Maureen F. McHugh

"“So what’s wrong with capitalism?” He sighs. For a minute I wonder if maybe he’s a capitalist. But then he says, “It’s not a fair system.” “That’s stupid,” I say. “Things aren’t fair. Only little kids expect things to be fair.”"

"So he starts by asking me what I know about capitalism. “People were rich and there was a lot of corruption and a lot of crime,” I say. “And now we have socialism and people are poor and there’s a lot of corruption and a lot of crime.” He laughs. Anything I say about politics makes him laugh."

"That is what lives are, aren’t they? Attempts to fill our time with activity designed to prevent us from realizing that there is no meaning?"

"We enter into all major relationships with no real clue of where we are going: marriage, birth, friendship. We carry maps we believe are true: our parents’ relationship, what it says in the baby books, the landscape of our own childhood. These maps are approximate at best, dangerously misleading at worst."

"Sydney had never forgotten to eat in her life. One of her secret fantasies had been that, as a girl who could code, she would work in the one place where a geeky fat girl could get dates. It had not been entirely untrue. But as someone had pointed out to her in school, although the odds are good, the goods are odd."

"Nothing prepares you for the death of a child. Nothing teaches you how to live with it."

"It’s true that we are free to do whatever we want, even go to France on a whim. We can make any choice we want. We can do anything we want. We just have to not care about consequences."

"I suppose to him it looks as if I threw everything away, but how can he understand how our choices are taken from us? He doesn’t even understand freedom and what an illusion it really is."

"After a minute Damien looked over her cube wall. His head was right above the Mardi Gras mask hung on her wall. She didn’t particularly want to go to Mardi Gras, which seemed to be mostly about blonde girls flashing their tits; she just liked masks."

"We went to Cancun, my Not-A-Honeymoon-Trip to Cancun. We stayed in a resort hotel with a pool that went halfway around the hotel and had two swim-up bars. Being in Mexico I thought everything would be more foreign, but in Cancun things felt a lot the same. There was McDonald’s and KFC, Pizza Hut, even Wal-mart. Mel said it looked just like Florida, only more people speak Spanish in Florida."

"One Christmas my dippy older sister was talking about God protecting her from some minor calamity, some domestic crisis involving getting a dent in her husband’s Ford pickup, and later, as we drove home, Allan said, grinning, “I’m so glad that God is looking after Matt’s pickup. Makes up for whatever he was doing during, you know, Cambodia, or the Black Plague.”"