“Father, R.I.P., Sums Me Up at Twenty-ThreeShe has no head for politics,craves good jewelry, trusts too readily,marries too early. Thenone by one she sends away her friendsand stands apart, smug sapphire,her answer to everything a slenderzero, a silent shrug--and every daystill hears me say she'll never be pretty.Instead she reads novels, instead her beltmatches her shoes. She is masterof the condolence letter, and knowshow to please a man with her mouth:Good. Nose too large, eyes too closely set,hair not glorious blonde, not her mother's red,nor the glossy black her younger sister has,the little raven I loved best.”

“For you she learned to wear a short black slipand red lipstick,how to order a glass of red wineand finish it. She learned to reach outas if to touch your arm and then nottouch it, changing the subject.Didn't you think, she'd begin, orWeren't you sorry. . . .To call your best friendsby their schoolboy namesand give them kisses good-bye,to look away when they sayYour wife! So your confidence grows.She doesn't ask what you wantbecause she knows.Isn't that what you think?When actually she was only waitingto be told Take off your dress---to be stunned, and then do this,never rehearsed, but perfectly obvious:in one motion up, over, and gone,the X of her arms crossing and uncrossing,her face flashing away from you in the fabricso that you couldn't say if she wasappearing or disappearing.”

“Used to be hewas my heart's desire.His forthright gaze,his expert hands:I'd lie on the couch with my eyesclosed just thinking about it.Never about the factthat everything changes,that even this,my best passion,would not be immune.No, I would bask on in aneternal daydream of the handsfinding me, the gaze like a windingstair coaxing me down. . . .Until I caught a glimpseof something in the mirror:silly girl in her lingerie,dancing with the furniture--a hot little bundle, flush withcliches. Into that pairof too-bright eyes I lookedand saw myself. And something else:he would never look that way.”

“The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn't read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books--great, big, fat ones--French and German as well as English--history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much.”

“Little Lotte thought of everything and nothing. Her hair was as golden as the sun's rays, and her soul as clear and blue as her eyes. She wheedled her mother, was kind to her doll, took great care of her frock and her red shoes and her fiddle, but loved most of all, when she went to sleep, to hear the Angel of Music.”

“I had seen a photograph of Sara at two. In it, her hair is platinum and falls around her face in happy disarray. She is dressed in yellow. Babyhood clings to her still and in the sunlight she appears incandescent. She is golden and delicious, sweet as a lemon drop. But her father never asks to see her.”

“Her head titled to the side and her eyebrows crept up her face. It was her uh-durrr face, she was just too kind to actually say it to me.”