“Look at those tits.” I was wearing … a cornflower-blue Ann Taylor dress made of soft, jersey cotton. The dress was hardly form-fitting, and nothing about it invited the usage of tits.
As a teenager growing up in a small town in northern India, I was enthralled by the romantic visions of the accomplishments of Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Planck, and the host of physicists who had changed our understanding of the physical universe and its inner workings.
I am certain that my photo will end up on the front page of the New York Daily News … with the tabloid headline, Sixth Grader, Slain. And underneath, a smaller headline, Body Found in Dryer.
I was looking to get lost in a new and different land, abandoning my own country’s chaos, and Redmond was a poet out to record the roadside scenes of American sorrow in the Seventies.
I’d never imagined that being a caregiver would encourage me to be such a liar, but I find I’m quite good at it.
Dressed in July in a three-piece suit no longer in fashion even in the Old Country, my great uncle simply shuffled, hardly pausing, from one painting to the next while muttering the painter’s name.
The door to her two-and-a-half rooms had been left unlocked in the night, and someone had left a crisp brown grocery sack beside her bed.
The pediatrician wears cartoon ties. His hair is spiked. His eyes are big and round. He looks like a boy-man.
Sometimes her silences make me feel like I’m underwater, reaching upward through murky dark. My extended fingers reaching for a surface, trying to break through the invisible hydrogen bonds that separate air from sea.
He is thirty-five, wears Hai Karate aftershave, drives a maroon 1970 El Dorado, and sits too close to me on the piano bench. For the first fifteen minutes of every piano lesson, Vic Giovanni details his sexual exploits, claiming numerous rendezvous with many Hollywood actresses.
