“When we did eventually get to the party - me walking next to Dad's Volvo driving at five miles an hour - I had a horrible time. Everyone laughed at first but then more or less ignored me. In a mood of defiant stuffed oliveness I did have a dance by myself but things kept crashing to the floor around me. The host asked if I would sit down. I had a go at that but it was useless. In the end I was at the gate for about an hour before Dad arrived.”

“Unbelievable! I said, "What would I be doing walking the streets at night as a stuffed olive- gate-crashing cocktail parties?”

“I have slightly less than 60 miles to go, and I’m going slightly faster than 60 miles per hour. I should arrive in a bad mood.”

“Well, I would have struck him, but I would have had to get up. You have no notion how difficult it is to arrange skirts when sitting down; it took me five minutes together the first time.”

“And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”

“Our relationship finally ended when he took to waking me up in the wee hours of the morning when he would go surfing. He thought it might be fun to have me come watch. "Fun for who?" I wanted to ask. I had never asked him to come to Happy Hour and watch me drink.”