Journeys home were always a test. I started up the car, knowing it was only a matter of seconds before the massed restlessness took on elements of threat. We could feel it coming, Babette and I. A sulky menace brewed back there. They would attack us, using the classic strategy of fighting among themselves.

At the Dinky Donut, outside town, Bob Pardee sat quietly as the family ate and talked. The soft pink golfer’s face had begun to droop from his skull. His flesh seemed generally to sag, giving him the hang-dog look of someone under strict orders to lose weight. His hair was expensively cut and layered, a certain amount of color combed in, a certain

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become.

Babette said she liked the series J. A. K. and didn’t think it was attention-getting in a cheap sense. To her it intimated dignity, significance and prestige. I am the false character that follows the name around.

It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

A smile that was permanently in conflict with some inner stricture against the seductiveness of humor. Murray told me once he had a crush on her, found her physical awkwardness a sign of an intelligence developing almost too rapidly, and I thought I knew what he meant.

The world is more complicated for adults than it is for children. We didn’t grow up with all these shifting facts and attitudes. One day they just started appearing. So people need to be reassured by someone in a position of authority that a certain way to do something is the right way or the wrong way, at least for the time being.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.