I meant the line, and I want to sit with what I meant, because it is the truth that saved me.

A cruel act on the first morning of a marriage is not an isolated event.

It is a trailer.

It is the studio showing you, in a compressed and vivid form, exactly what the full feature will contain.

The rag was Casper telling me — more honestly than he had ever told me anything — what the next forty years held: the contempt, the demands, the mother in the doorway coaching him, the slow grinding project of turning a wife into a servant.

He thought he was establishing roles for day one.