what a memory you have for some things

"Helen, what a memory you have for some things! You're perfectly right. It's a room that men have spoilt through trying to make it nice for women. Men don't know what we want--"
"And never will."
"I don't agree. In two thousand years they'll know."
"But the chairs show up wonderfully. Look where Tibby spilt the soup."
"Coffee. It was coffee surely."
Helen shook her head. "Impossible. Tibby was far too young to be given coffee at that time."
"Was Father alive?"
"Yes."
"Then you're right and it must have been soup. I was thinking of much later--that unsuccessful visit of Aunt Juley's, when she didn't realize that Tibby had grown up. It was coffee then, for he threw it down on purpose. There was some rhyme, 'Tea, coffee--coffee, tea,' that she said to him every morning at breakfast. Wait a minute--how did it go?"
"I know--no, I don't. What a detestable boy Tibby was!"
"But the rhyme was simply awful. No decent person could have put up with it."
"Ah, that greengage tree," cried Helen,nike shox torch 2, as if the garden was also part of their childhood. "Why do I connect it with dumbbells? And there come the chickens. The grass wants cutting. I love yellow-hammers--"
Margaret interrupted her. "I have got it," she announced.
'Tea, tea, coffee, tea, Or chocolaritee.'
"That every morning for three weeks,moncler jackets women. No wonder Tibby was wild."
"Tibby is moderately a dear now," said Helen.
"There! I knew you'd say that in the end. Of course he's a dear."
A bell rang.
"Listen! what's that?"
Helen said, "Perhaps the Wilcoxes are beginning the siege."
"What nonsense--listen!"
And the triviality faded from their faces, though it left something behind--the knowledge that they never could be parted because their love was rooted in common things. Explanations and appeals had failed; they had tried for a common meeting-ground, and had only made each other unhappy. And all the time their salvation was lying round them--the past sanctifying the present; the present, with wild heart-throb, declaring that there would after all be a future, with laughter and the voices of children. Helen, still smiling, came up to her sister. She said, "It is always Meg." They looked into each other's eyes. The inner life had paid.
Solemnly the clapper tolled. No one was in the front. Margaret went to the kitchen, and struggled between packing-cases to the window. Their visitor was only a little boy with a tin can. And triviality returned.
"Little boy, what do you want?"
"Please, I am the milk."
"Did Miss Avery send you?" said Margaret, rather sharply.
"Yes, please."
"Then take it back and say we require no milk." While she called to Helen, "No, it's not the siege, but possibly an attempt to provision us against one."
"But I like milk," cried Helen. "Why send it away?"
"Do you? Oh, very well. But we've nothing to put it in, and he wants the can,UGG Clerance."
"Please, I'm to call in the morning for the can," said the boy.
"The house will be locked up then."
"In the morning would I bring eggs, too,Discount UGG Boots?"
"Are you the boy whom I saw playing in the stacks last week?"
The child hung his head.

