In a Glass House (2015)
“I felt awkward at finding him waiting there, hunched against the cold at the side of his car like a footman. Some lightness, the anticipation of greeting, seemed to fall away from him at once when he saw me.
“Come nu bum, with your hair like that.” And already I’d ruined things, could hear in his tone his lost good intentions, his desire, his inability, to get along with me.
We held a gathering at our house on Christmas Eve. A tinselly Christmas tree had been set up in a corner of the living ro...om but there were no presents beneath it, only a plastic manger scene with a tiny cloth-diapered Jesus laid amidst bits of varnished straw.
“Oh, mascalzone!” Gelsomina said. She had three children now, had put on weight and carried herself with a smooth adultness, aggressively good-humoured. “You look like a Beatle with that hair.”
But there was a wariness in people, a forced friendliness I felt deadened in the face of. I tried to bring up the person in me who’d fit in with them but couldn’t find the right gesture or word that might conjure him, even speaking Italian seeming to require a hopeless exertion, my mouth resisting it like a lie.MoreLess
“Come nu bum, with your hair like that.” And already I’d ruined things, could hear in his tone his lost good intentions, his desire, his inability, to get along with me.
We held a gathering at our house on Christmas Eve. A tinselly Christmas tree had been set up in a corner of the living ro...om but there were no presents beneath it, only a plastic manger scene with a tiny cloth-diapered Jesus laid amidst bits of varnished straw.
“Oh, mascalzone!” Gelsomina said. She had three children now, had put on weight and carried herself with a smooth adultness, aggressively good-humoured. “You look like a Beatle with that hair.”
But there was a wariness in people, a forced friendliness I felt deadened in the face of. I tried to bring up the person in me who’d fit in with them but couldn’t find the right gesture or word that might conjure him, even speaking Italian seeming to require a hopeless exertion, my mouth resisting it like a lie.MoreLess
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