I watched my beautiful sister running . . . and I knew she was not running away from me or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a sc...
I knew my mother's limitations because they formed the marrow of my bones.
I had been kissed once by someone I liked. His name was Ray and he was Indian. He had an accent and was dark. I wasn't supposed to like him. Clarissa called his large eyes, with their half closed lids...
He took the hat from my mouth. ''Tell me you love me'', he said. Gently I did. The end came anyway
He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.
By the time I was eighteen, she had sat me down and detailed her alcoholism, its onset and aftermath. She believed that by sharing such things I might be able to avoid them or, if need be, recognize t...
Between a man and a woman there was always one person who was stronger than the other one. That doesn’t mean the weaker one doesn’t love the stronger.
Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow from the stronger on...
As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.
The helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human-- feeling as you went--groping in corners and opening your arms to light-- all of it part of navigating the unknown.
The earth has a mouth? Buckley asked.A big round mouth but with no lips, my father said.Jack, my mother said, laughing, stop it. Do you know I caught him outside growling at the snapdragons?
She was armed to the teeth for any onslaught of sympathy.
Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions
People grow up by living.
Occasionally my mother called from California. My parents had hurried and difficult conversations. She asked after Buckley and Linsey and Holiday. She asked how the house was holded up and whether the...
My mother gave Lindsey a meaningful look. 'We are not discussing this further. You can go up to your room and wait or wait with me. Your choice.'Lindsey was dumbfounded. She stared at our mother and k...
My grandmother stepped back into the kitchen to get their drinks. I had come to love her more after death than I ever had on Earth. I wish I could say that in that moment in the kitchen she decided to...
My father had not been outside the house except to drive back and forth to work or sit out in the backyard, for months, nor had he seen his neighbors. Now he looked at them, from face to face, until h...
Lindsey and I would lie down on the floor underneath it. I would pretend to be the knight that was pictured, and Holiday was the faithful dog curled up at his feet. Lindsey would be the wife he’d left...
Last night it had been my father who had finally said it: She’s never coming home. A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she ne...