Wedding gigs are our life

"Wedding gigs are our life," Billy assured him.
"Just be cool, OK?" Isaiah murmured.
"Yah, rilly," cackled Lester, the rhythm guitarist. "You blow this, Bill, we all gonna git wasted."
They got through the first set on inoffensive pop tunes, rock and roll oldies, even one or two Broadway standards. But during the break, a large emissary with a distinct taper to his head, Ralph Sr.'s trusted lieutenant "Two-Ton" Carmine Torpidini, arrived with a message for Billy. "Mr. Wayvone's compliments,nike shox torch 2, says thank you for the contemporary flavor of the music, which all the young people have enjoyed fabulously. But he wonders if in the upcoming set you might play something the older generations could more readily relate to, something more . .. Italian?"
More than eager to please, the Vomitones led off the set with a medley they'd been practicing of Italian tunes on a common theme of transcendence — a salsa treatment of "More" from Mondo Cane (1963), slowing to ? with "Senza Fine," from Flight of the Phoenix (1966), and to wrap it an English-language version, in Billy's nasal tenor,moncler jackets men, of the favorite "Al Di La," from any number of television specials.
No one was more surprised than Billy when Two-Ton Carmine appeared once again, this time with hurried breathing, flushed face, a look of excitement, as if he sensed a chance to do some of the untidy work he received his paycheck for. "Mr. Wayvone says he was hoping he wouldn't have to go into too many details with you, but that he was thinking more along the lines of 'C'e la Luna,UGG Clerance,' 'Way Marie' — you know, sing-along stuff, plus maybe a little opera, 'Cielo e Mar,' right? Mr. Wayvone's brother Vincent, as you know, being a very fine singer. . . ."
"Yah," Billy now with a slow and blunted sort of comprehension, "uh, well. Sure! I think we have those arrangements —"
"In the van," muttered Isaiah.
"—in the van," said Billy Barf. "All I have to do's just—" sliding one arm out of his guitar strap. But Carmine reached over, removed the guitar from Billy's grasp, and began to turn it end over end, so as to twist the strap, now around Billy's neck,replica gucci wallets, tighter and tighter.
"Arrangements." Carmine laughed, embarrassed and mean. " 'Way Marie,' what kind of arrangement do you need? You gentlemen are Italian, are you not?"
The band sat silent, feckless, watching their leader being garrotted. Few Anglos, some Scotch-Irish, one Jewish guy, no actual Italians. "Well, then, how about Catholic?" Carmine went on, punctuating his remarks with sharp yanks on the strap. "Maybe I could let yiz off with ten choruses of 'Ave Maria' and a Act of Contrition? No? So tell me, while you can, what's goin' on? Didn' Little Ralph say nothin' ta yiz? Hey! Wait a minute! What's this?" In the course of having the head on which it sat shaken back and forth, Billy's "Italian" wig had begun to slide off, revealing his real hairstyle, dyed today a vivid turquoise. "You guys ain't Gino Baglione and the Paisans!" Carmine shook his head, cracked his knuckles. "That's false pretenses, fellas! Don't you know you can end up in small-claims for that?"

The women around them wrinkle their noses

The women around them wrinkle their noses, some start to laugh,homepage. “Johnny’s wife is d-r-u-n-k,nike shox torch 2,” someone says.
Celia looks around her. She wipes at the sweat that’s beading on her makeuped forehead. “I don’t blame you for not liking me, not if you thought Johnny cheated on you with me.”
“Johnny never would’ve—”
“—and I’m sorry I said that, I thought you’d be tickled you won that pie.”
Hilly bends over, snatches her pearl button from the floor. She leans closer to Celia so no one else can hear. “You tell your Nigra maid if she tells anybody about that pie, I will make her suffer. You think you’re real cute signing me up for that auction, don’t you? What, you think you can blackmail your way into the League?”
“What?”
“You tell me right this minute who else you’ve told ab—”
“I didn’t tell nobody nothing about a pie, I—”
“You liar,” Hilly says, but she straightens quickly and smiles. “There’s Johnny. Johnny, I think your wife needs your attention.” Hilly flashes her eyes at the girls around them, as if they’re all in on a joke.
“Celia, what’s wrong?” Johnny says.
Celia scowls at him, then scowls at Hilly. “She’s not making sense, she called me a—a liar, and now she’s accusing me of signing her name on that pie and . . .” Celia stops,mont blanc pens, looks around like she recognizes no one around her. She has tears in her eyes. Then she groans and convulses. Vomit splatters onto the carpet.
“Oh shit!” Johnny says, pulling her back.
Celia pushes Johnny’s arm off her. She runs for the bathroom and he follows her.
Hilly’s hands are in fists. Her face is crimson, nearly the color of her dress. She marches over and grabs a waiter’s arm. “Get that cleaned up before it starts to smell.”
And then Hilly is surrounded by women, faces upturned, asking questions, arms out like they are trying to protect her.
“I heard Celia’s been battling with drinking, but this problem with lying now?” Hilly tells one of the Susies. It’s a rumor she’d intended to spread about Minny, in case the pie story ever got out. “What do they call that?”
“A compulsive liar?”
“That’s it, a compulsive liar.” Hilly walks off with the women. “Celia trapped him into that marriage, telling him she was pregnant. I guess she was a compulsive liar even back then.”
After Celia and Johnny leave, the party winds down quickly. Member wives look exhausted and tired of smiling. There is talk of the auction, of babysitters to get home to, but mostly of Celia Foote retching in the middle of it all.
When the room is nearly empty, at midnight, Hilly stands at the podium. She flips through the sheets of silent bids. Her lips move as she calculates. But she keeps looking off, shaking her head. Then she looks back down and curses because she has to start all over again.
“Hilly, I’m headed on back to your house,Moncler Outlet.”
Hilly looks up from tallying. It is her mother, Missus Walters, looking even frailer than usual in her formalwear. She wears a floor-length gown, sky blue and beaded, from 1943. A white orchid wilts at her clavicle. A colored woman in a white uniform is attached to her side.

