Getting Back
an excerpt

Take a moment to note the circumstances: a woman of forty-two, lower middle class, single mother of two young teenagers, protective of her brood and her livelihood, nearly rams into an angry twenty-something suitably dressed for an altogether different time and place, flailing about unable to contain his rage, and making up curses that, while vulgar, border on making sense. These curses would be especially frightening if, as this woman was, you were a on-and-off Catholic who happened to have engaged in no less than three types of nonverbal intercourse the night before.

Naturally, she screamed.

Startled that he hadn't noticed someone so close behind him, Thaddeus screamed, too, as he whirled to face her. When two strangers who don't know each other's motives scream into each other's faces, it's like balancing a toboggan at the top of a pyramid; something has to give. The first thing was the woman's self-control, the second was Thaddeus' face. Incidentally, her oversized handbag remained completely intact, despite the force of the impact.

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Mrs. B, bored and frustrated by Tolstoy ("He's just so ghastly repetitive, darling."), spent the day looking at catalogs, some with antique furniture, some with foreign babies, others with things that many people believed one couldn't put a price on. Obviously, these people have never had what must be termed "stupid" amounts of money. She did take a break from her strict sitting regimen to engage in some exercise with her personal trainer, Renoldo, who was a statuesque man wearing clothing that eighty-five percent of other men would agree was either too tight or too damned tight. The other fifteen percent were either latently or openly homosexual. Renoldo fit into the latter category, although it must be said that a generous portion of homosexual men also thought Renoldo's clothing was far too tight. The most interesting thing about this is that the data was obtained by the United States Census Bureau.