Chapter 12

• It’s papered in small blue flowers, forget-me-nots, with curtains to match. There’s a blue bath-mat, a blue fakefur cover on the toilet seat;
• “There were incidents in the bathroom at first; there were cuttings, drownings. Before they got the bugs ironed out.”
• “the bath is a requirement, but it is also a luxury. Merely to lift off the heavy wings and the veil, merely to feel my own hair again, with my hands, is a luxury.”
• “Cora has run the bath. It steams like a bowl of soup.”
• “I avoid looking down at my body […]. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.
• let it hold me. The water is soft as hands.
• I close my eyes, and she’s there with me, suddenly, without warning, it must be the smell of the soap. (…) She comes back to me at different ages. This is how I know she’s not really a ghost. If she were a ghost she would be the same age always.”
• “he liked to choose what kind of meat we were going to eat during the week. He said men needed more meat than women did, and that it wasn’t a superstition and he wasn’t being a jerk, studies had been done.”
• “One day, when she was eleven months old, just before she began to walk, a woman stole her out of a supermarket cart. (…) She was crying and saying it was her baby, the Lord had given it to her, he’d sent her a sign.”
• “I thought it was an isolated incident, at the time.”
• I am too important, too scarce, for that. I am a national resource.
• I cannot avoid seeing, now, the small tattoo on my ankle.
• I will never be able to fade, finally, into another landscape.
• They were right, it's easier, to think of her as dead. I don't have to hope then, or make a wasted effort. Why bash your head, said Aunt Lydia, against a wall?
• mother and baby, locked in a frame, for saftey.
• Blessed are the meek. She didn't go on to say anything about inheriting the earth
• You must be a worthy vessel. No coffee or tea though, no alcohol. Studies have been done.
• I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.