Crossing to Safety
Wallace Stegner
“Later, back at the Ridge, sitting on the porch steps eating crackers and cheese and trying to think what to do next, I saw that the sun was over the hill, and that all along the west a bed of cloud with fiery edges was turning orange. The sunset was going to be fine, just what Charity would have ordered.” p. 332
“‘And Milton? When he couldn’t stand any more English winters and English politics you know what he’d do? He’d eat an olive to remind him of Italy.’
‘I don’t need any olives,’ Sally says.” p.250
“The only party food I know—rye bread, mouse cheese, potato chips, and salted peanuts—I buy in quantity, and add a can of coffee in case we are short at home. Driving back, I note that the days are getting longer. At four-thirty there is still plenty of daylight left. Clearing clouds are blowing southward over Lake Mendota.” p. 115
“‘If you’d like to do something for me on my birthday, just of up there and play paterfamilias. Do their steaks as only you can do them. Sing some of your lovely sad ballads.’’” p. 314
“In the refrigerator, ready to go into the hampers at the last minute, would be bowls of salad ready for the dressing, carrot and celery sticks wrapped in a damp cloth, Sara Lee cakes thawing toward edibility, whatever fruits of the season McChesney’s offered, and above all the centerpiece of this pagan festival, the steaks, a dozen of them, great marbled slabs two inches thick, each a surfeit for three lumberjacks. Steaks for platoon, and scraps love over the all the platoon’s dogs.” p. 301
“‘Was he this way when you knew him? Ddi he save things in the refrigerator—saucers of leftover rice, and half and baked potato, and a little rhubarb sauce, and two or three asparagus spears? It drives Mom wild.” p. 214
“We bought a couple of chickens from a farm wife who talked a blue streak while she swiftly beheaded, plucked, and gutted them. From the same woman we bought ten ears of sweet corn.” p. 191
“When we arrive, our wives are clearing the space of limbs and nut hulls. We spread a blanket. Charity opens the basket and lays out fried chicken wrapped in wax paper, a wooden bowl of ready-mixed salad, French roll already buttered, a jar of artichoke hearts, celery sticks, fruit, cookies, napkins and paper plates.” p. 57-8
“Some of the younger faculty, including a couple I had found pretty condescending, hung so hungrily around the sherry that out of pure pride I refused to be like them. Sally, even stranger in that company that I was, stuck with me.” p. 19
“He smokes the right mixture in his Dunhill pipe, he works on his profile, he wears the right flannels and tweeds, he can recommend the right nutty sherries.” p. 41
“Some things that astonished Sally—hard beds, hard chairs, unfinished walls, Ivory soap, no liquor harder than sherry—could not dispel the impression I got of a simplicity expensively purchased and self-consciously cherished, a naturalness as artificial as the Petite Trianon, and a social life that was lively, hectic, and incessant.” p. 152
