The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.

Our beautiful Italian babysitter tells me she broke up with her boyfriend. I know him, a serious young musician who adored her. "What did he do?" I say. She makes herself a cup of tea. "He cried like a clown."

She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.

There is a story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same.

When we met, he wore glasses he'd had for fifteen years. I had the same bangs I did in college. I used to plot to break those glasses secretly, but I never told him how much I hated them until the day he came home with new ones.
I think it was a year later that I grew out my bangs. When they were finally gone, he said, "I've always hated bangs actually."