Weekday Fun Quotes

Chantelle has three older brothers. Their parents are divorced, so they spend the weekdays at their mother and stepfather’s house, and the weekends at their father’s house. She says that it’s fun to belong to two places. I know what she means.

Arithmetic Matilda longed for her parents to be good and loving and understanding and honourable and intelligent. The fact that they were none of these things was something she had to put up with. It was not easy to do so. But the new game she had invented of punishing one or both of them each time they were beastly to her made her life more or less bearable. Being very small and very young, the only power Matilda had over anyone in her family was brain-power. For sheer cleverness she could run rings around them all. But the fact remained that any five-year-old girl in any family was always obliged to do as she was told, however asinine the orders might be. Thus she was always forced to eat her evening meals out of TV-dinner-trays in front of the dreaded box. She always had to stay alone on weekday afternoons, and whenever she was told to shut up, she had to shut up. Her safety-valve, the thing that prevented her from going round the bend, was the fun of devising and dishing out these splendid punishments, and the lovely thing was that they seemed to work, at any rate for short periods. The father in particular became less cocky

She walked from the lowest step to his car and I saw that she had her red hair done up in a pouf with a big, sharp curl on each cheek pointing to her especial face like a finger saying I’ll Have That One, and I saw that she had a tiny waist with roundy hips, and pointed shoes whose heels had made a feminine click and clatter on the stairs for how many weeks now? Made them going up at suppertime and coming down late or the next morning but never at noon on a weekday. I began to think about those curls on her cheeks and for the fun of it I made myself a cardboard hand, one of those old-fashioned hands you used to see pointing, and I pinned it on my straw hat with a safety pin so that it was pointed down at me. Maybe it was God’s finger pointing, maybe it was God saying Look At This Woman. She’s Got A Soul Because I Gave It To Her. She’s Not Dead Yet Even If Some People Look Right Through Her As If She Was. She’s One Of My Living Souls.