines. She would’ve chosen the one night a year the night-blooming cereus uncoils its moon-white skirt, opens its opalescent throat, and allows the bats who’ve flown hundreds of miles with their young clutching to their fur as they swim through the air, half-starved from waiting, to drink their fill and feed their next generation of creatures who can see through the dark. She’d have been a Queen of the Night and taught her daughter to give her body to no Gabe. She knew that, deep inside. Where Anzaldúa and Castillo dwelled, where she fed on the nectar of their toughest blossoms. These truths would moonstone in her palm and she would grasp her hand shut, hold it tight to her heart, and try to carry it with her toward the front door, out onto the walkway, into the world. Until Gabe would bend her over. And call her gordita or cochina. Chubby girl. Dirty girl. She’d open her palm, and the stone had turned to dust. She swept it away on her jeans. A daughter doesn’t solve anything; she needed her mama to tell her this. But she makes the world a lot less lonely. A lot less ugly.  

At first I didn’t think I was going to be able to make it on the outside at all. I’ve described prison society as a scaled-down model of your outside world, but I had no idea of how fast things moved on the outside; the raw speed people move at. They even talk faster. And louder. It was the toughest adjustment I’ve ever had to make, and I haven’t finished making it yet . . . not by a long way. Women, for instance. After hardly knowing that they were half of the human race for forty years, I was suddenly working in a store filled with them. Old women, pregnant women wearing tee-shirts with arrows pointing downward and a printed motto reading BABY HERE, skinny women with their nipples poking out at their shirts—a woman wearing something like that when I went in would have gotten arrested and then had a sanity hearing—women of every shape and size. I found myself going around with a semi-hard almost all the time and cursing myself for being a dirty old man. Going to the bathroom, that was another thing. When I had to go (and the urge always came on me at twenty-five past the hour), I had to fight the almost overwhelming need to check it with my boss. Knowing that was something I could just go and do in this too-bright outside world was one thing; adjusting my inner self to that knowledge after all those years of checking it with the nearest screwhead or facing two days in solitary for the oversight . . . that was something else. My boss didn’t like me. He was a young guy, twenty-six or -seven, and I could see that I sort of disgusted him,

At Ardennes she conceived a desire to strangle the young woman who prepped and held down garde manger. The woman, Becky Hemerling, was a culinary-institute grad with wavy blond hair and a petite flat body and fair skin that turned scarlet in the kitchen heat. Everything about Becky Hemerling sickened Denise—her C.I.A. education (Denise was an autodidact snob), her overfamiliarity with more senior cooks (especially with Denise), her vocal adoration of Jodie Foster, the stupid fish-and-bicycle texts on her T-shirts, her overuse of the word “fucking” as an intensifier, her self-conscious lesbian “solidarity” with the “latinos” and “Asians” in the kitchen, her generalizations about “right-wingers” and “Kansas” and “Peoria,” her facility with phrases like “men and women of color,” the whole bright aura of entitlement that came of basking in the approval of educators who wished that they could be as marginalized and victimized and free of guilt as she was. What is this person doing in my kitchen? Denise wondered. Cooks were not supposed to be political. Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it. Denise suspected that Becky Hemerling had chosen the cooking life to make a political point: to be one tough chick, to hold her own with the guys. Denise loathed this motivation all the more for harboring a speck of it herself. Hemerling had a way of looking at her that suggested that she (Hemerling) knew her better than she knew herself—an insinuation at once infuriating and impossible to refute. Lying awake beside Emile at night, Denise imagined squeezing Hemerling’s neck until her blue, blue eyes bugged out. She imagined pressing her thumbs into Hemerling’s windpipe until it cracked.    Then one night she fell asleep and dreamed that she was strangling Becky and that Becky didn’t mind. Becky’s blue eyes, in fact, invited further liberties. The strangler’s hands relaxed and traveled up along Becky’s jawline and past her ears to the soft skin of her temples. Becky’s lips parted and her eyes fell shut, as if in bliss, as the strangler stretched her legs out on her legs and her arms out on her arms…    Denise couldn’t remember being sorrier to wake from a dream.    “If you can have this feeling in a dream,” she said to herself, “it must be possible to have it in reality.

