“But in Europe where—?” he calls after me, as the taxi pulls away from the curb. “I don’t know where,” I call after him, gleefully waving farewell. I am thirty-three, and free at last of my mother and father! For a month. “But how will we know your address?” Joy! Sheer joy! “You won’t!”
Freedom from Family.
Radioactive Pilot In Love.
She actually seems to think of herself as a woman at the very frontiers of experience, some doomed dazzling combination of Marie Curie, Anna Karenina, and Amelia Earhart.
Wintereligion.
It’s a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, “Momma, do we believe in winter?”
Keep me clean.
It takes effort, to be sure—but where health and cleanliness are concerned, germs and bodily secretions, she will not spare herself and sacrifice others.
Gemecker.
Portnoy’s Complaint: “(pôrt´-noiz kəm-pl´nt´) n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933 - )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.