Old Babes in the Wood

That was the active period. Then there had been the slowdown; an accumulation, as in sluggish rivers. Things ended up in this house that hadn’t been needed in their city life but that they couldn’t simply throw out. Layers of sediment, over thirty years of it, had sifted in during springs and summers and falls and springs and summers, and now Nell

They’ve had a sauna in the little shack Tig designed and built for the purpose, back when he was first feeling arthritic, back when he thought such a thing as a sauna might reverse time. No such luck, but anyway here they are. They’re holding hands. They’re wearing white terry-cloth bathrobes like those in spas, bought by Nell when white terry-clot

Perhaps I was a woman to begin with—maybe even this particular woman, Amber, with her wardrobe of jokey T-shirts—and I was sent into a snail in order to learn something of deep importance to my soul. But what could that be? To pay homage to the immediate, such as the rich veins and cells of edible greens and the heady, intoxicating scent of decayin

Do you all have your comfort blankets? We tried to provide the right sizes. I am sorry some of them are washcloths—we ran out. And your snacks? I regret that we could not arrange to have them cooked, as you call it, but the nourishment is more complete without this cooking that you do. If you put all of the snack into your ingestion apparatus—your,

The late 1960s was a time of big domestic breakups: the so-called sexual revolution, post-pill, pre-AIDS. Young bearded hippies everywhere, girls in maxicoats, then long flower-child skirts and granny boots, acid and weed freely available, plus—later—other substances. It was as if the 1950s ideal family had swelled up like a water balloon and then

What is she doing, wandering around the house in the middle of the night, in the middle of this one condensed slice of past time in which so much is happening but so much is obscure? Pawing through the rubble, a brick here, a shard there, fragments of lives; trying to understand things that can’t be understood, or not by her. Pieces of paper, folde

My heart is broken, Nell thinks. But in our family we don’t say, “My heart is broken.” We say, “Are there any cookies?” One must eat. One must keep busy. One must distract oneself. But why? What for? For whom? “Are there any cookies?” she manages to croak out. “No,” Lizzie says. “But there’s chocolate. Let’s have some.” She knows that Nell’s heart

She’s a strategic liar, being a memoirist. She likes to roll the dice, try things out on people, see how far she can go.

Protective colouration, she called her outfits. She looked like a dependable mother from a respectable neighbourhood such as ours. As she worked at the kitchen counter, she might have been demonstrating a jiffy recipe in Good Housekeeping magazine—something with tomato aspic, this being the mid-1950s, when tomato aspic was a food group.