Summer Darlings

I don't need a big house,... Just a cozy one. A fireplace in the living room, those two little square windows on either side.

... everyone leaves parts of their past behind as they grow up... You don't have to carry yours around like a backpack weighing you down with bricks. All anyone cares about is who you are right now.

Bridge. Ha!.." "Have you ever played?" "I don't play anyone's games, especially hers...

Jean-Rose poured a cup of the tomato and lemon concoction Ruth made for hangovers, gulping it back.

Heddy could see that money couldn’t fix a person. It couldn’t save someone, or serve as a Band-Aid to whatever wounds a person carried around. It helped keep the lights on and the radiators humming, but it didn’t make anyone happier. Whatever had hurt Heddy as a child would always be with her, no matter how much education she received or how high her social standing climbed.

She wasn’t telling Heddy to be someone else. She was telling her to edit. To omit. To figure out the parts of herself she was proud of and let go of the parts that she wasn’t. It was like revising a story; she was always cutting details to shape the plot.

I think every person you meet has something they can teach you, whether it's good or bad.

A man may be benign or he may be sinister, but don't expect him to be interesting.

A dress is just a dress if you don't know how to inhabit it.

She heard her mother, the day she left for Wellesley: Some people play the slots. Others put their money into a house. Well, I don’t have any money at all, so I’m investing in you.

What came to mind was a line from a Salinger story, something about how every man has at least one place that at some point turns into a girl. She’d written a paper on what that one line meant, and still, she hadn’t understood until she happened upon this surfer on Martha’s Vineyard. Perhaps, for every woman, there is at least one place that at some point turns into a boy.

Women in the movies got men interested in them by taking charge. Instead, Heddy tended to wish men would want to know her, sense her quickening pulse, note her cheerfulness or the way she twisted her earring as she imagined kissing them. But men never looked that hard, she supposed.

Curious, living in someone else’s house—it was like parachuting into another person’s life, landing smack in the middle of a home with its own culture and mores.

And this is where you'll pinch a brown loaf," Teddy said, pointing at the toilet in a small adjoining bathroom...

...Ted kissed Jean-Rose like it was on his to-do list, and she wondered if a morning kiss from one's husband was different from an evening kiss, which may be less perfunctory.

...three jobs: keep a fine house, organize an enviable social calendar, and be a tiger in the bedroom.

...my mother taught me how to separate the shiny apples from the bruised ones.

Gigi waved, closing one finger at a time into her palm.

Don't let her fill your head. She's the destroying type.

Jean-Rose told me today that someday my social cache will be built upon how few wrinkles I have on my face. She gave me a bar of Pears glycerin soap to wash my face with, prescribed ice-water plunges to keep my skin firm, and handed me a jar of Pond's Cold Cream to apply before bed each night.

Anna tugged at Heddy's denim shorts, holding a charred-over remnant of a Roman candle firework she found on the ground. "Will you carry me?

A factory job. Never. A baby. Not without a husband. She sliced through the water with her forearms, her thighs burning with fatigue. I'm better than that.

It's one thing that happened, not the only thing.

That she might marry someone her equal, who needed her as much as she needed him, was a different way to think about marriage. Was it even possible that someone else would join her life, that there could ever be a “we” other than her and her mother? She knew there’d be a day when she’d lose her mother, and that she’d be alone then. But imagine having someone else, a backup—a life partner.

You can’t make assumptions about people. On-screen, I get to control the ending. Real life is so much more disappointing.” Heddy tugged a shrimp off a skewer. “Maybe that’s why I want to be a writer. Then things can only be as bad as I make them.

You see, a lot of people go fishing, and they wait for a fish to bite. But we could sit here all day with these poles and nothing may come of it. The same is true for love.

The best part about growing up is that you get to write your own story.

She left home with one identity, but while away, she dared to step into another one. But it left her feeling lost, since she wasn’t firmly planted in the upper-crust circles at school or the working-class neighborhood back home. She was somehow both, teetering between the two worlds, lost in a way no one else she knew was.

I’ve always thought that different doors are ways into different lives. Like, what would it be like to walk out one door and into another? I like to imagine the characters who would live in a penthouse, a Cape Cod, a sprawling beach house (...) But what goes on inside those houses, the lives of these characters, is all the same—love, betrayal, sadness, and joy.

Heddy devoured books like others did chocolate. It was her way of escaping into another place whenever hers was too much to bear.