Month: January 2015

My grandmother used a particular shade of Maybelline plum lipstick. When Maybelline discontinued it, she ordered a family-wide quest to find any tube that hadn’t been sold. There was no internet, so it could have been the Grail and we would have as much luck. She was disconsolate and died soon after. I, too, have…

A few days before Christmas I went to a party. I didn’t know many people there, but I knew Julie and her partner Elaine, who goes by Laine. I didn’t know the hostess at all, but people in Julie and Laine’s crowd are very hospitable. So, I let myself in the front door of this…

In my fertile days I would occasionally worry that I would only want kids after it was too late. What if the last egg traveled down the tube and set off a Rube Goldberg mechanism that unblocked a river of maternal urges? What would happen then? Of course I planned for what would happen then:…