serena joy

• Her left foot on the footstool, because of her arthritis. Or knitting scarves, for the angels on the front lines
• She doesn’t bother with the cross and star pattern used by many of the other wives, its not a challenge.
• She doesn’t speak to me, unless she can avoid it I am a reproach to her; and a necessity
• She wanted me to feel that I could not come into the house unless she said so. There is push and shove, these days over such toeholds.
• Her blue waist, thickened, her left hand on the ivory head of her cane, the large diamonds on the ring finger.
• Try to think of it from their point of view, she [Aunt Lydia] said, her hands clasped and wrung together, her nervous pleading smile. It isnt easy for them.
• She had a cigarette, and she put it between her lips and gripped it between her lips.
• She was then a woman who might bend the rules. But what did I have, to trade?
• You can sit down. I dont make a practice of it, just this time.
• I’ve read your file. As far as I’m concerned, this is like a business transaction.
• I wanted her to turn into an older sister, a motherly figure, someone who would understand and protect me
• Serena Joy didn’t do this herself, she made speeches instead, but she presented this failure of hers as a sacrifice she was making
• How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.
• I wonder how she manages to get herself noticed. I think it must be hard
• Possibly she’ll put a hand on my shoulder, to steady herself, as if I’m a piece of furniture
• She’d have to redirect her energies into something convincingly domestic, she had the intention of passing them off as ancestors
• It’s the scent of prepubescent girls, of gifts young  children used to give their mothers, for Mother’s Day
• Even at her age she feels the urge to wreathe herself in flowers…you can’t use them anymore, you’re withered. They’re the genital organs of plants.
• She leans back, inhales deeply. I on the contrary move forward
• She likes to keep him waiting
• she is in control of the process and thus the product
• some blitzkrieg, some kamikaze, committed on the swelling genetalia of the flowers
• I felt I was an intruder in a territory that ought to be hers
• She said I was poaching on a another woman’s ground
• I am leashed, it looks like, manacled; cobwebbed, that’s closer.
• I look up at her. She looks down.
• She’s made of wood, or iron, she can’t imagine
• her stud farm