“Whether you ever regretted your choice of what to wish for.”
A moment of silence followed. The eyes she turned on me seemed to lack any depth. The desiccated shadow of a smile flickered at the corners of her mouth, suggesting a kind of hushed sense of resignation.
“I’m married now,” she said. “To a CPA three years older than me. And I have two children, a boy and a girl. We have an Irish setter. I drive an Audi, and I play tennis with my girlfriends twice a week. That’s the life I’m living now.”
“Sounds pretty good to me,” I said.
“Even if the Audi’s bumper has two dents?”
“Hey, bumpers are made for denting.”
“That would make a great bumper sticker,” she said. “‘Bumpers are for denting.’”
I looked at her mouth when she said that.
“What I’m trying to tell you is this,” she said more softly, scratching an earlobe. It was a beautifully shaped earlobe. “No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That’s all.”
“There’s another good bumper sticker,” I said. “‘No matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.’”
She laughed aloud, with a real show of pleasure, and the shadow was gone.
A passage that keeps reminding on my mind lately.