Fiona’s Reviews > Seating Arrangements > Status Update

That waiting room and the waiting room where Biddy now sat beside Winn, his injured leg propped up on a chair, were nearly identical—the same linoleum, the same vinyl chairs, the same isopropyl tang in the air. All waiting rooms were essentially the same, not really places in themselves as much as rehearsals for purgatory.

After Winn’s wedding, his mother refused to venture outside the white stone house ever again, preferring to live out her days sequestered on the top floor. When he came to Boston for Ophidian dinners or business meetings, he had sometimes detoured past the house at night and stood on the sidewalk or peered out from the back of a taxi, looking up at the lit window of his mother’s room atop the dark mass

Livia had always liked the Duffs. They were painless companions. Dicky and Maude lived within familiar confines: the Ivy League, the Junior League, The Social Register, Emily Post, Lilly Pulitzer, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Windsor knots, cummerbunds, needlepointed tissue box covers, L.L. Bean, Memorial Day, Labour Day, waterfowl-based décor. They were old-fashioned, myopic, beyond reproach.

His discomfort intrigued her. Instinct, honed by years of field experience, had rendered her unable to resist sniffing along a trail of male bad behavior once she caught the scent, and she studied him, increasingly certain that, underneath his bluster, something was off. Winn scowled, backed up against his tree. What had he been looking at in the first place? He moved to block her view, but she leaned around him

Watching Biddy and Daphne nestle together in the hospital bed, he realised he had been mistaken to think that pregnancy and birth had something to do with him. He had imagined that by impregnating this woman he had ensured she would deliver a son who would go forth and someday impregnate another woman who would, in turn, have a son, and so on and so forth down the Van Meter line into the misty future.

He’d known Agatha since she was fourteen and Daphne’s first roommate at Deerfield, and though she must be twenty-seven now, he couldn’t shake his idea of her as a Lolita. His attraction still embarrassed him as much as when it had revolved around her field hockey skirt. She had been a lackluster athlete; probably she had played only because she knew she looked spectacular in skirt and kneesocks.