Excerpts

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Opening paragraph of Chapter One, “A Christmas Revenge”:

 

We were where we belonged, the House on the Hill.  I stood tall to be measured in the pantry, my name and height were marked there below the marks of my twin cousins, and now in the twilight Robert and Richard were throwing around a new football in the great expanse of emerald yard.  I stayed inside to entertain the adults.  I could spread my legs and bend over very slowly and touch my head to the vast Oriental rug and-- without putting my hands down-- straighten up to stand tall again.  A brave little soldier, I saluted.

 

Opening paragraph Chapter Two, “Optimism for Courageous Living”:

 

When Mother and I finally got off the plane in Louisville, the temperature and the humidity were both in the nineties, my brown tweed pants were damply digging into my legs, my ears wouldn’t pop and my throat was on fire. Our room in the Henry Clay wasn’t air-conditioned. Mother had room service send up ice cubes, and she put them in a little white towel and held it to my head. My fever was 101; I’d been perfectly okay in Eugene that morning, so maybe I’d picked up a bug in Chicago. And then, after dinner, I got frightened by some drunk Optimists. They came laughing out of the bar, didn’t see me standing there sick, and almost knocked me down. The inebriated Conventioneers seemed like an omen-- I might not even make it past the semi-finals.

 

              Opening paragraph of Chapter Eleven Part Two, “The Far Side of the World”:

 

I never should have come to Calcutta alone.

 

Calcutta was misery, endless misery. For an hour, sweating stains into my clothes, my ass bleeding, I sat in the airlines bus hating, blindly hating.  The Indian girl in uniform let me off at the corner, where she said I could live for $35 a week. The heavy sky was lying close to the city like an army blanket.  Humidity: 94.  Temperature: 109.  No Americans in sight.  I pulled my bag off the bus and trudged up the brick path to the hotel where snakes lived in monstrous trees.  Signing in, I stared at the water on the backs of my hands.  Gray storm light, air like soup, I was an American.  Through a little window I saw a snake writhe down a limb and disappear into tall grass behind a sacred cow, asleep.