Chapters (60)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Personae
- I: Early Days
- One. Control
- Two. Doubt
- Three. Fate
- Four. Same
- Five. Fine Arts
- Six. In Loco Parentis
- Seven. Settling
- Eight. Neighbors
- Nine. Prospects
- Ten. The Lucky
- Eleven. Instruction
- Twelve. Same
- Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
- Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
- Fifteen. The Reason
- Sixteen. That Person
- Seventeen. Predictably
- II: Writing Teacher
- Eighteen. Early Poems
- Nineteen. Motivation
- Twenty. Allegory
- Twenty-One. Grief
- Twenty-Two. A Portrait
- Twenty-Three. Veils
- Twenty-Four. Soft Power
- Twenty-Five. Lists
- Twenty-Six. A Break
- Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
- Twenty-Eight. Custom
- Twenty-Nine. Parity
- Thirty. Fortune
- III: Volta
- Thirty-One. Images
- Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
- Thirty-Three. Letters
- Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
- Thirty-Five. Love
- Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
- IV: Your Best Reader
- Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
- Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
- Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
- Forty. Détente
- Forty-One. Worlds
- Forty-Two. Recognition
- Forty-Three. Persistence
- Forty-Four. And Then
- Forty-Five. Mingling
- Forty-Six. You
- Forty-Seven. Persona
- Forty-Eight. Est et Non
- Forty-Nine. The Author
- Epilogue
- Afterword: The Libertine
- Acknowledgments
- About the Authors
Lizzie keeps a diary of her observations. This makes it a little classier. It’s the first thing she does when she gets home from school, or home from whatever: pick up the binoculars, check out what it is that’s going on at the moment. She has a pretty good view of the snow-filled yard and pool house and neighbors’ places, and just between Lizzie and Lizzie’s diary, Lizzie has seen some things! Anyway, it’s not like there’s that much going on in this town. It’s not like Lizzie’s a perv. Everyone should just be grateful that she doesn’t try to date frat boys like every other underage girl!
It’s late afternoon, and Lizzie is sitting by her beloved window, her best friend. She has a bowl of Pirate’s Booty and the binoculars to her eyes, but then she hears something below her, on her very own lawn. She sets down her accessories. It’s just her mother, of course, stalking the whiteness of the yard, cell phone jammed to face. Her mother has nice legs and decent hair, Lizzie thinks, which is good because you can always go to the salon, and her mom does look pretty good for her age. She watches her mother draw a figure eight with one hand. Her mother pauses, tucks phone to chin. She lights a cigarette, untucks phone.
Her mother never used to smoke like this. But she also never used to stand in one place in the freezing cold for over an hour, listening to somebody talk, interjecting various adamant things in German.
Lizzie scratches her elbow. She wonders if she should say something to her dad about this. Like maybe this would be a good opportunity to find out what’s up. She could test her dad, say something like, “Oh, I think mom has a pretty serious friend or something now,” and see what her dad’s reaction is. Not that Lizzie even wants to know, because she doesn’t. If her father is fully aware of what’s going on with her mom, Lizzie doesn’t know if she could take it. She doesn’t know if she would be incredibly sad or really, really angry, or some combination. She doesn’t even want to find out how she would feel, to be honest, which is why she hasn’t said anything. Plus, they haven’t talked about splitting up for a while, so maybe they’ve changed their minds.
Lizzie touches the binoculars but leaves them on the sill. She presses her nose against the cold glass.