As promised, here are some “Good Words” from The Robber Bride:
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| Photo found on surf-knot.blogspot.com |
Her face is silting up, like a pond; layers are accumulating. (pg. 79)
The memory of her is composed of shiny fragments, like a vandalized mosaic, or like something brittle that’s been dropped on the floor. Every once in a while Tony takes out the pieces and arranges and rearranges them, trying to make them fit. (pg. 150)
Despite the suffering he’s gone through and is still going through, there’s something shiny about him, shiny and new. Or else impermeable. She herself is so penetrable; sharp edges stick into her, she bruises easily, her inner skin is puffy and soft, like marshmallows. She’s covered all over with tiny feelers like the feelers on ants; they wave, they test the air, they touch and recoil, they warn her. Billy has no such feelers. He doesn’t need them. Whatever slams into him bounces right off – either he dismisses it, or instead of hurting him it makes him angry. (pg. 233-234)
It’s a sunless noon. Charis is in her garden, watched by the hens, who peer greedily through the hexagons of their wire fence, and by the remaining cabbages, goggling at her like three dull green goblin-heads emerging from the ground. The garden in November has a mangy, thumbed appearance; wilted marigolds, nasturtium leaves faded a pale yellow, the stumps of broccoli, the unripe tomatoes frost-killed and mushy, with silvery slug tracks wandering here and there. (pg. 247)
He was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, then end man in the almost-daily suit-and-briefcase parade that followed her father around like a tail. (pg. 341)
There was something about her that set her apart, an invisible barrier, faint and hardly there, like the surface of water, but strong nevertheless. Roz didn’t know what it was but she could feel it. She wasn’t like the others, she was among them but she wasn’t part of them. So she would push and shove, trying to break her way in. (pg. 360)
When she begins, with her rooming house stories, her stories of toilets and scrubbing, they roll their eyes and yawn delicately, like kittens, and change the subject back to their own mothers. Roz can’t possibly know, they imply. She can’t understand. (Pg. 381-382)
A long time later, after Roz was a married woman, after her mother had died – slowly and disapprovingly, since death was immodest, male doctors prying into your body being next door to sin – and after her father had followed, in jerky, painful stages, like a train shunting – after all this had happened and Roz was an orphan, she found out about the money. (pg. 384)
In every conversation between the two of them there was a third party present: her money, sitting between them on the sofa like some troll or heavy barely sentient vegetable. (pg. 386-387)
Then she hears a small voice, a small voice clear as ice-water, right at the back of her head. It’s the voice of experience. It’s the voice of Tony. Zenia lies, it says. (pg. 401)
He’s rumpled like a park-bench drunk, his skin is grey from travel, dark hollows ring his eyes. He’s lost weight, his flesh is loose, his face is starting to cave in, like some old guy without his false teeth, like the kid’s Halloween pumpkins a few days after the holiday is over and the candles inside have burned out. That softening, that subsiding inwards towards a damp central emptiness. (pg. 418)
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