Chapter 31

• “I even walk like that: crouched over, my spine constricting into a question mark”
• “Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I’m only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel technicolor"
• “I sit in my chair, the wreath on the ceiling floating above my head, like a frozen halo, a zero. A hole in space where a star exploded. A ring, on water, where a stone’s been thrown. All things, white and circular.”
• “clipped whispers, projected through the funnels of our white wings. It’s more like a telegram, a verbal sephamore. Amputated speech.”
• If a woman went in there, they’d throw buns at her, she said.
• “they seem improbable, childish even, like something you’d do for fun; like a girls’ club, like secrets at a school. Or like the spy novels I used to read, on weekends,”
• “Her dress is crisp cool cotton. For her it’s blue, watercolour, not this red of mine that sucks in heat and blazes with it at the same time.”
• “I am leashed, it looks like, manacled; cobwebbed, that’s closer.”
• remnants of some lost intention, like signs on a road that lead nowhere. Throwbacks to Domesticity”
• “I look up at her. She looks down. It’s the first time we’ve looked into each other’s eyes in a long time. Since we met. The moment stretches between us, bleak and level”
• ““Maybe I could get something for you, (…) Something you want, (…) A picture”, she says, as if offering me some juvenile treat, an ice cream, a trip to the zoo”
• “She knows where they’ve put her then, where they’re keeping her. She’s known all along. Something chokes in my throat. The bitch, not to tell me, bring me news, any news at all. Not even to let on.”
• “She’s actually smiling, coquettishly even; there’s a hint of her former small-screen mannequin’s allure, flickering over her face like a momentary static.”
• “she takes the cigarette she’s been fiddling with and, a little awkwardly, presses it into my hand, closing my fingers around it.”
• "Maybe he can't," she says.

  I don't know who she means. Does she mean the commander, or God? if it's God she should say /won't/. Either way it's heresy. It's only women who can't, who remain stubbornly closed, damaged, defective.
• But the Marthas would take care of it mostly.