“In the unopened pile of mail she keeps in a tarnished toast holder, Jean Brovak finds a letter from her ex-husband, addressed in that balanced architect’s script of his. The letters kneel shoulder to shoulder the way gymnasts do to create a pyramid.”

“Her neighbor and mother would call and say ‘Sweetie, you just need to relax and forget about it. Then you’ll conceive.” Ever notice that relax is a very unrelaxing word. It has the word AX in it, which is what she wanted to do to all of them. RELAX AX AX AX. Instead she did what she could: Toffee peanuts, rocky road ice cream, frozen burritos, gallons of Chablis.”

“The woman has a cervix like a Goodrich tire. Half a day to dilate a few centimeters, then booming contractions for the last two hours.”

“Her friends say it’s a dead-end relationship. They’re absolutely right, only it doesn’t lead her to the same conclusions. She keeps telling them: Who needs
Mr. Right when you’ve got Mr. Vacation?”

“Her ex-husband was a money addict. He couldn’t get enough of everyone else’s money.”

“Virginia’s creative writing course meets in Franzen Hall, an industrial age, cement box built with pipes exposed on purpose so that you feel at all times as though you were in a toilet tank.”

“His sweetness is like the candy she used to make with her mother, dribbled in designs on the snow, breaking the minute it is lifted from the cold.”

“She knew she would love her baby no matter what, if his brain were an open bloom, or his heart had three chambers. She knew she would love him even if she had to watch him die.”

“Now her mom’s had a stroke. She can’t tell the difference between a diaper hamper and a mailbox. Half the time, she doesn’t know who Tasi is, but she always knows who her husband is, and in the olive-drab den when no one’s visiting, she tries to brain him with the porcelain figurine he gave her on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, you know the one, Big Girl in the Dirndl.”

“She isn’t shopping like that anymore—with the instinct of an ant pulling and pushing a whole wasp’s body in to the mound. Now she is in Costco buying a quantity of Kotex that will last till menopause; that’s her mood.”

“In those days, women were inseminated with fresh sperm so the procedure had to have taken place within two hours of ejaculation. All we had to do was find the closest medical school and call up the alumni association for the year books.”

“Like Monique’s father, my father would have shelled out ten or twenty grand to give me a wedding, but the college money was reserved for the boys, who could bring the improvement in themselves home. Girls were the ones who really left home, pitted by rice and baby pearls.”

“On the bus ride out here, I thought about how it’s possible to set out on a journey in America not to discover oneself and succeed. From on-ramp to off-ramp, from Burger King to Burger King, Motel Six to Super Eight, Arby’s, Bob’s, Wendy’s, Denny’s, every place the same place. Why not be a chain-outlet person? Go home with the first person to mistake me for somebody they know.”

“Nigel once asked me if my mother and I were close. We are and we aren’t. Every statement I make about her has to be like that.”

“One morning as she was putting away my laundry, my mother found the crumpled tube of Ortho-Gynol nesting in my underwear. I watched from the bed. She picked it up between her fingers the way you would a dead moth, by its wings.”

“Gust of wind travel up the cliff and fold over the headland, mixing the stench of the cormorant rookeries with the sweetness of new grass. Acid and salt, that which has passed into the gullet alive and died on the way down, the smell is sharp and merciless as first desire.”

“My daughter thinks I am incapable of loving a man when the truth is I love ceaselessly. I am like one of those ghosts that haunt highways because I don’t know I’ve died and no one can tell me.”

“This is a story that doesn’t tell. It rewinds and it plays, but it doesn’t tell.”

“What did I want my father to be anyway? It was like hearing Mr. Roger’s sing ‘You’re Special to Me' and fantasizing that he was only broadcast to my house.”