1846 My sisters loved my father and always came to his defense. They said he was brilliant and that much was true. He was generous with his family when it came to material goods, and my sisters never went without, at least until he lost everything we had. He was a notable man named John…
They had started out too late. This is what she tells herself as she sits in the dark on the old screened porch and drinks a glass of wine. Terrible wine—white, at least a week old, at room temperature. It had been sitting, recorked, in the box of last-minute things they’d brought up with them…
Year after year, rain enters your diary, as the Japanese say, and an exhaustive sadness prevails. And then suddenly one day, you find the love of your life. Happenstance or blind luck; what does it matter, as long as two people meet and life is lived more intensely for all that. Because nothing brings such…
His parents placed him on a Greyhound with twenty dollars, a plastic bag full of asparagus from the small garden out back, a satchel containing his meager summer clothes, and a letter. The asparagus he tossed in a trashcan when the bus made its first stop in Pennsylvania. The letter he opened before they’d even…
His parents placed him on a Greyhound with twenty dollars, a plastic bag full of asparagus from the small garden out back, a satchel containing his meager summer clothes, and a letter. The asparagus he tossed in a trashcan when the bus made its first stop in Pennsylvania. The letter he opened before they’d even…
After two years in Europe, fighting in the war, Frederick returned to the family farm outside of Ipswich. It was June of 1945. People commented on how much he’d changed. His eyes, which had once been full of feeling, were now entirely empty of emotion. Looking into them was like staring at a desert or…
Albert Arno, the film director, dropped dead at his home in the middle of a sentence. It was early evening and his wife, Lynne, was lifting a dish of potato gratin out of the oven. Albert came out of the downstairs shower room, one striped towel wrapped round his waist, rubbing his neck with another:…
Once, when she’d been walking in her neighborhood, a car had stopped for directions to Alsop, the psychiatric hospital perched above the Blackstone River. How to get there was complicated, the man already so lost in the tangle of leafy streets that Tess hadn’t been sure where to start. Begin at the beginning, wasn’t that…
It was 1968 and there was a war between the men and the women. Jane heard it on the radio, where for the first time women’s voices read the news; and she saw it at school, where her art teacher, Miss Hannah Shapiro, had started going braless—great wandering breasts shifting this way and that under…
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