Friend of My Youth

People are curious. A few people are. ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.

Her silent singing wrapped around the story she was telling herself, which she extended further every night on the deck. (Averill often told herself stories-- the activity seemed to her as unavoidable as dreaming.) Her singing was a barrier set between the world in her head and the world outside, between her body and the onslaught of the stars.

She thought back to what he had said. /I could make you very happy./ It was something men said then, when they were trying to persuade you, and that was what they meant. It seemed rash and sweeping to her, dazzling but *presumptuous*. She had to try to see herself, then, as somebody who could be /made happy/. The whole worrying, striving, complicated bundle of her -- was that something that could just be picked up and /made happy/?

We had a hard life but we didn't know it...We had power....it's a power of transformation you have, when you're stuffed full of fear and eagerness - not a thing in your life can escape being momentous. A power you never think of losing because you never know you have it.

Georgia took once a creative-writing course, and what the instructor told her was: Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think. Eventually she wrote a story that was about her grandfather killing chickens, and the instructor seemed to be pleased with it. Georgia herself thought that it was a fake. She made a long list of all the things that had been left out and handed it in as an appendix to the story. The instructor said that she expected too much, of herself and of the process, and that she was wearing him out. The course was not a total loss, because Georgia and the instructor ended up living together.

Pensé que, salvo yo, no había nadie vivo en el mundo que supiera eso, que pudiera establecer la relación. Y que yo sería la última en establecerla. Pero quizás no es así. Las personas son curiosas. Algunas personas lo son. Se ven impulsadas a averiguar cosas, incluso cosas triviales. Recopilan cosas. Se les ve yendo ahí con libretas, rascando la suciedad de las lápidas, leyendo microfilmes, solo con la esperanza de ver un goteo en el tiempo, de establecer una relación, de rescatar una cosa de la basura.

In dreams you can have the feeling that you’ve had this dream before, that you have this dream over and over again, and you know that it’s really nothing that simple. You know that there’s a whole underground system that you call “dreams,” having nothing better to call them, and that this system is not like roads or tunnels but more like a live body network, all coiling and stretching, unpredictable but finally familiar—where you are now, where you’ve always been.

Life has a lot of surprises up its sleeve . . . I just mean there’s more than one way to love God, and taking pleasure in the world is surely one of them. That's a revelation that’s come on me rather late. Too late to be of any use to your mother . . . No. Guilt is a sin and a seduction. I’ve said that to many a poor soul that liked to wallow in it. Regret’s another matter. How could you get through a long life and escape it?

Men had fallen in love with Averill before. Twice she had promised to marry them, then had had to get out of it. She had slept with the ones she was engaged to, and with two or three others. Actually, four others. She had had one abortion. She was not frigid - she did not think so - but there was something about her participation in sex that was polite and appalled, and it was always a relief when they let go of her.