“….One day when Emily was finished at the supermarket—she had learned how not to be stultified by the supermarket, how to deal with it in quick, competent movements that brought results—she sat for a long time in the steaming brilliance of the laundromat. She watched the whirl of suds and soaked cloth in the porthole of her machine; then she watched the other customers, trying to guess which were students and which were faculty and which were people from the town. She bought a chocolate bar and it tasted surprisingly good—as if, without her knowing it, sitting here and eating this chocolate was the one thing she had wanted to do all day. Waiting for the drying cycle to end she began to feel a vague dread, but it wasn’t until she was at the warm, lint-speckled folding table that she figured it out: she didn’t want to go home.”
- Richard Yates, from Part 2, Chapter 1 of “The Easter Parade”
The Easter Parade