She's never said it of course, but he's sure she compares them, judges him unfavorably because he's still alive. Chickenshit, to be still alive. No balls.

***

When the aborigines sighted Captain Cook's ships, they ignored them because they knew such things couldn't exist. It's the next best thing to being invisible.

***

Men replaced dinosaurs, true, in her head as in geological time; but thinking about men has become too unrewarding.

***

Limping home from school, purple and cut because his mother had forbidden him to fight. Even when they hit me first? Even when they hit you first. But he'd thought of a way around her. They were beating up a smaller boy. Not good enough. Three against one. Still not good enough. They called him a kike. Ah, that did it. Fire flashed from her eyes. In the name of tolerance, kill.

***

It's blatant propaganda, and the pictures are ugly. With their crude bright colors and clearly drawn smiling figures they're like the Sunday-school handouts she loathed so much as a child. Jesus loves me. She never believed that for a second. Jesus was God and God loved Auntie Muriel; Auntie Muriel was absolutely certain of that. As far as Elizabeth was concerned God could not love both her and Auntie Muriel at the same time.

***

She doesn't dare ask. She doesn't dare phone Nate, either. If Elizabeth answers, he'll be displeased. If one of the children answers he'll also be displeased. If he himself answers he'll be displeased too because he'll know it could just as well have been one of the others.

***

Elizabeth herself has no such ambitions. She wants only one thing: escape. She can't yet see what form this will take. She can see herself planning, finding a job through the Star want ads, hunting a furnished room, packing; making provisions. She can also see herself running out the front door in her nightgown and vanishing for ever into a ravine. Both of these things are equally possible.

***

But how would the Montagues and the Capulets have behaved if Romeo and Juliet had lived? A lot like her relatives, she suspects. Snubs at family gatherings, resentments, subjects that were not discussed, this or that grandmother weeping or raving in a corner. Juliet, like her mother, would have become impenetrable, compact, plump, would have drawn herself together into a sphere.

***

Most people do imitations; she herself has been doing imitations for years. If there is some reason for it she can imitate a wife, a mother, an employee, a dutiful relative. The secret is to discover what the others are trying to imitate and then support them in their belief that they've done it so well. Or the opposite: I can see through you.

***

He threw away a promising career, everyone said it was promising though they didn't say what it promised.

***

Mummy. A dried corpse in a gilded case. Mum, silent. Mama, short for mammary gland.

***

"Dinosaurs are dead," he said to her one day, trying to lighten things up. "But I'm still alive."
"Are you sure?" she said, with one of those ball-shriveling looks. As if he was a teeny little dog turd.

***

All she wants is a miracle, because anything else is hopeless.

***

She acts as if she can't remember ever having cried, ever having hit him or screamed, and Nate reflects once more upon the shamelessness of women. Their lack of shame. They believe whatever they do is justified at the time, so why be guilty?

***

But does the Mesozoic exist? When it did it was called nothing. The dinosaurs didn't know they were in the Mesozoic. They didn't know they were only in the middle. They didn't intend to become extinct; as far as they knew they would live forever.