“Catherine tittered exactly as if she had seen the point of some invisible joke: but then she noticed that the truckmen had forgotten to set up the speaker’s table, so she excused herself very politely, gaping out at her father-in-law her diligently attentive smile with earnestness and breeding that his intestines publicly croaked. The father of the artist hated his daughter-in-law, and could not bear to share a roof with her even for a single night; her conversation depressed him and gave him evil sweated dreams: sometimes he dreamt he was in his sister’s city, and the bomb explode out of his own belly, and then rolled past him, as on a turntable in the brutalized nave, his little niece laid out dead, covered only by her yellow hair. Across the room Catherine was supervising the placing of the lectern: he heard it scrape through the invisible voices.” —Cynthia Ozick, “The Suitcase”
(part of my Two Times Two street photography series of couples)
Chris Bronsk 