” I go in the kitchen and fill up a glass from the sink

“Yes’m.” I go in the kitchen and fill up a glass from the sink. She must be feeling bad because she’s never asked me to serve her anything before.
When I walk back in the bedroom though, Miss Celia’s not in bed and the bathroom door’s closed. Now why’d she ask me to go get her water if she’s got the means to get up and go to the bathroom? At least she’s out of my way. I pick Mister Johnny’s pants up off the floor, toss them over my shoulder. Ask me, this woman doesn’t take enough exercise, sitting around the house all day. Oh now, Minny, don’t go on that way. If she’s sick, she’s sick.
“You sick?” I holler outside the bathroom door.
“I’m . . . fine.”
“While you in there, I’m on go head and change these sheets.”
“No,nike shox torch ii, I want you to go on,” she says through the door. “Go on home for the day, Minny.”
I stand there and tap my foot on her yellow rug. I don’t want to go on home. It’s Tuesday, change-the-damn-sheets day. If I don’t do it today, that makes Wednesday change-the-damn-sheets day too.
“What Mister Johnny gone do if he come home and the house’s a mess?”
“He’s at the deer camp tonight. Minny, I need you to bring me the phone over—” her voice breaks into a trembly wail. “Drag it on over and fetch my phone book that’s setting in the kitchen.”
“You sick,Moncler Outlet, Miss Celia?”
But she doesn’t answer so I go get the book and stretch the phone over to the bathroom door and tap on it.
“Just leave it there.” Miss Celia sounds like she’s crying now. “I want you to go on home now.”
“But I just gots—”
“I said go home, Minny!”
I step back from that closed door. Heat rises up my face. And it stings,fake uggs online store, not because I haven’t been yelled at before. I just haven’t been yelled at by Miss Celia yet.
THE NEXT MORNING, Woody Asap on Channel Twelve is waving his white scaly hands all over the state map. Jackson, Mississippi, is frozen like an ice pop. First it rained, then it froze, then anything with more than a half-inch extending broke off to the ground by this morning. Tree branches, power lines, porch awnings collapsed like they’d plumb given up. Outside’s been dunked in a shiny clear bucket of shellac.
My kids glue their sleepy faces to the radio and when the box says the roads are frozen and school is closed, they all jump around and whoop and whistle and run outside to look at the ice with nothing on but their long johns.
“Get back in this house and put some shoes on!” I holler out the door. Not one of them does. I call Miss Celia to tell her I can’t drive in the ice and to find out if she’s got power out there. After she yelled at me like I was a nigger in the road yesterday, you’d think I wouldn’t give a hoot about her.
When I call, I hear, “Yeeello.”
My heart hiccups.
“Who is this? Who’s calling here,knockoff handbags?”
Real careful I hang up that phone. I guess Mister Johnny’s not working today either. I don’t know how he made it home with the storm. All I know is, even on a day off, I can’t escape the fear of that man. But in eleven days, that’s all going to be over.
MOST Of THE TOWN THAWS in a day. Miss Celia’s not in bed when I walk in. She’s sitting at the white kitchen table staring out the window with an ugly look on her face like her poor fancy life is just too hot a hell to live in. It’s the mimosa tree she’s eyeing out there. It took the ice pretty hard. Half of the branches broke off and all the spindly leaves are brown and soggy.

