It wasn’t true precisely that Monica Jensen had been a golden girl, though she liked the expression—she was reminded by it of Shakespeare’s grim lyric. (“Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”) A wonderful false democratizing here, a suggestion that all human beings are equal in Infinity, hence why envy, spite, sorrow, pain, unhappiness now—? Small consolation for the chimney sweepers who died young, not only turning to dust but dwelling in it, in life; but immense consolation to the golden lads and girls who need not feel guilt for their selfish privilege. Monica saw herself unsentimentally as a woman, a former girl, who had had the power—derived from where, she couldn’t have guessed—to convince others, for a while, of her goldenness, her specialness. The emotional logic of loving her.

She had been married at the age of twenty-one, and divorced at the age of twenty-nine. There were eight years to account for, more or less. (She had begun living with her fiancé in what had been imagined as a defiant gesture, seven or eight months before they were married. But neither his family nor hers had chosen to respond to the defiance.) She was beginning to forget a great deal. She had already forgotten a great deal. The dailiness of their lives—at which they were not very skilled—was rapidly retreating, leaving behind stark and isolated events, mere incidents, things that had happened and were therefore meant to illuminate their participants: the marriage, the ill-timed pregnancy, the abortion, the mourning, the silence . . . and the rest. Monica had told herself sternly that if her experience had been special it would be wicked of her to forget it: but it hadn’t been special, it belonged to too many people of her generation.