Mr. James > Recent Status Updates

The conversation, too, serves a purpose of location, of locating the others on a continuum of happiness or its opposite, of satisfying the speakers that the others are within hailing distance in this our dark passage through life, with its mating and birthing, its getting and spending, its gathering and scattering. -- J.U.

The three women talk, touching their friends with their tongues not to harm them but to give themselves pleasure; little new can be offered—mere pinches or slivers added to the salad, tiny, almost meaningless remarks or glimpses that yet do enhance the flavor. -- J.U.

Above his head, on the swaybacked ceiling, footsteps scurry and rustle like those of giant rats. The children: he wants to go upstairs to check on the girls and tuck in the twins, but during these leaf-season weekends the children are invited to make their own society, and exist like a pack of shadows in the corners of the grownup fun. -- J.U.

[What was so funny?] Their all being here in Vermont, in this old farmhouse with its smells from another century, is in itself funny, and the Saturday-night meal of something so hearty and Western as chili and hot dogs is funny, and the half-gallons of cheap wine that replace themselves at the table, like successive generations of bulbous green dwarfs, are part of the delicate, hallucinatory joke. -- J.U.

The weariness of the long drive is still in her voice. Ruth’s words are like glass sandwiches that reflect back an obvious meaning on the first level, a less obvious one on the second, and so on, as deep as you want to look. “The poor child sat on the bench,” she adds. -- J.U.

This whole milieu and business of woodchopping is so exotic to him that his awareness flickers like a bad light bulb. Minutes of blankness —rural idiocy, Marx had called it— are suddenly illumined by a flash when the maul again sinks its murderous edge close to the tips of his city shoes; then the pebbles, the grit, the twigs are superillumined, vivid as the granules of paint in a Dubuffet... -- J.U.

The smells of the house are country smells—linoleum, ashes, split wood, plaster, a primeval cellar damp that rises through the floorboards and follows us up the steep, wear-rounded stairs to the second floor, where we see the children and their sleeping bags settled in the tangle of middle rooms. -- J.U.

And the leaves, whole valleys and mountains of them—the strident pinks and scarlets of the sugar and swamp maples, the clangorous gold of the hickories, the accompanying brasses of birch and beech, on both sides of the road, rise after rise, a heavenly tumult tied to our dull earth only by broad bands of evergreen and outcroppings of granite. We arrive feeling battered by natural glory [...]. -- J.U.

The men huddled in the snow were dressed in tails and the women had on furs. Shiny things glittered from underneath their coats. It made me tired to look at them. Tired, tired, tired. -- T.M.

Maggie was my dancing mother. Deaf, I thought, and dumb. Nobody inside. Nobody who would hear you if you cried in the night. Nobody who could tell you anything important that you could use. Rocking, dancing, swaying as she walked. And when the gar girls pushed her down, and started roughhousing, I knew she wouldn't scream, couldn't – just like me – and I was glad about that. -- T.M.

Those four short months were nothing in time. Maybe it was the thing itself. Just being there, together. Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew – how not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed. There was politeness in that reluctance and generosity as well. Is your mother sick too? No, she dances all night. Oh – and an understanding nod. -- T.M.

Things are not right. The wrong food is always with the wrong people. Maybe that's why I got into waitress work later – to match up the right people with the right food. -- T.M.

When we stood for hymns she kept her mouth shut. Wouldn't even look at the words on the page. She actually reached in her purse for a mirror to check her lipstick. All I could think of was that she really needed to be killed. The sermon lasted a year, and I knew the real orphans were looking smug again. -- T.M.

A pretty mother on earth is better than a beautiful dead one in the sky even if she did leave you all alone to go dancing. -- T.M.

The kids said she had her tongue cut out, but I think she was just born that way: mute. She was old and sandy-colored and she worked in the kitchen. I don't know if she was nice or not. I just remember her legs like parentheses and how she rocked when she walked. -- T.M.

Mary's idea of supper was popcorn and a can of Yoo-Hoo. Hot mashed potatoes and two weenies was like Thanksgiving for me. -- T.M.

We didn't like each other all that much at first, but nobody else wanted to play with us because we weren't real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky. We were dumped. Even the New York City Puerto Ricans and the upstate Indians ignored us. -- T.M.

So for the moment it didn't matter that we looked like salt and pepper standing there and that's what the other kids called us sometimes. We were eight years old and got F's all the time. Me because I couldn't remember what I read or what the teacher said. And Roberta because she couldn't read at all and didn't even listen to the teacher. -- T.M.

Note: I'm reading a printed copy and not listening to an audio book, as this edition proclaims. My edition isn't listed and the Librarian Group is occupied with other matters. This edition has the correct page count and the cover is cool. The latter being the most important.

I couldn't figure it out. I glanced back over the house [audience] again. Individual faces moved into focus: Normals with gray hair, red hair, white skin, black skin. Normals with contorted faces stoning the personification of themselves. I couldn't figure it out. -- T.D.H

"Nobody's going to heaven, just to space." -- T.D.H.

The Flukes had an even stronger animosity toward Freaks than Normals did. We were the new kids on the block, the foreign whores, the black sheep, the heteroclitic Mafia. We stood, chemical pretenders, outside of history and legend and art, we had no overtones and lit no votives to the memory of General Tom Thumb. -- T.D.H.

She handed three singles upfront. On each bill Washington's eyes had been whited out with correction fluid; it made him look pathological, which was the whole point, I suppose. Fucken pro nihilists could be as cutesy sometimes as those sheiks who wore bubble rings filled with crude oil. -- T.D.H.

Reeni was watching a program on television. It was a rerun -- I'd seen it last year -- about dolphins, about how they'd turned misanthropic, were refusing to share any more of their myths, their math or their semisacred medical arts. -- T.D.M.

Nobody. Then somebody: two somebodies: a fox-faced dwarf and a guy with ropy red hair and a gulch where his nose should've been. They stepped through the curtain at the rear of the store. "How the fuck did you get in here?" demanded Gulch-face. I told him: I just walked in, the door was open. -- T.D.H.

He breathed at me, then shuffled across the kitchen, his long, swollen, unserviceable arm dragging heavily behind him. It was wrapped in knotted dish towels and dustrags cinched with coarse twine. The hand was mittened in a tough vacuum-cleaner bag. The bag was polished shiny with dirt. Same as Ma, I'd always wondered how come he refused to have that arm amputated. -- T.D.H

I nosed inside the refrigerator, which Ma had stocked weirdly with beer, frozen bagels and a bag of make-believe corn. -- T.D.M.

The guy was standing there grinning, and his grin was a deliberate forgery of mine. -- T.D.M.

Nothing had been disturbed and Reeni was still dead when I got back. Relief, like soda water hectic in my circulatory system. I locked the door behind me and bolted down salt pills galore. I took Reeni's pulse: the faintest perk. She was beginning to resurrect, still had a long way to come. Thirty, forty minutes. -- T.D.H