• In passing, Lesje glances into the windows of dress shops, department stores, appraising the cadaverous mannequins who stand with their pelvises thrust forward, hand angular on hips, legs apart, one knee bent. If these bodies were in motion they would be gyrating, jerking a stripper's orgasmic finale. Since they are frozen plaster and wire, however, they are in good taste
• The third bowl, the steel one, is full of pennies, for the UNICEF boxes the children carry around with them these days. Save the children. Adults, as usual, forcing the children to do the saving, knowing how incapable of it they are themselves.
• I am an adult and I do not think I am merely the sum of my past.
• self-righteous banditry
• Nate folds back the Indian spread. Lesje can hardly see: the room is a blur around her, vision a shaft of light illuminating tigers, off-red tigers in a purplish jungle. Under the tigers there are flowered sheets. Wordlessly Nate undresses her, lifting her arms, bending her elbows as if he's undressing a doll or a child; Lesje stands still. He eases her sweater over her head, presses his cheek against her stomach while he kneels to the slide down her jeans. Lesje raises one foot and then the other, stepping out, obedient. There's a cold air, a draft somewhere in the room. Her skin contracts. Gently he pulls her ontothe bed. She sinks into a hollow, petals flow over her.

He's on top of her, both of them impelled now by fear, the sun moving across the sky, the feet walking inexorably towards them, the sound of a door which has not yet opened, boots on the stairs.

• ...hoping to feel lust bloom like a desert flower between her thighs.
• She's been living for so long on convenience food, take-outs, heat n' serve, she's sure her capacities for appreciation have been blunted.
• Mummy . A dried corpse in a gilded case. Mum , silent. Mama , short for mammary gland. A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed. If you didn't want trees sucking at your sweet flowing breast why did you have children? Already they're preparing for flight, betrayal, they will leave her, she will become their background. They will discuss her as they lie in bed with their lovers, they will use her as an explanation for everything they find idiosyncratic or painful about themselves. If she makes them feel guilty enough they'll come and visit her on weekends. Her shoulders will sag, she will have difficulty with shopping bags, she will become My Mother , pronounced with a sigh. She will make them cups of tea and without meaning to but unable to stop will pry, pry like a small knife into their lives.
• Many women no longer use their husbands' names, they object to being called "my this" or "my that," and Nate, when he has to introduce her to anyone, which isn't all that often, doesn't use the possessive. He simply uses her name, without even a Miss, and this pleases him. He's glad, he says, that her name isn't Mrs. Schoenhof. God forbid she should in any way resemble his mother or his wife. But instead of making her feel like an entity in her own right, as Nate claims it's supposed to, this makes her feel like a cipher. Through her own conservatism, unsuspected till now, appalls her, she wants to belong, to be seen to belong; she wants to be classifiable, a member of a group. There is already a group of Mrs. Schoenhofs: one is Nate's mother, the other is the mother of his children. Lesje isn't the mother of anyone; officially she is nothing.
• The other grandmother had danced too, or so she claimed, She'd mentioned handkerchiefs; Lesje hadn't understood, so finally she'd pulled a crumpled Kleenex from her sleeve and waved it in the air. All Lesje had been able to picture was her grandmother at her present age, hopping about ridiculously in her tiny black boots, waving handfuls of Kleenex.
• Tenderness floats in him, hovers, is gone.
• The world exists apart from him. He's rehearsed this often enough in theory; he's just never known it with certainty. It follows that his body is an object in space and that someday he will die.
• It's hard to believe that such a negligible act of hers can have measurable consequences for other people, even such a small number of them. Though the past is the sediment from such acts, billions, trillions of them.
• Will they still be doing this in twenty years? Older women, old women, wearing black and not speaking; ill-wishing; never seeing each other, but keeping the other locked in her head, a secret area of darkness like a tumor or the black vortex at the center of a target. Someday they may be grandmothers. It occurs to her, a new idea, that this tension between the two of them is a difficulty for the children. They ought to stop.
• He think of Elizabeth, briefly, with detachment. For a moment she's someone he once knew. He wonders what has become of her. It's the walks they never took, the fields he could never convince her to enter he regrets now.
• He'll clim the steps and lean in the same spot where he used to do time for Elizabeth, one shoulder against the stone. He'll light a cigarette, watch the museum-goers passing in and out like shoppers, and wait for Lesje. She won't be expecting him. Perhaps she'll be surprised and pleased to see him; once he could count on it. Perhaps she'll only be surprised, and possibly not even that. he anticipates this moment, which he cannot predict, which leaves room for hope and also for disaster. They will either go for a drink or not. In any case, they will go home.
• Suddenly Elizabeth feels, not lonely, but single, alone. She can't remember the last time anyone other than her children helped her to do something.