[gmw]

When I was in high school I wanted to be a flight attendant because I thought it was the only way I was ever going to get out of town,” the stewardess said blankly from the back of the plane. Sabine and the other woman turned around. The stewardess had bright blond hair and wore her eye makeup like Natalie Wood. “I thought, How else am I ever going to get to go to Europe? Meet a wealthy businessman, get married? Nobody told me that I’d be flying to the same little [bleeping] towns I came from.”

Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world’s unhappiness on the advent of calculators.

-- Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant (1997)