Saying these words, she felt her gums were hard; it was her gums, it was her teeth that said them. Her lips were still! She kissed her daughter.
The child, who had lain wide-eyed silent, fell asleep....
Fanny stood beside her bed. It loomed like a white sucking mouth—white lips. She pulled a quilt away, sank to the floor. With knees high huddled in her arms, near her chin, and the quilt lightly touching her bare toes, her knees, her mouth, she slept on the floor. The world’s blackness, the ghost-grained night of her sleep was not the world, not her sleep ... was the bed above her. Blackness was spun white threads come to rest: each thread beside the other, each thread of white not touching any other. She lay escaped from her Bed in undulant hardness, she flowed ... at last at rest ... like a red worm through water....
—At this Party too, they aren’t going to let me be gay!
All they would not let her. They smiled on her and carefully patterned their talk. They had eyes forever wiping against her thoughts. They must have hated her, had she been gay and forgetful of her loss. They did not want to hate her. They preserved her low and broken where they did not need to hate her. “Dear poor Fanny—so brave!” Their words and their ways announced: “We try to be gay with you, we try to make you gay.” They would not let her be gay. They hoisted their talk uphill against the evident pull of their sole interest in her, of their solemn compassion for her. They would not let her forget. “We are being gay, we are trying to cheer you up. We are talking with you of indifferent matters.” So....
Fanny waited ... here too. In these bright congestions of men and women was there not surely somewhere a color that went with her own, a tone that could make her vibrate? She waited in stiff rigor, not knowing she waited.... Gowns and shoes ... words put on like gowns and shoes over different flesh. She smelt at times under satin and starch warm flesh that needed air. She sat and let herself be talked to, be sympathized with, be gloated over.—If only you’d shout you are glad! Healthy that, naked.... O no. She was stiff as in death.
A tall man, dark....—Newcomer, strange ... moved up to her and spoke. Words not spawned or swerved by her own story: words she needed not to hear since they were fending away a world that would not let her be gay. In a new separateness Fanny felt herself....
Felt herself laughing.