Bright Young Things

Love is all right, as things go, but lovers can be a terrible waste of a girl's time.

It is easy to forget now, how effervescent and free we all felt that summer.

Among her other talents were forgetting what she did not like and ignoring what she preferred not to see.

It is often advantageous to forget. Forget your wincing humiliations, forget life's blows, and get on. For blocks in every direction, down every street in the city, people not yet old enough to have lines on their foreheads were laughing away memory, warmly ensconced in shrines of forgetfulness. Those who followed the word of God and those who preferred what the priests called "hoodoo" alike. People everywhere forgetting with drink or forgetting with religion or forgetting with the numbing quality of their many heaps of things. They looked forward and imagined rosy tomorrows, and gave up whatever horrors heckled their dreams, and listened to the pretty stories of whomever ruled their pulpit.

It is easy to forget now, how effervescent and free we all felt that summer. Everything fades: the shimmer of gold over White Cove; the laughter in the night air; the lavender early morning light on the faces of skyscrapers, which had suddenly become so heroically tall. Every dawn seemed to promise fresh miracles, among other joys that are in short supply these days. And so I will try to tell you, while I still remember, how it was then, before everything changed-that final season of the era that roared.

That is what I want to tell you about: the girls with their short skirts and bright eyes and big-city dreams. The girls of 1929.

Well, if you weren't flirting with him"-his voice had now grown a little plaintive-"who was he, and what did you want with him anyway?" "If you are so determined to bore me, I may just have to go home." Astrid sighed carelessly, "What a shame, when I am wearing such a pretty dress.

He was just like summer, and she loved summer. If she had any wish, it would be to live a lifetime of summers.

In New York there is always something to look at, but it is all infinitely more interesting through a window in the backseat of a limousine.

But in that moment she realized how false most smiles were and what a tremendous waste of time.

Girls took to dressing like boys, and though women had obtained the vote, we had swiftly moved on to pursuing flashier freedoms: necking in cars and smoking cigarettes and walking down city streets in flesh colored stockings.

... and in that part of the world the darkness could go on and on forever, as though there would never be light again. She hadn't ever been able to tolerate that very well.

...when girls use the brightness of their eyes or the softness of their skin, they have an uncommon advantage in getting what they want.

It was like the color of his eyes, she supposed - not quite one shade or another, and utterly unlike anyone else's.