A couple of years after his wife died. It was too much to love in the apartment without her, everything reminded him, so when an apartment opened up in the floor above me he moved in.”
“We often sit together at my kitchen table. The whole afternoon might go by without our saying a word. If we do talk, we never speak in Yiddish. The words of our childhood became strangers to us—we couldn’t use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language.”
“I started again. This time I didn’t write about real things and I didn’t write about imaginary things. I wrote about the only thing I knew. The pages piled up.”
“She wrote to my father in Israel almost every day on expensive French stationary, and when she ran out of that she wrote to him on graph paper torn out of a notebook.”
“She didn’t like America, but she didn’t hate it, either. Two and a half years and eight gazillion books later, she had Bird. Then we moved to Brooklyn.”
″‘Where are you planning to sleep, the Arctic Circle?’ she asked. I thought, There or maybe the Peruvian Andes, since that’s where Dad once camped. I started to keep a notebook called How to Survive in the Wild.”
“From then on, I took an even greater pride in my work. I’d bring the most difficult locks home and time myself. Then I’d cut the time in half and practice until I got there. I’d keep at it until I couldn’t feel my fingers.”
“She learned back and looked at him with something like hurt, and then he almost but didn’t say the two sentences he’d been meaning to say for years: Part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you.”
“When I was little my mother used to get a certain look in her eyes and say, ‘One day you’re going to fall in love.’ I wanted to say, but never said: Not in a million years.”
“I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten. I stood on the sidewalk a nothing, a gathering of dust.”
“The recovery room turned silent; everyone stared. Bruno groaned and turned toward the wall. That night I put him to bed. Bruno, I said. So sorry, he said. So selfish. I sighed and turned to go. Stay with me! he cried.”
“She asked me to make a copy of her key. I was happy for her. That she wouldn’t be alone anymore. It’s not that I felt sorry for myself. And yet. I made two copies. One I gave to her, and one I kept. For a long time I carried it in my pocket. To pretend.”
″‘Then again, you could always just stick with half English and half Israeli, since—’ ‘I’M AMERICAN!’ I shouted. My mother blinked. From the corner of the room where he was looking at the pictures in a magazine, Bird muttered, ‘No, you’re not. You’re Jewish.‘”