After Marcus had wiped her perspiring body with a cool, damp cloth, he dressed her in his discarded shirt, which held the scent of his skin. He brought her a plate containing a poached pear, and a glass of sweet wine, and even allowed her to feed him a few bites of the silky-soft fruit. When her appetite was sated, Lillian set aside the empty plate and spoon, and turned to snuggle against him. He rose on one elbow and looked down at her, his fingers playing idly in her hair. “Are you sorry that I wouldn’t let St. Vincent have you?” She gave him a puzzled smile. “Why would you ask such a thing? Surely you’re not having pangs of conscience.” Marcus shook his head. “I am merely wondering if you had any regrets.” Surprised and touched by his need for reassurance, Lillian toyed with the dark curls on his chest. “No,” she said frankly. “He is attractive, and I do like him… but I didn’t want him.” “You did consider marrying him, however.” “Well,” she admitted, “it did cross my mind that I would like to be a duchess— but only to spite you.” A smile flashed across his face. He retaliated with a punishing nip at her breast, causing her to yelp. “I couldn’t have borne it,” he admitted, “seeing you married to anyone but me.” “I don’t think Lord St. Vincent will have any difficulty finding another heiress to suit his purposes.” “Perhaps. But there aren’t many women with fortunes comparable to yours… and none with your beauty.” Smiling at the compliment, Lillian crawled halfway over him and hitched one leg over his. “Tell me more. I want to hear you wax lyrical about my charms.” Levering himself to a sitting position, Marcus lifted her with an ease that made her gasp, and settled her until she straddled his hips. He stroked a fingertip along the pale skin that was exposed at the open vee of the shirt. “I never wax lyrical,” he said. “Marsdens are not a poetic sort. However…” He paused to admire the sight of the long-limbed young woman who sat astride him while her hair trailed to her waist in tangled streamers. “I could at least tell you that you look like a pagan princess, with your tangled black hair and your bright, dark eyes.” “And?” Lillian encouraged, linking her arms loosely around his neck. He set his hands at her slender waist and moved them down to grasp her strong, sleek thighs. “And that every erotic dream I’ve ever had about your magnificent legs pales in comparison to the reality.” “You’ve dreamed about my legs?” Lillian wriggled as she felt his palms slide up her inner thighs in a lazy, teasing path. “Oh yes.

My dear Marwan, in the long summers of childhood, when I was a boy the age you are now, your uncles and I spread our mattress on the roof of your grandfathers’ farmhouse outside of Hom. We woke in the mornings to the stirring of olive trees in the breeze, to the bleating of your grandmother's goat, the clanking of her cooking pots, the air cool and the sun a pale rim of persimmon to the east. We took you there when you were a toddler. I have a sharply etched memory of your mother from that trip. I wish you hadn’t been so young. You wouldn't have forgotten the farmhouse, the soot of its stone walls, the creek where your uncles and I built a thousand boyhood dams. I wish you remembered Homs as I do, Marwan. In its bustling Old City, a mosque for us Muslims, a church for our Christian neighbours, and a grand souk for us all to haggle over gold pendants and fresh produce and bridal dresses. I wish you remembered the crowded lanes smelling of fried kibbeh and the evening walks we took with your mother around Clock Tower Square. But that life, that time, seems like a dream now, even to me, like some long-dissolved rumour. First came the protests. Then the siege. The skies spitting bombs. Starvation. Burials. These are the things you know You know a bomb crater can be made into a swimming hole. You have learned dark blood is better news than bright. You have learned that mothers and sisters and classmates can be found in narrow gaps between concrete, bricks and exposed beams, little patches of sunlit skin shining in the dark. Your mother is here tonight, Marwan, with us, on this cold and moonlit beach, among the crying babies and the women worrying in tongues we don’t speak. Afghans and Somalis and Iraqis and Eritreans and Syrians. All of us impatient for sunrise, all of us in dread of it. All of us in search of home. I have heard it said we are the uninvited. We are the unwelcome. We should take our misfortune elsewhere. But I hear your mother's voice, over the tide, and she whispers in my ear, ‘Oh, but if they saw, my darling. Even half of what you have. If only they saw. They would say kinder things, surely.' In the glow of this three-quarter moon, my boy, your eyelashes like calligraphy, closed in guileless sleep. I said to you, ‘Hold my hand. Nothing bad will happen.' These are only words. A father's tricks. It slays your father, your faith in him. Because all I can think tonight is how deep the sea, and how powerless I am to protect you from it. Pray God steers the vessel true, when the shores slip out of eyeshot and we are in the heaving waters, pitching and tilting, easily swallowed. Because you, you are precious cargo, Marwan, the most precious there ever was. I pray the sea knows this. Inshallah. How I pray the sea knows this.

