The last thing Althea needed with Owen missing was Irene nosing around.
Elephants have six sets of molars, I learned the summer that I made Gerald move downstairs. They use the front set to eat. When those wear down, the back molars push forward, ejecting the dull ones and leaving fresh ones for chewing. Once the final set wears down, elephants die.
That voice. Gravelly, loud, insistent. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!” yelled over and over outside Mila’s building, six-thirty sharp, mornings and evenings.
Sylvie is late the first time she meets Kyle’s son. An accident on Mulholland snarls traffic, and she winds up rushing to the movie theater, eager for Kyle’s embrace, the quiet reverence of his touch. He’s always finding reasons to touch her, to remind himself what she feels like, he sometimes says with a shy smile that leaves her as giddy as a girl with a crush.
The fire drill was Winston’s idea. No way Marney would have done it alone.
Every Sunday during Mass, Grace stared at little Noreen Baransky—at her swollen joints and wasted limbs, her bulging, watery eyes, the discolored fingernails. Grace wondered what was wrong with her. Maybe a rare chromosomal disorder with a complicated Latin name.
These days, when she’s not helping Ralph prepare to live as a woman, Elke devotes herself to their pet sitting business.
After Hannah scraped the decorative border from the nursery walls, she placed an ad in the university housing office. Summer break had just started, but within days someone called. Rune was her name. “Like the fortune-telling alphabet,” the girl said, her voice throaty and low.
I wasn’t due for another month when my water broke. Neal and I lay there naked and shocked in a puddle of amniotic fluid.
Any other day Savina wouldn’t have answered the door. She would have checked the peephole, seen who it was, and hidden.
Lately Del is uncomfortable around Nora, a tiny woman with a cap of restless curls, whose pregnant belly protruding from her tapered limbs makes her look even smaller. Nora makes Del feel like a hulking mass of flesh, which she often feels like anyway. Del is five feet four inches tall and weighs two hundred and ninety-seven pounds.
Trump’s win felt like a personal attack. I honestly thought all his bald-faced lies, all the racist things he’s done over the course of a lifetime, and all the sexual harassment he’s so casually committed, would matter. I thought America would get it right, and that Trump’s downfall would be a kick in the teeth to all the men — strangers — who, over the years, have thought it was their right to touch my breasts and put their hands between my legs and make comments about my body. How can it be possible that anyone is willing to overlook the things this man has done and said?
As a kid, I used to beg my mother to tell me about the day her father died. Mom was a dynamic storyteller, and a smart one. She knew how to make that story about something other than grief.
I’ve never been much of a girly girl. I rarely wear makeup or get my nails done. Most days I forget to brush my hair. Waxing any body part seems like a torture designed for others braver than I am.
Lately, I’ve been feeling rather smug about how well I’m dealing with the aging process. My encroaching wrinkles give me character. I embrace my faulty memory. And my crotchety, do-it-my-way-or-not-at-all attitude has a certain charm. Aging and I have become buddies.
Then, recently, I decided to wear a thong.
I’ve always worn my pessimism like a badge of honor. Optimism is for suckers, I’d tell myself. Better to be on constant high alert for the worst possible outcome so it can’t blindside you. Where an optimist might perceive a cloudy sky as a promise of nourishing rain, a pessimist anticipates an oncoming downpour that will cause a major leak in the roof costing thousands of dollars to fix, not to mention the flood in the backyard thanks to a break in the mainline due to the weight of the sodden soil that can’t absorb all the water from this storm of biblical proportions.
To some writers–including me–plot can seem like the dirtiest, most despicable of four letter words. Writers of this ilk have been known to run screaming from a room when we hear the word. “Make something happen?” we call, quaking in our hiding spots. “Why would we do that? Stories come from character, not plot. Stories should be about someone, not something.”
This, I’ve learned, is a huge, smelly load of horse shit.
“That’s not true” has become my 10-year-old son’s knee-jerk refrain.
He corrects every word I say. Every. Single. Word.
It’s difficult for me to keep a neutral expression, especially when I’m stressed. My emotions have always dwelled close to the surface, impatient to assert themselves. Serious is easier. Serious is close enough to angry or upset that I can approximate it, no matter what I’m feeling.
So serious and determined became the face I wore at school and work. I took nothing lightly. I strove to be the best at whatever I did. I hid my fear, my hurt or upset, or tried to. Too often I didn’t succeed. I would cry soundlessly in a bathroom stall or over-apologize when something went wrong, even when I wasn’t at fault. Then it would hit me, what a failure I was. What a puppy.
…Before I met my husband and had my son, my house was pristine, every surface a glorious, bare expanse: no pictures, no tchotchkes, no vases or plants. My bed was made, my books shelved, my paperwork and bills hidden away.
I even had rules about the way I kept my refrigerator: containers lined up by size, cheeses and meats in the deli drawer, fruits and veggies in the crisper and only liquids on the top shelf, since that’s the tallest shelf and liquid containers are the tallest items in the fridge. No top-shelf solids—not ever.
My son didn’t cry on his first day of preschool; he cried on his thirtieth.
Recently, a twentysomething girl on an airplane called me “Ma’am.”
I was on my way to Chicago for a reunion with a wonderful group of women who dubbed themselves the Dowagers years ago in graduate school, when they were far from dowagers. I was more of a dowager than they were. I was one of the oldest in our program, though at the time I was only in my 30s.
Still, no one called me “Ma’am” back then.
I started out my dating life as a serial monogamist. From my teens until well into my twenties, I held on tight to my relationships, especially the difficult ones. Nothing worth having should be easy to get. I would find the formula to make a difficult relationship work. Guess what? No formula. No success.
Liu’s novel succeeds not just as fine-tuned historical fiction but also as an insightful portrait of individuals determined to understand and embrace the humanity of all. The book is set within the context of the British colonial system’s arrogant dehumanization of anyone perceived as “other.” Publisher’s Weekly writes the following about Glorious Boy: “With nuanced descriptions of diverse characters, and a wrenching portrait of the well-meaning Durants’ limited power, Liu upends the clichés of the white savior narrative.”
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