The World According to Garp

have a respectable hard-on

now littered with youthful trash—beer cans and broken glass.

She knew that if she could plug poor Garp into the wet-dream program, her job and his life would be much happier. But it wasn't that easy.

wanted a job and I wanted to live alone. That made me A Sexual Suspect. Then I wanted a baby, but I didn't want to have to share my body or my life to have one. That made me A Sexual Suspect, too.”

It struck her that they were thinking: If she is to be a whore, let her at least be clean and well shod.

In this dirty-minded world, she thought, you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other. If you don't fit either category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong with you. But, she thought, there is nothing wrong with me.

“If you don't feel like mourning, what are you mourning for?” Jenny asked her. In her autobiography, Jenny wrote: “That poor woman needed to be told what to feel.”

Thank you for coming when I called you,” Jenny said.

“What's a family for?” one said.

“Blood runs thick,” said the other. Then he paled, embarrassed at the association—her uniform was so besmirched.

“I'm a good girl,” Jenny told them.

“Get your stinking hand off me,” she said. Several people turned around.

She felt if she ever had children she would love them no less when they were twenty than when they were two; they might need you more at twenty, she thought. What do you really need when you're two? In the hospital, the babies were the easiest patients. The older they got, the more they needed; and the less anyone wanted or loved them.