Therefore, out of a class of 362 bright young Vassar women, I ended up ranked at 361—a fact that caused my father to remark in horror, “Dear God, what was that other girl doing?

You and I have the most interesting jobs in the universe: We run the Intergalactic Steam Circus, a most outrageous and bizarre affair. Traveling in wildly colorful space clippers, we sail from planet to planet in a huge parade, landing just outside the major population centers, setting up our magnificent and gaudy tents, and selling the people our magic of noise, confusion, bright lights, and trickery. There are, of course, beautiful young women strutting like cats in scanty sequined outfits, and handsome young men with tanned and muscular bodies, their shirts open to the waist. But that’s not what draws the crowds, day after day, planet after planet. They come to see the machinery.

Though an incredibly destructive example of the so-called lust murderer, a fantasy-driven offender whose homicides are marked by a wild and primitive fury, Bundy was also a bright and smooth-talking psychopath, witty and urbane, handsome in his younger days, and the object of not a few young women’s sexual fantasies, as well. Until you got to know him, it was a battle (even for cops) to reconcile the pleasant and friendly defendant who so fascinated the press and the public with the beast that lurked within. These qualities, plus his extraordinary instincts as a predator, were major reasons Ted made it so devilishly difficult for us to stop him. As he’d later brag to me, “I have a Ph.D. in serial murder.

Ember smiled brightly. “Hello! We haven’t met before. My name is Ellen. I’m an antiques dealer around these parts?” Mrs. Bailey looked surprised, but gave a polite smile. “Oh, yes?” “Yes. I’m sorry to burst in on you like this, I know it’s early. But I heard from one of the women in the historical society--Yolanda? You know her, don’t you?--that you collect antique ice picks. Best collection in the county, she said.” Mrs. Bailey smiled, looking a little confused. Ember wasn’t sure if there was a Yolanda in the historical society, but evidently Mrs. Bailey wasn’t sure, either. “Of course,” said Mrs. Bailey. “I have some very special pieces. I didn’t realize the historical society knew about them. Would you like to see them? I keep them just in here.” She pointed back behind her, into the house. “That would be lovely,” Ember said eagerly. So Mrs. Bailey let Ember inside. Ember noticed with a bashful feeling that the large picture she had knocked had been replaced on the wall, but all the glass of the frame was missing. Probably it had taken a long time to clean up all those many pieces. “My name is Anna, by the way,” Mrs. Bailey was saying. “It’s nice to meet you, Ember. I’m always so pleased to know young people such as yourself who are interested in antiques.

I carry you like my own personal Time Machine, as I put on my lipstick, smile, and head out to the party.

nature is the very best example of integration. Things grow differently when they’re damaged, showing us how to occupy strange new ground to bloom red instead of green. We can be found, brighter than before.

talking to me?” someone said. Arthur turned around to find a young woman in a rain slicker, her blonde hair pulled into a taut ponytail, juggling a pink backpack, an orange tote bag, and a red umbrella. She had a square face and a wide mouth that were spared from looking masculine by her lively blue eyes and the bright makeup she wore. She smiled at Arthur tentatively. “Hello, young lady,” Arthur said. He gave her a half bow. Arthur had turned just forty-seven the previous spring, but he looked older because his hair had turned mostly gray a decade before, and deep emotions had carved lines on his face. Recently, he’d decided he was now old enough to refer to younger women as “young lady.” When he was a young man himself, he was always befuddled by what to call women. “Miss” and “Ma’am” seemed to offend more often than not, for reasons that confused Arthur. “Hey you” was always inappropriate. “Hi,” the young woman said. Arthur held out a hand. “I’m Father Blythe.” Inwardly, he cringed at the formality. He preferred being called by his first

that’s where, much like their predecessors back west, they dropped the ball, and instead of picking it up, they watched, whistling through the gaps in their two front teeth, while it rolled off the face of the earth.

There’s a diet for you. I lost five pounds in four days after reading that.

Feeding the hungry is helping people,” Tina said. “Getting their coffee is servitude.

