Girls (22 page)

You will be standing on the shoreline of a river where you played as a child, drank as a teenager. You will stand there with your daughter and stare out over the water, over at the other side. She will insist on lipstick and on earrings but will still hold your hand when it’s cold, sometimes even when it isn’t.

“Daaaad,” she will whine, “what’re we doing here? It’s cold.”

“I don’t understand,” you will say, “there used to be a factory over there across the river. A run-down abandoned factory. You could look at it for hours. It had all kinds of machines running into it and coming out of it. No one ever knew what it did — but that was why it used to be so fascinating. This used to be a really cool spot to just hang out.”

“Dad,” she will say with a withering look, a look you will not catch as you look out over the water at the new yacht club on the other side, “Dad, nobody says ‘hang out’ anymore . . . and nobody cares about how things used to be.”

When did the embassy succeed with us? When did we take up our shields in spite of our rage?

And when did that which was offered disfigure us? How does glory make us rot? How does something we cannot touch, or see, or even define, do so much damage, make us so miserable?

How did we get so ugly?

I would like to thank Mark Rudman, Loren Fishman, and my editor, Judy Clain. Without them, this never would have happened. Dan Degnan, Jim Higdon, James Tierney, Carole Maso, Meredith Steinbach, and Bob Coover were also tremendously helpful. Claire Smith and Sarah Burnes have my gratitude for their patience in answering all my questions, while Steve Lamont has it for his unwavering eye. Nick Mills and Edward Baron Turk should know they have always been inspirations to me. Finally I would, of course, like to thank Alfred and Janice for their support and belief through all the years.

Although the rules for punctuation, capitalization, and grammar are well established, in this book I have chosen to experiment with their limitations. For example, punctuation in
girls
reflects narrative rhythm rather than grammatical convention, while capitalization frequently reflects the tone of a word rather than the ordinary mechanics of typography. Any perceived “errors” along these lines are entirely intentional.

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The Scent of Your Breath

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Melissa, the Sicilian girl from
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