I wondered about the half-life of regret.
Lorrie MooreI felt sorry for Mary-Emma and all she was going through, every day waking up to something new. Though maybe that was what childhood was. But I couldn't quite recall that being the case for me. And perhaps she would grow up with a sense that incompetence was all around here, and it was entirely possible I would be instrumental in that. She would grow up with love, but no sense that the people who loved her knew what they were doing - the opposite of my childhood - and so she would become suspicious of people, suspicious of love and the worth of it. Which in the end, well, would be a lot like me. So perhaps it didn't matter what happened to you as a girl: you ended up the same.
Lorrie MooreBut family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.
Lorrie MooreThe catalog showed a man sleeping peacefully while his model-wife read a book in soft but focused light. In real life, however, the light was so intense that the same man would have had to wear sunglasses.
Lorrie MooreAt home in Dellacrosse my place in the world of college and Troy and incipient adulthood dissolved and I became an unseemly collection of jostling former selves. Snarkiness streaked through my voice, or sullenness drove me behind a closed door for hours at a time.
Lorrie MooreShe had worn a sequined, strapless wedding gown, and left her bridesmaid to wear brightly flowered dresses to fit for a kind of pornographic milkmaid: low-cut and laced up the midriff with a sort of shoelace. "What Scarlet O'Hara might have done with a shower curtain, if she were trying to snag a plumber.
Lorrie MooreThis was love, I supposed, and eventually I would come to know it. Someday it would choose me and I would come to know its spell, for long stretches and short, two times, maybe three, and then quite probably it would choose me never again.
Lorrie MooreWe were in dialogue that was about something other than what we were saying.
Lorrie MooreAmber was past tense. We were covering her inanimate face in the white sheet of was.
Lorrie MooreFarmers aren't rich. They have land but no money." Actually, my father didn't even have that much land. He had once stood on the porch and flung his arms out and said, "Someday kids, all this will be yours." But his knuckles hit the porch supports. Even the porch wasn't that big.
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