Women got that feeling about him, that funny one we all get when we know something isn’t right, but we don’t know how to politely extricate ourselves from the situation without escalating the threat of violence or harassment.

He targets college campuses and sorority houses because he’s looking for the cream of the crop. He wants to extinguish us—we are the ones who remind him that he’s not that smart, not that good-looking, that there’s nothing particularly special about him.

and soon I was drunk and thinking about Julia Child, whose show my father and I watched religiously, and whose first cookbook was rejected by twenty-one male publishers before going on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

Like all children, he was too young to take care of himself but capable of extreme emotional destruction.

The fact that these young women, with their trim ankles, high cheekbones, good educations, bright eyes, little bosoms, and expensive clothes, keep coming to my bungalow and often to my bed, despite the fact that I'm old, fat, often drunk, beneath them on the social scale, and in love with a dead woman, only increases Jill's impatience with her own sex. Their foolishness drives her up the wall, and my willingness to assist them in their obvious folly is a constant bone of contention between us.

The point is that nothing can be predicted, really,

I once had a doctor tell me there are a certain number of catastrophically bad things that, statistically speaking, must happen every year to a certain number of people—rare diseases, freak accidents, and, yes, serial killer attacks. Little grains of tragedy carried by the wind. I could make peace with the idea that one of those currents happened to catch my corner of the world. But a brush with the improbable Defendant had amplified something about my everyday terrain that was proving harder to accept. Which was that guys like Roger did not arrive into our lives on the curve of some unfavorable wind. They were already rooted and ubiquitous.

These were not things that the girls would have talked about unless they were compelled to under oath. They wouldn’t have wanted people to pity them or think they were complaining. Nobody liked a complainer, and we wanted so much for people to think well of us.

There was still something about him that irked me, and I didn’t want to be too nice to him in case I gave him the wrong idea. I wanted him to understand I was coming along because he needed my help and because he seemed a little rejected,

I’d heard people describe rapists and murderers before. How their eyes went black and they saw pure evil. But the man I saw before me was the man I’d seen at the lake, in the car. I’d seen this man all along. I’d seen him and I’d gone with him anyway, because he’d asked for my help, and I’d already denied it to my mother that day.

I’d heard people describe rapists and murderers before. How their eyes went black and they saw pure evil. But the man I saw before me was the man I’d seen at the lake, in the car. I’d seen this man all along. I’d seen him and I’d gone with him anyway, because he’d asked for my help, and I’d already denied it to my mother that day. I’d have been a real bitch to tell someone no for the second time in twenty-four hours.

What was worth their ire was not an old man in an old video clip grieving for the ruined future of a potential protégé, it’s that there was never anything to grieve.

What can I do for you?” Janet is regarding me with the combination of concern and resignation that I haven’t seen in a long time—the look people give you when the very worst has happened, and really, there isn’t anything anyone can do for you, for any of us, because some of us die early and inconveniently and there is no way to predict if it will be you next, and before you know it, mourner and comforter are staring dead-eyed into the abyss.

For this he was called cunning and clever, though I had a dog who also tore up toilet paper when he didn’t get enough attention.

You should not have to deny the magnitude of your loss to make her feel seen.

Why did this happen? One day we would get our answer, and it’s not the one you think. Right here, right now, I want you to forget two things: he was nothing special, and what happened was not random.

The women I studied were young, healthy and resilient. Bright sparks each one. They took to flying in a way that alarmed their superiors, not to mention their male colleagues. They greeted the sky each morning and gazed at it ruefully as evening fell and they returned to their barracks.

Go away,” I tell this fuzzy stranger. “I’m calling the police.” I hold up my phone and show him that I’ve pressed send on the 911 call. The man laughs. “That won’t never go through out here.

There is little to be done to substantiate the rumor that The Defendant was a product of incest but there are enough chains in the links of logic for me to believe it to my marrow.

The one that would derail my life, briefly, then set me on course.

He was nearing his final act in life, and he did not want to be alone at the end. In turn, he would offer Tina what no man her age could. With tears in his eyes, he told Tina and her family she could do whatever she wanted with her life. Go to Radcliffe, if it called to her, and live anywhere in the world. She thought about the barn that Ed bought Deb after high school, and she felt ill because she understood how it was Deb was so miserable doing whatever she wanted with her life too.

