Status Updates From Surfacing

“I curled up, concentrating on excluding him: he was merely an object in the bed, like a sack or a large turnip.”

“There's more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn't see why they would want to skin a cat even one way. I stared at the wall and thought of maxims: two can play that game, marry in haste, repent at leisure, least said soonest mended, traditional wisdom which was never any help.”

2/2 A lady was what you dressed up as on Halloween when you couldn't think of anything else and didn't want to be a ghost; or it was what u said at school when they asked u what u were going to be when u grew up, you said "A lady" or "A mother," either one was safe; and it wasn't a lie, I did want to be those things. On some of the pages were women's dresses clipped from mail-order catalogues, no bodies in them.”

1/2 “The next scrapbook was mine. I searched through it care-fully, looking for something I could recognize as myself, where I had come from or gone wrong; but there were no drawings at all, just illustrations cut from magazines and pasted in. They were ladies, all kinds: holding up cans of cleanser, knitting, smiling, modeling toeless high heels and nylons with dark seams and pillbox hats and veils.