WHEN MY GRANDMOTHER FELL ILL, she and my grandfather talked more and more about a trip that they had always hoped to make, someday, when they had the time, when there wasn’t so much to do, when they had some extra money—someday. They wanted to go to Rarotonga, one of the Cook Islands, in the South Pacific, west of New Zealand.

ARIANE AND I were in her kitchen. She was making lasagne, going about her work with the queer verve of a chef on a television cooking show, slicing and chopping and stirring with the cool indifference of a weary pro, but sniffing and tasting with the ecstatic delight of an obsessive gourmet.

“TOOTSIE!” said Red. “Where the hell you been, girl? Want a drink?”

29

“I SAID TO MYSELF, ‘Ariane, let’s face it. Things haven’t been going your way. You need a change. Time to travel another path.’ ”

FROM The Films of Gregory Tschudin, by Andrew Cargill: A Little Mischief     Anne Coffin (Deirdre Frost) is a college student who has returned to her home town for the summer and taken a job as a maid at a resort. She’s from a working-class family that is just scraping by. Sending her to school is a sacrifice.

WHEN SHE TURNED THE CORNER and saw home, she knew what she was going to do. It made her shiver, and it made her smile. 

27

“I DID. I went away. Actually, I let him lead me away—down the corridor and out the door. And he watched me until I was off the grounds. I was—dazed. I felt ashamed, just as ashamed as I would have felt if I’d been guilty. And I felt—”

IN MOVIES, there are always clues. A spy will walk into a deserted square in Bratislava and we, the viewers, will know—from the way the shadows fall, the stillness in the air, the unusual way that the pigeons are pecking at crumbs—that this is a setup, that he’s walking into a trap, but the clues in life are subtle, unreliable, and often misleading, so we rarely spot the setup or see the ambush coming. 

“THAT’S WHEN the son of a b***h hit me. He punched me. In the stomach.” She shuddered and drew a breath. “I lose my breath even now,” she said, “remembering it. ...

“THEN I SURPRISED MYSELF again,” she said. “There isn’t any way around this—it sounds so square to say this, but I remembered that it wasn’t right. It was shameful, it was—”