Boys are one interest of mine that never really goes away, though to little avail. None of the guys I go to school with notice me. I’m not even on their lists of alternatives after all the girls with names like Jennifer and Alison and Nicole don’t work out. It’s not that I’m unattractive—I think that maybe I’m even pretty, but my look appeals to an entirely different demographic group. I have cultivated a certain shaggy paleness, I have that boozy and bruise-eyed Chrissie Hynde look, so I end up attracting older guys who are used to women who aren’t bright and cheery.

Could I ask your help with something?” He smiled a little sheepishly. I sat up on command. “I’m supposed to be meeting some friends here to help me load my sailboat onto my car, but I can’t find them anywhere.” The man squinted into the swarm of people, one last attempt to pick them out. “I’d do it myself, but…” He smiled down at his bum arm.

I admitted to myself that something was wrong with him in the car, but through some lethal interaction between denial and decorum, I kept the conversation going at a sparkling cadence.

It is a guilty pleasure to be persuasive when you are wrong.

the Jewish Agency and they had agreed to allocate from the next immigrant ship twenty-four Moroccans to Kibbutz Makor for work at the dig. “They’ll be pretty rough diamonds,” Eliav warned. “No English. No education.” “If they speak Arabic I can handle them,” Tabari assured the leaders, and two nights later the team went to greet the large ship that plied monotonously back and forth across the Mediterranean hauling Jewish immigrants to Israel. “Before we go aboard,” Eliav summarized, “I’ve got to warn you again that these aren’t the handsome young immigrants that you accept in America, Cullinane. These are the dregs of the world, but in two years we’ll make first-class citizens of them.” Cullinane said he knew, but if he had realized how intellectually unprepared he was for the cargo of this ship, he would have stayed at the tell and allowed Tabari to choose the new hands. For the ship that came to Israel that night brought with it not the kind of people that a nation would consciously select, not the clean nor the healthy nor the educated. From Tunisia came a pitiful family of four, stricken with glaucoma and the effects of malnutrition. From Bulgaria came three old women so broken they were no longer of use to anyone; the communists had allowed them to escape, for they had no money to buy bread nor skills to earn it nor teeth to eat it with. From France came not high school graduates with productive years ahead of them, but two tragic couples, old and abandoned by their children, with only the empty days to look forward to, not hope. And from the shores of Morocco, outcast by towns in which they had lived for countless generations, came frightened, dirty, pathetic Jews, illiterate, often crippled with disease and vacant-eyed. “Jesus Christ!” Cullinane whispered. “Are these the newcomers?” He was decent enough not to worry about himself first—although he was appalled at the prospect of trying to dig with such assistance—but he did worry about Israel. How can a nation build itself strong with such material? he asked himself. It was a shocking experience, one that cut to the heart of his sensibilities: My great-grandfather must have looked like this when he came half-starved from Ireland. He thought of the scrawny Italians that had come to New York and the Chinese to San Francisco, and he began to develop that sense of companionship with Israel that comes very slowly to a Gentile: it was building itself of the same human material that America was developed upon; and suddenly he felt a little weak. Why were these people seeking a new home coming to Israel and not to America? Where had the American dream faltered? And he saw that Israel was right; it was taking people—any people—as America had once done; so that in fifty years the bright new ideas of the world would come probably from Israel and no longer from a tired America.

You have a good heart,” she said with a smile, slightly stretching the tattoo on her chin. “The spirit of a fighter. You love the dry desert and the high mountains equally, the bluebird and the bear. You trust, time and time again, even though you have been hurt, time and time again. You have both old scars and new wounds, and still, you look towards the future. You cry for old women who have no one else, give what little you have to young boys with no parents. I see so much promise in you. It would be a shame to fill a grave and bury what is inside you. I see the red of your cheeks and the black of your hair and the green of your eyes, but I can also see your soul, Aspa. If you only knew how brightly it shines. It is in fact, quite blinding.

Thank you. I keep telling my daughter that I’m the one who needs this group, but with two grandchildren, who has the time?” Her laugh was absurdly modest. There was nothing at all taxing about having two grandchildren.

Gone were the head-to-toe tennis whites, the plummy voice, and the handicapped act, the pleas to complaint young women for help, which we’d been conditioned from birth to answer the way he’d been conditioned from birth to expect a woman to take care of him.