Annie Dillard, The Maytrees

The way of the world could be slight, then and now, but rarely, among individuals, vicious. 1

Falling in love, like having a baby, rubs against the current of our lives: separation, loss, and death. That is the joy of them. 2

She lacked a woman's sense of doom. 4

He slept with a long leg flung over her, as a dog claims a stick. / Once while he slept on his side, his legs thrashed and he panted. She pressed his shoulder. / Chasing a rabbit? / He exhaled and said, tap-dancing. 5

They shook hands and hers felt hot under sand like a sugar donut. 7

Later you cut yourself--right there, on the side. Paper cut in the webbing, and years later, another beside where it healed ... when you have hurt every single place on your body, you die! 14

Lou heard Elaine Cairo say she was up to her eyeballs in highballs. 25

Forever and aye, my jubilee. 32

Awareness was a braided river. It slid down time in drops or torrents. 32

The tractors, themselves whacked, worked. Splay-legged in her wobbling kitchen, Flo Proto cooked on a woodstove a slumgullion to feed the crew. The chimney smoked, and its smoke marked their route. 41

Maytree was no more finicky than house owners or the town about who might own lots’ titles. During the war, property bills, if any, lapsed. Yankees paid back taxes and taxes on empty lots. After the war they owned them all. 42

Until you have a baby, her mother had said, you don’t know what love is! Her mother had volunteered this on the day of Lou’s one and only wedding. –Oh, Lou wanted to say, go soak your head. 49

At eight Petie wrote for school, “Mice are small creatures who come in.” 53

Maytree celebrated Thanksgivings by beginning work on a book. 54

One night Lou and Maytree skated arm-in-arm on black ice in half a gale. 56

Sometimes now Lou searched old albums to test her proposition that nothing so compels a woman as the boyhood of the man she loves. 58

Brandy he drinks? The tenth-anniversary-present brandy from four years ago we’ve sipped on Christmas mornings only? 63

The sea beside him, a monster with a lace hem, drained east. 69

He fit her arms as if they two had invented how to carry a baby. While she walked, he patted her shoulder in time with her steps. If he stopped patting, she stopped walking. If his pats speeded up, she stepped lively. 108

She imagined joining picnic tables outside by the beach and setting them for 22 Peties and Petes, or 122, however greedy she was that day and however divisible Pete. Together the sons at every age and size--scented with diaper, formula on rubber nipples, salt-soaked sand, bike grease, wax crayon, beer, manila, engine oil, fish--waited for dinner. 109

Were not people who tolerated snakes going against human nature? Did that mean they were cultured? 122

Unseen, a catbird sang baroque. 124

What happens to people out here on the lower Cape, a mid-ocean sandspit, what happens even to intelligent and educated people, that they take to plying the skies like cows in Chagall? From solid citizens they sublimed to limbless metaphysicians. Their minds grew lucent as gels. 125

The lasting love he studied, not mere emotion, might be willful focus of attention. It might be a custody of reactions. 129

The feeling of love is so crucials to our species it is excessive, like labor pain. Lasting love is an act of will. It is a gentleman's game. 130

For dying, she was ready as for any other party. --Messages for anyone dead?

When Maytree was young, men, women, and children found their way in starlight alone. When clouds covered the night sky, as now, the whole Cape knew it: Dark night! they said, in a greeting then as common, and almost as frequent, as--Fine day!

Maytree was--as their old friend Mary Heaton Vorse said--"night-footed." 158

Actually, he would rather turn back and find the lee of a beach plum in the swale, discover some brandy, and sleep abutting the strange dog. And not ask Lou what he had to. 161

Now she wanted to clean the glass on those beachside doors and beg, borrow, or buy bedding, food, bowls, and plates. 169

Yankee the turtle crawled out from under the couch and stretched his snake neck... He regarded dead Deary with the obsidian calm of a god. 181

What a crashing bore. 187

I wither slowly in thine arms, here at the quiet limit of the world. 213