[b]Meg Wolitzer
In the apartment, the answering machine blinked fiercely, two gnats drag-raced around the apparently sweet, rotting hole of the kitchen drain, and life was difficult once again, and familiar, and a disappointment.[/b]
In my apartment, it’s fruit flies.
Jules listened to this soliloquy in grim silence; she hardly knew what to say. Ash was describing an enclosed world that Jules too had been given a chance to enter, but hadn’t wanted to. She still didn’t want to, but the descriptions of the closeness and intensity of that world only increased her loneliness. Go on, was all she said.
So he did.
Being here reminded him of how hard the city had been, it’s unyielding surfaces, the relentless need for more and more money just to keep yourself vaguely afloat. The city was not a place for the contemplative or the slow.
Thank God then for the suburbs?
Corporate America had tried to get women to behave as badly as men, Faith Frank said, but women did not have to capitulate.
Though clearly most of them did. If not then some.
Twitter, said Manny, waving his hand. You know what that is? Termites with microphones.
But that’s before you get to the maggots.
All people, male or female, were helpless in the specifics of their own bodies.
Or they certainly were eventually.