Gus’s Reviews > Jazz > Status Update

Now it's clear. Through the doorway I see the table. On it is a brown wooden bowl, flat, low like a tray, full to spilling with oranges. I want to sleep, but it is clear now. So clear the dark bowl the piles of oranges. Just oranges. Bright. Listen. I don't know who is that woman singing but I know the words by heart.

And the women tip-tapping their heels on the pavement tripped sometimes on the sidewalk cracks because they were glancing at the trees to see where that pure, soft but steady light was coming from.

...Joe thought maybe it was Wordsworth Hunter moved near to, and if he could ask him, Victory would remember exactly (assuming he was alive and prison had not rattled him) because Victory remembered everything and could keep things clear in his mind. Like how many times peahens had used a certain nest. Like where a henna carpet of pine needles was shin-bone deep. Like whether a particular tree—...

...Sitting in the thin sharp light of the drugstore playing with a long spoon in a tall glass made her think of another woman occupying herself at a table pretending to drink from a cup. Her mother. She didn't want to be like that. Oh never like that. To sit at the table, alone in the moonlight, sipping boiled coffee from a white china cup as long as it was there, and pretending to sip it when it was gone...

"...Victory would remember exactly (assuming he was alive and prison had not rattled him) because Victory remembered everything and could keep things clear in his mind. Like how many times peahens had used a certain nest. Like where a henna carpet of pine needles was shin-bone deep. Like whether a particular tree—the one whose roots grew up its trunk—was in bud two days ago or a week and exactly where it was."

“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.”

“…her hand thrust through the leaves, the white flowers, would be enough to say that she knew him to be the one, the son she had fourteen years ago, and ran away from, but not too far. Just far enough away to annoy everybody because she was not completely gone, and close enough to scare everybody because she creeps about and hides and touches and laughs à low sweet babygirl laugh in the cane.”

“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…”