Gus’s Reviews > Jazz > Status Update

“Committed as Violet was to hip development, even she couldn’t drink the remaining malt—watery, warm, and flat-tasting. She buttoned her coat and left the drugstore and noticed, at the same moment as *that* Violet did, that it was spring. In the City.”

“…laughter is more serious. More complicated, more serious than tears.
Crumpled over, shoulders shaking, Violet thought about how she must have looked at the funeral, at what her mission was. The sight of herself trying to do something bluesy, something hep, fumbling the knife, too late anyway…She laughed till she coughed and Alice had to make them both settling tea.”

“Just a sign, he said, just show me your hand, he said, and I’ll know don’t you know I have to know? She wouldn’t have to say anything; it wouldn’t have to be words; he didn’t need words or even want them bexause he knew how they could lie, could heat your blood and disappear. She wouldn’t even have to say the word ‘mother.’ Nothing like that…”

“The malted was gone and although her stomach seemed about to lose its stitching, she ordered another and took it over behind the secondhand magazine rack to one of the little tables that Duggie had placed there against the law that said if he did it, it made the place a restaurant. There she could sit and watch the foam disappear, the scoops of ice cream lose their ridges and turn to soft, glistening balls…”

“The snow she ran through was so windswept she left no footprints in it, so for a time nobody knew exactly where on Lenox Avenue she lived.…”