Sublime

“I thought you had a missing parent to find.” “Maybe Flor can give me a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, and then I won’t have to.” “You’ve got a lot to learn about rich people,” Colleen said. “Flor won’t even share her dental floss.”

It seemed an anachronistic ambition, wanting to be a movie star; girls were not supposed to want that in 1968. They were supposed to want only to perfect their karma, to give and get what were called good vibrations and to renounce personal ambition as an ego game. They were supposed to know that wanting things leads in general to grief, and that w

She was smarter than him and they both knew it. It wasn’t just school—Lane Dean was in accounting and business and did all right, he was hanging in there. She was a year older, she was twenty, but it was also more—she had always seemed to Lane to be on good terms with her life in a way age could not account for. His mother had put it that she knew

The funny thing about Barbara is she has a little dog who she insists is a well-behaved dog but who, in reality, either barks or tries to bite pretty much everyone who comes near—except Barbara. New residents—grad students, adjuncts—sometimes believe Barbara and bend down to pet him, but we got with the program long ago and speak to Barbara only, g

She was, quite simply, a nice lady who’d raised a family and now lived quietly with her cats and grew vegetables. This was both nothing and everything.

In elegant, expensive clothing, she is the consummate homemaker and bares her soul to anyone who will listen. She obsesses about her mangled love life.

One treated them like poor girls and made the bare business offer. The other put a woman in charge—a motherly, dignified, capable woman. They did business in her name. They used her picture. She signed all ads and letters. She wrote to these girls like a friend.