Euphoria

‘Americans make such good anthropologists because they’re so bloody rude.’

? I didn’t want anything to do with women or anthropology at that point.

But there’s always that one last piece to shove in place, even if it’s the wrong shape entirely.’
They laughed heavily, a sort of deeply sympathetic agreement that was like a salve on my shredded nerves.
‘It always feels like that in the field, doesn’t it?’ Nell said. ‘Then you get back and it all fits.’
‘Does it?’ I said.
‘If you’ve done the work it will.’

remembered a fall day when I was about 8 or 9 and my brother & I had played with some new children in our neighborhood for the first time and we were being called to dinner and we stood in the yard with them chilled by the sudden evening but warm from running and I had a terrible fear that we’d never play like that again, that it would never be the same. I don’t remember if my premonition proved true. I just remember the stonelike weight in my chest as I went up the back steps.

Pitiful that a great amount of my pain disappeared when someone paid a bit of attention to it.

I was ashamed to feel such bald need for these near strangers

And then my throat closed entirely and I couldn’t force it open. She stared at me and nodded into the silence between us, as if I were still talking and making perfect sense.

feel like I got most of life’s lessons before I turned six.

Every child seeks meaning. When I was four I remember asking my quite pregnant mother: What’s the point of all this? Of all what? she asked. Of all this life. I remember how she looked at me and I felt like I’d said something very bad. She came and sat beside me at the table and told me I’d just asked a very big question, and that I wouldn’t be able to answer it until I was an old, old woman. But she was wrong. Because she had that baby, and when she brought her home I knew I’d found the point.

the combination of the winter gloom, my mother’s restless bullying, and the stale cerebral self-conscious wit that bubbled like a frothy mold in every corner of Cambridge drove me to return to the Kiona as fast as I could manage.