Madeline’s Reviews > Surfacing > Status Update

“The lake didn’t matter to them, only the system: it would be a reservoir.”

We found that someone had built a fireplace already, on the shore ledge of bare granite; trash was strewn around it, orange peelings and tin cans and a rancid bulge of greasy paper, the tracks of humans. It was like dogs pissing on a fence, as if the endlessness anonymous water and unclaimed land compelled them to leave their signature, stake their territory, and garbage was the only thing they had to do it with.

Further on, glossy color prints, forgotten boys with pimples and carnations, myself in stiff dresses, crinolines and tulle, layered like store birthday cakes; I was civilized at last, the finished product. She would say "You look very nice, dear," as though she believed it; but I wasn't convinced, I knew by then she was no judge of the normal.

"Do you love me, that's all," he said. "That's the only thing that matters."
It was the language again, I couldn't use it because it wasn't mine. He must have known what he meant but it was an imprecise word; the Eskimos had fifty two names for snow because it was important to them, there ought to be as many for love.
"I want to," I said. "I do in a way."

2/2 - since then everything had been glancing off me, it was like being in a vase, or the village where I could see them but not hear them because I couldn't understand what was being said.
Bottles distort for the observer too: frogs in the jam jar stretched wide, to them watching I must have appeared grotesque.”

1/2 “I didn't feel awful; I realized I didn't feel much of anything, I hadn't for a long time. Perhaps I'd been like that all my life, just as some babies are born deaf or without a sense of touch; but if that was true I wouldn't have noticed the absence. At some point my neck must have closed over, pond freezing or a wound, shutting me into my head;

“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.