But I have been gossiping too long--and yet not too long if I have impressed upon the reader an idea

But I have been gossiping too long--and yet not too long if I have impressed upon the reader an idea of what a rusty, delightful old town it was to which I had come to spend the next three or four years of my boyhood.

A drive of twenty minutes from the station brought us to the door-step of Grandfather Nutter's house. What kind of house it was, and what sort of people lived in it, shall be told in another chapter.
Chapter 5 The Nutter House and the Nutter Family
The Nutter House--all the more prominent dwellings in Rivermouth are named after somebody; for instance, there is the Walford House, the Venner House, the Trefethen House, etc., though it by no means follows that they are inhabited by the people whose names they bear--the Nutter House, to resume, has been in our family nearly a hundred years, and is an honor to the builder (an ancestor of ours, I believe), supposing durability to be a merit. If our ancestor was a carpenter, he knew his trade. I wish I knew mine as well. Such timber and such workmanship don't often come together in houses built nowadays.

Imagine a low-studded structure, with a wide hall running through the middle. At your right band, as you enter, stands a tall black mahogany clock, looking like an Egyptian mummy set up on end. On each side of the hall are doors (whose knobs, it must be confessed, do not turn very easily), opening into large rooms wainscoted and rich in wood-carvings about the mantel-pieces and cornices. The walls are covered with pictured paper, representing landscapes and sea-views. In the parlor, for example, this enlivening figure is repeated all over the room. A group of English peasants, wearing Italian hats, are dancing on a lawn that abruptly resolves itself into a sea-beach, upon which stands a flabby fisherman (nationality unknown), quietly hauling in what appears to be a small whale, and totally regardless of the dreadful naval combat going on just beyond the end of his fishing-rod. On the other side of the ships is the main-land again, with the same peasants dancing. Our ancestors were very worthy people, but their wall-papers were abominable.

There are neither grates nor stoves in these quaint chambers, but splendid open chimney-places, with room enough for the corpulent back-log to turn over comfortably on the polished andirons. A wide staircase leads from the hall to the second story, which is arranged much like the first. Over this is the garret. I needn't tell a New England boy what--a museum of curiosities is the garret of a well-regulated New England house of fifty or sixty years' standing. Here meet together, as if by some preconcerted arrangement, all the broken-down chairs of the household, all the spavined tables, all the seedy hats, all the intoxicated-looking boots, all the split walking-sticks that have retired from business, "weary with the march of life." The pots, the pans, the trunks, the bottles--who may hope to make an inventory of the numberless odds and ends collected in this bewildering lumber-room? But what a place it is to sit of an afternoon with the rain pattering on the roof! What a place in which to read Gulliver's Travels, or the famous adventures of Rinaldo Rinaldini!

