She was choosing cucumbers at the grocery store and wondering what sorts of genitalia cicadas had when someone touched her on the shoulder. She prepared her public face and turned, expecting to see her friend the produce man.

It was 1973, the summer of Watergate, but my mind was not on politics, but literature. While the parade of unreliable narrators told their stories on daytime television to be followed by their nightly commentators

“We must go deeper,” Cousteau says. He is haggard, worn to bone, his splendid Gallic nose a wedge driven into his face. He uses his utensils to illustrate — his fork has become a crane, his spoon the

As I was saying, ladies and gentlemen, before that little unpleasantness: I have just been assured, by those in position to know, that this evening’s eminent “mystery guest” has arrived, and should be with us any time now.

Twice this summer rabid raccoons have crawled down people’s chimneys and in both cases bit old women, in both cases on the face. This is the reason that A. has brought her cat, B., to the veterinarian.

When I was really little, she would tell me the Luftwaffe’s bombs were as loud as a sweet potato man’s steamer, like a jet engine on the runway.

“Consider, if you will, the ancient Egyptians,” Stan Duval said, just as we were sitting down to dinner. “They had the correct attitude, in my humble estimation.”

It was the long bad time after the long good time. Stocks a puzzle, real estate stalled, the bond market iffy, Wall Street firms down to half their size. Two of his former associates under indictment:

It had been a hundred years since Hershleder had taken in a late afternoon movie, a hundred years since he had gone to the movies by himself. 

She seems to be afraid. The way she sits on the bed, her legs drawn up, and the way the blanket covers them and is pulled up to her throat. And look at her face, it seems …