What exactly did it mean to prefer a kiss you couldn't remember to one you could?

Russell Lee - Storekeeper and wife in front of their store at Section 30. 'Bust' iron mining town near Winton, Minnesota, August 1937 (source)

Le verre à moitié vide de Tessa…

My father wasn't a spendthrift, but saving for a rainy day wasn't in his nature. To his way of thinking, the sun was shining most of the time. My mother had inherited from her parents the exact opposite view. To her, a sunny day was a rarity. Tomorrow it would rain, and the only question was how hard. (p. 112*)

On those rare occasions when she took my father to task, he always hung his head woefully and claimed she hadn't understood what he meant. "All I'm saying is, what if this was Russia? Over there you got no chance. You just gotta take what they give you." To which my mother would roll her eyes. "How much do you really know about Russia, Lou? Did you go to Russia once and not tell me?" Which would make him even more sheepish. "It's what they say," he'd reply lamely, which would elicit, predictably, my mother's trump observation, that she couldn't care less what "they" said. It was what he said that was giving her a headache. (p. 56*)

For the last several years Division has been one of the top-five stores in the entire state in terms of Lotto ticket sales. "Desperate people who can't wait to pay the taxes" is how my mother describes it. She's always considered gambling, especially the legal state-sponsored variety, to be a tax on ignorance, and Division's success may well be, as she claims, an accurate barometer of that ignorance. (p. 96*)

"And why do you always say you aren't saying what I just heard you say?" she wanted to know. "You should've been a politician. You can't remember what you've said from one minute to the next." (p. 201*)

My father wasn't about to deny how much he liked having Sarah around Ikey's.

"She had a great time, too," I said. "She told me so."

"We're the only family she's got left," my father pointed out.

"Exactly," Uncle Dec chimed in from behind the meat counter.

My mother sighted him along her index finger. "Don't you start in."

"Is this a new rule, Tessa? I don't get to talk?"

"No, it's an old one," she said. "I just haven't been enforcing it. I wish the three of you would quit ganging up on me every time we discuss something."

"It takes all three of us to argue with you," my uncle objected, "and we still lose." (p. 379*)

…le verre toujours plein de Lou Lou

Because he just stood there staring at the closed door, I didn't immediately understand he was talking to me. "Don't never be like that, Louie."

I said I wouldn't.

"You ain't gotta treat nobody like that, is what I'm saying," he continued.

Anxious for us to be gone, I said I understood.

"Don't never treat people like you wish they were dead." (p. 78*)

But there is and has always been a curious lack of passion in him, and that's what puzzles his mother and me. Years ago rental trucks had devices called "governors" that prevented speeding and reckless driving, and a similar mechanism seems to govern my son. Extremes of joy or anger or fear appear foreign to him. (p. 94*)

It's always been my wife's contention that I have a place deep inside me that is wholly mine, that it's fortified and unassailable, a place no one, even herself, has ever entered. This, she further believes, is where I go when I have one of my spells. Does my son have such a place? Don't we all? (p. 95*)

Even I would've known better than to say what my father said next. Worse still was the silence that stretched between them, until he finally said, "Milk's better in bottles."

Then, to my surprise, it was my mother who was crying. "Oh, Lou, Lou," she sobbed. "Can't you see it doesn't matter what you think? People have decided. They want supermarkets. They want milk in cartons. Who cares which is better? When people want the wrong thing, they still want it. Usually they want the wrong thing more than the right thing. You've been outvoted." (p. 109*)

No, rather than contemplate the future, Lucy seemed fixated on the past. At seventeen, he was already as backward looking as an octogenarian. He'd begin every other sentence with the same word, "remember." (p. 294*)

For my father, the world wasn't a complicated place. Its rules mostly made sense and they were for our own good. I've always wanted to be the person he believed me to be, which at times has kept me from being a better one. A terrible realization, this. (p. 473*)

But as Sarah was quick to point out, once a thing has happened, the odds of its happening become moot. Realism and plausibility aren't reality's poor cousins. No doubt this was what all those arguments between my parents were about. No wonder my father lost them all. (p. 264*)

Premières amours…

Meeting a girl's parents was like getting an unauthorized glimpse of the future. (p. 303*)

The most infuriating thing was that he couldn't remember whether she'd kissed him back. He hadn't known he was going to kiss her until he did, and somehow at the critical moment managed not to pay attention. It was a little like reading a passage in a book, then realizing your mind had wandered and that you couldn't remember a single thing about what you'd just read, though your eyes had passed dutifully over every word. If the kiss had been a paragraph, he'd have gone back and read it again to see if anything rang a bell. But it wasn't a paragraph, and nothing did. (p. 446*)

Unlike the earlier kiss, he paid attention to this one, which was nothing like the kisses Nan offered when she knew other people were watching. Those were dramatic, cinema inspired, moist and fully adult, whereas this was dry and frightened and full of the little girl Nan hadn't been in a long while. And what exactly did it mean, he wondered, to prefer a kiss you couldn't remember to one you could? (p. 452*)

 

Sex was only part of what she couldn't do, which also included his squalid flat, Murdick's, the Hill and he himself. She'd vomited all that, along with Larry's gravy-drenched fries. Last night, the West End had served her vengeful purpose as a means of getting back at her family, but in this black hour before dawn her courage had failed her utterly. Instead of teaching her parents a lesson, she'd taught herself one, and now she wanted that old world back, her own pink bedroom in her own Borough house, even her own angry, bitter mother. (p. 452*)

He was as naked as she was, of course, and it occurred to him that when they'd made love she hadn't actually seen him. Her expression now was identical to the one she had last evening when Larry, in his threadbare gravy-stained T-shirt, had joined them in their booth. It would've been funny if she weren't so truly frightened. (p. 452*)

Could it be that acts committed in the privacy of darkness became wrong only in the public light of day? (p. 473*)

…et dernières amours

It wasn't that she regretted the freedom she'd found here these last few years. She'd needed that after Pencil Dick. No, she'd had all kinds of fun and didn't regret any of it, but having fun wasn't the same as having a future. You couldn't count on fun to last, that was the thing. Sarah understood that you had to make plans, didn't she? And, if you weren't very good at making plans--and she allowed she wasn't--then you had to rely on someone else to do it for you. Harold saw the future clearly, and he made excellent plans. (p. 355*)

Passion and independence, she seemed to be saying, were all fine and good, but ultimately not sustainable. In the end it came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise. Hadn't Sarah known this all along? Suddenly she understood the question she'd really been trying to ask all summer. Which was more important: to love or be loved? (p. 356*)

*sur ma liseuse

Richard Russo - Bridge of sighs (Knopf, 2007)