The room was soft and calm, as if awaiting me, and a crack in the window let in a little cold air that turned the pages of a bedside book, one after another, at the speed a ghost might read them. Bells and salesmen and the scent of chestnuts. Italian voices. The smell of gaslight and coal-fire st...
That same summer, Ethel Rosenberg was electrocuted. The last time she saw her husband was minutes before he was taken to the chair, in a room where a screen separated the traitors so they could not touch. They were left alone; no one knows what they said to each other. But when the warden entered...
It is a humiliation, to say the least, to recite my times tables with this Midwestern crowd of children—five times twelve is sixty—but the hardest part is to keep my voice as quiet as I can, my profile low, so that the teacher (a woman exactly my age) won’t notice that odd boy in the corner scrib...
“But I’m sooo good at it, and sooo careful,” she complained, pulling up a bar stool and resting her chin on the countertop. He refused, wiped the blade of his heavy knife, and began slicing a moon-white onion, letting the rings fall silently to the board. “Oh, come on,” Lydia said to her father, ...