roman-à-clef

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

She was always on to me to learn shorthand after college, so I’d have a practical skill as well as a college degree. “Even the apostles were tentmakers,”

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.

certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that’s the way I knew things were all the time.

People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.