"What it imparts is precisely the knowledge of greater power withheld. In that knowledge lies the genuis of the slap, the deep humiliation it imposes. It invites the victim to accept a punishment that might have been worse -- that will in fact be worse if the slap isnt accepted. The slap reuired in the victim an unwavering submission, an utter abegnation. The victim bends in spirit before a lord. In this sense the slap is internal. The sting passes, athe redness fades, but the wound lingers, invisible. Therein lies the deepest meaning of the slap: its real work takes place secretly, out of sight, on the inside."
The White Glove
"But if the glove was creating a new Emily, a hidden Emily, it was also doing something to me. The peace I'd always felt in her presence was being replaced by wariness, by an almost phychological alertness, as if my body were warning me to watch her closely."
He engages the senses with this thick creamy nostalgia. I feel that i experienced my own childhood in these makebelieve places, full of lemonade and cherry pie and sunshine.
"Oh, i knew where I was going, didn't want to know where I was going, in the warm blue air with little flutters of coolness in it, little bursts of grass-smell and leaf-smell, lilac and fresh tar."
And then he takes some simple, ordinary thing, and infuses it with great weight, with supernatural power, in some way derived from the nostalgia itself. It is the justaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary that permeates all of these stories.
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