Motion Sickness by Lynne Tillman

textiles, jewelry, and all the time the floating barges undulate beneath our feet. I say to, myself, of all things, I must remember this, this funny wavering sensation that accompanies Cengiz and me as we walk across the river on a moving floor that seems like no support at all. But the decision to remember a bridge is much too symbolic.
    Cengiz wants to know how I feel about there being so few women on the streets and almost none after dark, except in the Western part of the city with its oddly named discos, at which everyone wears the latest Western styles, of which Cengiz disapproves. Cengiz likes getting to know the foreigners who visit Istanbul; he goes out of his way to be friendly and helpful, but he doesn’t want to be a Westerner. His fervent pride in his country as well as his intense anger at its failures is a grand passion, like his love for married women and the Bosphorus.
    We’re in a
lokanta
, a restaurant, and I am, as usual, the only woman. One man eating alone is waving a chicken leg above his head, in a kind of ecstasy. Hashish, Cengiz whispers, he is stupid man. He walks me to my hotel and deposits me at the front door which is locked. Mr. Yapar, wearing a Perry Como sweater over his pajamas, sleepily answers the bell and lets me in. A disinclined Cengiz walks away fast, as if he’s got a late date. With the married woman who’s available at strange hours.

Chapter 15
     
Postscript
     
    On the back of a color photograph of Vietnamese high-school girls bicycling in Hanoi: Dear Clara, I meant to telephone you before I left Barcelona. I hope you’re well. There’s nothing like Gaudi’s buildings, or you and Gregor. I hope I was of some help on your memoirs, but I don’t think I was. All my best to you. Love.
    ※

Credits
     
    This book was originally published by Poseidon, a Simon & Schuster imprint, in 1991. It was edited by Ann Patty.
    It was published in the UK also in 1991 by Serpent’s Tail, where Pete Ayrton was the publisher.
    Jeffrey Yozwiak, Cursor’s first intern, scanned it from the Serpent’s Tail edition and hand-coded it to an ePub file.
    Lisa Duggan, Daniel Schwartz, and Richard Nash proofread it.
    India Amos performed technical quality control.

Further Reading
     
    If you enjoyed Motion Sickness , may we recommend other books by Lynne Tillman?
Haunted Houses
     
    In uncompromising and fresh prose, Tillman tells the story of three very contemporary girls. Grace, Emily and Jane collide with friends, family, and culture under dark and comic circumstances, presented in uncanny, disturbing, and sometimes shocking terms. In Haunted Houses , Tillman writes of the past within the present, and of the inescapability of private memory and public history. A caustic account of how America makes and unmakes a young woman.
“In
Haunted Houses
, Lynne Tillman chronicles the loneliness of childhood and incipient womanhood, the salvation of friendship, and the neurotic chain that binds perpetually needy daughters to their perpetually self-absorbed parents… Her style is spare and compelling, the effect of clinical authenticity.”
—
New York Times Book Review
“Ms. Tillman’s characters are rigorously drawn, with a scrupulous regard for the truth of their inner lives… this is one of the most interesting works of fiction in recent times… Fans of both truth and fancy should find nourishment here.”
—
LA Weekly
“Lynne Tillman’s protagonists are so lifelike, engaging and accessible, one could overlook, though hardly remain unaffected by, the quality of her prose, with its unique balancing of character interrogation and headlong entertainment. Haunted Houses achieves that hardest of things: a fresh involvement of overheard life with the charisma of intelligent fiction. Its pleasures pull their weight.”
— Dennis Cooper
“This complex and skillfully constructed novel has three separate storylines following the lives of three girls growing up in New York, maturing in a world of