(As I once said to Marjorie, "The only two things I've ever been good at in this world are sex and sewing." To which she responded: "Well, honey—at least you chose the right one to monetize.")

The war had invested me with an understanding that life is both dangerous and fleeting, and thus there is no point in denying yourself pleasure or adventure while you are here.

Sex is so often a cheat—a shortcut of intimacy. A way to skip over knowing somebody's heart by knowing, instead, their mere body.

Except theirs was the sort of love that best thrives when a husband and wife are separated by the distance of an entire continent. ("Don't laugh," my grandmother said. "A lot of marriages would work better that way.")

History has a pulse, they say—but mostly I have never been able to hear it, not even when it is drumming right in my goddamn ears.

"So you're not only beautiful, but gifted as well? Imagine that! And they say the Lord never gives with both hands!"

"Honestly, Peg—I don't know why that woman doesn't trust me. I'm very, very, very trustworthy."
"The more 'very's' you, Billy, the less trustworthy you sound. You do know that, right?"

"I've seen him act, if you can call it acting. I saw him in Gates of Noon. He's got the vacant eyes of a milk cow, but he looked like a million bucks in his aviator scarf."

"Pegsy," he said, and that one word—the way he said it—seemed to contain decades of love.

His was a predator's stare. You might have said he was good-looking, if you could release your concerns about when he was going to eviscerate you.

And so I slid toward marriage, like a car sliding off the road on a scree of loose gravel.

"I like you, kiddo, and once I like a person, I can only like them always. That's a rule of my life."

I didn't pursue any men during the war.
For one thing, they were difficult to come by; most everyone was overseas. For another thing, I didn't feel like playing around. In keeping with the new spirit of seriousness and sacrifice that blanketed New York, I more or less put my sexual desire away from 1942 until 1945—the way you might cover your good furniture with sheets while you go off on vacation.

Sleep became a golden commodity that everyone longed for but nobody had.

I liked to witness the man's surprise and joy at being propositioned so blatantly by a good-looking woman. They would light up every time. I have always loved that moment. It is as though you have brought Christmas to an orphanage.

I liked to leave their beds before they started telling me things about themselves that I didn't want to know.

If you're wondering if any of those men ever fell in love with me—well, sometimes they did. But I always managed to talk them out of it.

Anyway, at some point in a woman's life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time.
After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.

"The field of honor is a painful field," Olive went on at last, as though Peg had not spoken. "That's what my father taught me when I was young. He taught me that the field of honor is not a place where children can play. Children don't have any honor, you see, and they aren't expected to, because it's too difficult for them. It's too painful. But to become an adult, one must step into the field of honor. Everything will be expected of you now. You will need to be vigilant in your principles. You will be judged. If you make mistakes, you must account for them. There will be instances when you must cast aside your impulses and take a higher stance than another person—a person without honor—might take. Such instances may hurt, but that's why honor is a painful field. Do you understand?"

(Lucky is the soul whose only troubles are self-inflicted.)

"She's more church than the Church itself," he said.

"The world ain't straight. You grow up thinking things are a certain way. You think there are rules. You think there's a way that things have to be. You try to live straight. But the world doesn't care about your rules, or what you believe. The world ain't straight, Vivian. Never will be. Our rules, they don't mean a thing. The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can."

I came to cherish his face precisely because it was his. Even his burn scars became beautiful to my eye. (His skin looked like the weathered binding of some ancient, sacred book.)

"Things happen to people. We are the way we are—there's nothing to be done for it."

That's when he turned to look at me. "I can't live without you, Vivian," he said.
"Good. You'll never have to."
And that, Angela, was the closest your father and I ever came to saying I love you.

We never asked much of Nathan. We thought he was good enough, just the way he was. We were proud of him sometimes just for getting through the day.

There had never been a correct work for what Frank and I were to each other, so the absence I felt after his death was both private and unnamed.

I grew out of my sorrow—the way people usually do, eventually.

This is what I've found about life, as I've gotten older: you start to lose people, Angela.

The world can begin to feel lonely and sparse, teeming though it may be freshly minted young souls.