Unit 1: Vocabulary from Readings 5

My mother is the surviving half of a blindfold trapeze act, not a fact I think about much even now that she is sightless, the result of encroaching and stubborn cataracts.

It has occurred to me that the catlike precision of her movements in old age might be the result of her early training, but she shows so little of the drama or flair one might expect from a performer that I tend to forget the Flying Avalons.

In the town square a replica tent pole, cracked and splintered, now stands cast in concrete.

They loved to drop gracefully from nowhere, like two sparkling birds, and blow kisses as they threw off their plumed helmets and high-collared capes.

They rubbed their hands in chalky powder, then Harry launched himself and swung, once, twice, in huge calibrated beats across space.

She was a girl, but I rarely thought of her as a sister or even as a separate person really. I suppose you could call it the egocentrism of a child, of all young children, but I considered her a less finished version of myself.

From below, it looked as though even a squirrel would have had trouble jumping from the tree onto the house, for the breadth of that small branch was no bigger than my mother's wrist.

‘My friends,’ explained the man, and with his friends began the descent, emptying out a demotic mystery language into the stairwell.

She stood in the center of the room, clumsily divesting herself of the loud red coat.

Usually Pam would use these minutes in the office to ascertain something about likely wealth, class, all very gently— what kind of house, what kind of taste, what kind of price—but she had been wrong about English accents before, not knowing which were high class, which not.

Pam reached over to her stereo like a woman with one foot each in two drifting boats; she punched at a couple of buttons to no avail...

From behind she was an even more neatly made girl than from the front, everything tight and defined, fighting slightly against the banal restraint of polyester.

'But have you been to America before?’
‘Only Florida when I was twelve. I didn’t like it—it’s quite vulgar?’ said Martha, and the word was most definitely borrowed in her mouth.

She drummed her fingers on the patch of wall behind her—as close an expression of suppressed fury as Pam ever managed.

If there’s a box around “sensitive,” because it seems pretentious in the context, try “susceptible.” Why “susceptible”? Because you looked up “sensitive” in the dictionary and it said “highly susceptible.”

From the airplane, you could discern where these places were, because, seen through the trees, there would be an interruption of the reflection of sunlight on water.