Nate Zamost took that week off school. We wondered what he did those long days other than the funeral, which didn’t take more than a few hours. The Zamosts lived in one of those houses just across the fence from Foley’s Pond. Nate’s sister, Barbara—they called her Babs—slid under the chain-link and waddled down to the water.
They’ll have to hire a girl. The father knows why. The daughter will no longer tolerate any housework that gets her hands dirty. She gives excuses the father doesn’t believe, but he doesn’t argue.
During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees.
It happened like this. A week after the Six-Day War, Sam walked to the eastern bank of the Jordan River. He was working as a counselor that summer near Karameh, at a day camp for boys.
I’d started to visit Olivia more often because it was obvious she was lonely. The ALS lady who’d been moved to Hopkins had been Aunt Olivia’s closest friend, leaving aside Merton Hillstead, who actually went home.
As soon as I said I was thirty, I wondered why I had said it. “Thirty,” said the woman I was talking to, who had a tousled gamine haircut, dyed white as only a very young woman will risk.
When had she begun to suspect that her second-floor tenant, Mr. Han, was building a bomb? The idea had come to her slowly, the way she’d intuited her husband’s illness in its early days, before the lapses and the wandering and the loss of language made it clear to everyone.
Funny thing to worry about. Little hairs. Hairs on back of sweater as she goes out of the room. Little hairs, how you look from the back, girls worry about this. Or they used to. Now girls are free. Okay to be unpretty, ungirls.
The week that began with Melania Trump’s memorable observation that a country should be judged by how it treats its citizens also began with an email from my mother’s sister, announcing that she and her husband were in Paris and would love to see me if I had time.
At the age of eighteen, my mother embarked on a movie career in her native city of Antwerp. Until then, she had worked for the gas company and taken some elocution courses, but when a studio was built on the Pyckestraat, at the initiative of a certain Jan Vanderheyden, she walked in the door and was hired.
I leaned forward from the couch and took the burning nub of joint from his outstretched hand. We called him Dub because his name was Lazarus Livingston—Double L.