Цитаты из книги Half His Age

It's a strange thing, seeing your mother grow up.

It's funny, I thought our friendship would end dramatically, the insults we'd been saving up for years shot back and forth, tears and snot streaking our faces. But instead, the ending has been uneventful, petering out with almost no noise at all. Maybe that's how you know it's really an ending.

When he finds the time to take me to dinner out of town, he tells me to order whatever I'd like, as if a piece of salmon can cure a broken heart. Maybe it can. I've heard omega-3s have a lot of benefits, maybe this is one of them.

What marks the rite of passage from girl to woman? A certain age? A broken heart? A fed-upness? A real bra? Using pads to catch post-period spotting instead of stuffing your underwear with wads of toilet paper?

I correct my posture. Run my finger along the items as if I'm taking the menu as seriously as I want Mr. Korgy to take me. I jut out my chin. Spew occasional hmms, pretending the ingredients I don't know are appealing. Ah yes, escabeche. Cipollini. Toum. My old friends. Is this how a woman does it? How a woman reads a menu?

Hey, thanks for being so accommodating.

"That's your favorite kind, right?" she asks. It's hers.

I hate that thing moms have, where they can sense exactly how you're feeling in exactly the moments you'd least like them to.

You can never really believe someone if all they're telling you is to be the same as they are.

When in doubt, let the tits hang out, right hon?

Maybe that's not healthy, but waddaya want, health or honesty?

I wish I felt that comfortable with being lost now.

And what is connection, really, if not shared judgment?

I laugh. Ha ha ha ha ha, so funny.

There can never be too much scraping, too much sloughing off, of a woman's body. What is a woman, really, if not silky? If not smooth? If not supple, perky, and poreless?

Some people choose to further their education, I choose perfume.

Hi. That's it. Wow. What a word. What a choice. The brilliance is staggering. The genius, heartbreaking.

"Ugh, why, Waldo? Why am I like this?"

I don't know how to answer her. I don't know why she is the way she is. Is it hereditary, like the bags under her eyes? Or is it something that can be traced back to her own childhood, to her parents' shortcomings and her kid-brain internalization of them? Something she could adjust with a series of therapy sessions that she can't afford?

Because no matter how much a grown man wants a woman who can read a book, he wants her to be able to suck a dick, too.

So I guess attractiveness and attraction are different things. Maybe what I felt in the past was... appreciation, for a good physique or face or haircut. And maybe this is attraction. Something more primal, that makes less sense.