Stopping on the landing to gird herself, emotionally, for the inevitable—and, it seemed lately, nightly—fray, Arden glanced into the study. There, on the floor, lay Rennie, his head pillowed by the swollen belly of Talisker, their golden retriever. The television was on. A half-finished glass of wine stood, precariously, on the carpet [...]
Archive for the ‘Section I’ Category
One•II•8&9
Posted in Part One, Section I, tagged family conflict, Shiraz, Talisker on September 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
One•I•6&7
Posted in Part One, Section I, tagged failing grades, family conflict on August 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
“Aran!” she shouted up to the third floor (whatever it was about this time, it was, she was quite certain, her youngest’s fault), “If you’d spend as much time worrying about your homework as you do about your clothes, you might not be such a failure at school. You can forget about [...]
One•I•5
Posted in Part One, Section I, tagged parenting, Steve Madden on August 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Upstairs, the girls were at one another again: Skye, almost sixteen, in so many ways a replica of herself, but she was—what?—a bit too round about the hips, too fleshy in her arms, and so high-strung, but a promising academic, if she continued to apply herself; Aran, two years Skye’s junior, was, [...]
One•I•4
Posted in Part One, Section I, tagged perfectionism, university, Victorian architecture on August 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Old Mary had played nursemaid to Arden’s girlhood. She had spent long hours sitting on the steps leading up to Addison Hall (steps that were concave even then, eroded by what her childish fancy took to be the heft and drag of learning), waiting for one parent or the other to descend, [...]
One•I•3
Posted in Part One, Section I, tagged English Department, perfectionism, Rowell, Shiraz on August 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Reclining on the living room sofa with another glass of the Shiraz that she permitted herself on weekends only, she caught herself thinking, with increasing frequency (and with an urgency that she found, admittedly, somewhat puzzling), that her girlhood, at any rate, had approached something like perfection. Before retiring, her parents had [...]
One•I•2
Posted in Part One, Section I, tagged Pandora's Box, perfectionism, semifreddo bellini, Tinker Bell on August 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
But if her consciousness was a Pandora’s Box all but emptied of abstraction, Arden’s Hope, a slight spider tenaciously clinging to a darkened corner of the sprung chest, was perfection. Although her life, now, was by no means perfect, she had unquestionably glimpsed perfection’s likeness, stopping at night to gaze through a [...]
Part One•Section I•Paragraph 1
Posted in Part One, Section I, tagged fiction, love as self-deception, perfectionism on August 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Arden believed in perfection. It was, in truth, the only abstraction in which she did, still, believe. Beauty she dismissed as visual math, a calculated arrangement of objects—flowers in a vase, fruit in a bowl, features on a face—suggesting a precarious balance between order and diversity. Happiness was the (usually transitory, often [...]