Far enough west

Far enough west, and they have outrun the slowly branching Seep of Atlantic settlement, and begun to encounter towns from elsewhere, com?ing their way, with entirely different Histories,— Cathedrals, Spanish Musick in the Streets, Chinese Acrobats and Russian Mysticks. Soon, the Line's own Vis Inertiae having been brought up to speed, they dis?cover additionally that 'tis it, now transporting them. Right in the way of the Visto some evening at Supper-time will appear the Lights of some complete Village, down the middle of whose main street the Line will clearly run. Laws continuing upon one side,— Slaves, Tobacco, Tax Lia?bilities,— may cease to exist upon the other, obliging Sheriffs and posses to decide how serious they are about wanting to cross Main Street. "Thanks, Gentlemen! Slaves yesterday, free Men and Women today! You survey'd the Chains right off 'em, with your own!"
One week they encounter a strange tribal sect, bas'd upon the worship of some celestial Appearance none but the Congregation can see. Hun?gry to know more about the Beloved, ignoring the possibility of a nega?tive result, recklessly do they prevail upon the 'Gazers to search scientifickally, with their Instruments, for this God, and having found its position, to determine its Motion, if any. It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus. The Lads, stunn'd, excited, realize they've found the first new Planet in all the untold centuries since gazing at the Stars began. Here at last is the Career-maker each has dreamt of, at differing moments and degrees of Faith. "All we need do is turn," cries Mason,— "turn, Eastward again, and continue to walk as we ever have done, to claim the Prize. For the first time, we may forget any Obligations to the current Sky,— for praise God (His ways how strange), we need never work again, 'tis t'ta to the Mug's Game and the Fool's Errand, 'tis a Royal Entrance at Life's Ridotto, 'tis a Copley Medal!"
"Eeh!" Dixon amiably waves his Hat. "Which half do thou fancy, obverse or reverse?”
"What?" Mason frowning in thought, "Hum. Well I rather imagin'd we'd...share the same side,— a Half-Circle each, sort of thing—"
Yet by now they can also both see the Western Mountains, ascending from the Horizon like a very close, hitherto unsuspected, second Moon,— the Circumferentor daily tracking the slow rise in vertical angle to the tops of these other-worldly Peaks. They are apt to meet men in skins, and Indians whose Tongue none of the Party can understand, and long strings of Pack-Horses loaded with Peltry, their Flanks wet, their eyes glancing 'round Blinders, inquiring... Survey Sights go on now for incredible Hundreds of Miles, so clear is the Air. Chainmen go chaining away into it, and sometimes never come back. They would be re-discover'd in episodes to come, were the episodes ever to be enacted, did Mason and Dixon choose not to turn, back to certain Fortune and global Acclaim, but rather to continue West, away from the law, into the savage Vacancy ever before them—

As to Laurent

As to Laurent, he had decidedly become a poltroon since the night he had taken fright when passing before the cellar door. Previous to that incident he had lived with the confidence of a brute; now, at the least sound, he trembled and turned pale like a little boy. A shudder of terror had suddenly shaken his limbs, and had clung to him. At night, he suffered even more than Therese; and fright, in this great, soft, cowardly frame, produced profound laceration to the feelings. He watched the fall of day with cruel apprehension. On several occasions, he failed to return home, and passed whole nights walking in the middle of the deserted streets.

Once he remained beneath a bridge, until morning, while the rain poured down in torrents; and there, huddled up, half frozen, not daring to rise and ascend to the quay, he for nearly six hours watched the dirty water running in the whitish shadow. At times a fit of terror brought him flat down on the damp ground: under one of the arches of the bridge he seemed to see long lines of drowned bodies drifting along in the current. When weariness drove him home, he shut himself in, and double-locked the door. There he struggled until daybreak amidst frightful attacks of fever.

The same nightmare returned persistently: he fancied he fell from the ardent clasp of Therese into the cold, sticky arms of Camille. He dreamt, first of all, that his sweetheart was stifling him in a warm embrace, and then that the corpse of the drowned man pressed him to his chest in an ice-like strain. These abrupt and alternate sensations of voluptuousness and disgust, these successive contacts of burning love and frigid death, set him panting for breath, and caused him to shudder and gasp in anguish.

Each day, the terror of the lovers increased, each day their attacks of nightmare crushed and maddened them the more. They no longer relied on their kisses to drive away insomnia. By prudence, they did not dare make appointments, but looked forward to their wedding-day as a day of salvation, to be followed by an untroubled night.

It was their desire for calm slumber that made them wish for their union. They had hesitated during the hours of indifference, both being oblivious of the egotistic and impassioned reasons that had urged them to the crime, and which were now dispelled. It was in vague despair that they took the supreme resolution to unite openly. At the bottom of their hearts they were afraid. They had leant, so to say, one on the other above an unfathomable depth, attracted to it by its horror. They bent over the abyss together, clinging silently to one another, while feelings of intense giddiness enfeebled their limbs and gave them falling madness.

But at the present moment, face to face with their anxious expectation and timorous desires, they felt the imperative necessity of closing their eyes, and of dreaming of a future full of amorous felicity and peaceful enjoyment. The more they trembled one before the other, the better they foresaw the horror of the abyss to the bottom of which they were about to plunge, and the more they sought to make promises of happiness to themselves, and to spread out before their eyes the invincible facts that fatally led them to marriage.