Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  And that thing is me.” “Yet you see her request for a breather as rejection,” I respond. “You know, desire acts in weird ways. Here she is asking you to ignore her, not to want her, as a way for her to want you. I can see why this makes no sense. Why such detours? And I understand your reaction. But you see, she needs to separate the intimate from the erotic, and for that she needs space. She invited you into a scheme that would allow her to do just that. It wasn’t a rebuff; it was an invitation. You have to imagine it not literally, but as a form of sexual play. Play at not needing me. Play at ignoring me.” But Jimmy could not play, because he was caught in a struggle with Candace. He didn’t want to engage in such contortions to elicit her desire. He wanted her to want him his way. Jimmy had felt deprived and rejected for so many years that the main feeling that escorted him was anger. His bile only highlighted the extent of his longing and need. The way they neutralized the threat of rage was through massive affection. Their almost constant physicality acted like a sexual appetite suppressor. This kind of contact can sustain itself for years without turning into desire. Unconditional love does not drive unconditional want. That’s what we have with friends, and Jimmy and Candace were friends who wanted to be lovers. Knowing that Candace had already expressed a need for distance, I saw an opening to intervene. I sought to introduce a disruption into the cozy, affectionate touch that had come to replace sex. “Do you touch each other?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. “All the time,” she replied. “Do you cuddle?” “Yes,” Jimmy said. “A lot?” “Yes,” they said in unison. “Well, it’s got to stop.” They looked at me wide-eyed. Here they had been emphasizing one aspect of their relationship that they both cherished, and I was taking it away from them. But by the way Candace responded, I knew I was on to something. “You don’t know what you’re doing to me,” she said. “I’m so touch-sensitive. For me, it’s all about touch. I’ll take it from anyone, even a relative stranger. I’m a touch whore.” Jimmy added, “When we visited my family last week, my mother’s best friend was rubbing her shoulders. You know, now that I think about it, I remember wondering if it even mattered whether it was me or Mrs. Monahan.” “So, this is going to be the goal of therapy,” I interjected. “We’re going to differentiate between Jimmy and Mrs. Monahan.” By telling them not to touch I was mapping a space that would give her room to go after him. That, in turn, would give him the feeling of being desired. “I’ll make this clear for you. No contact. No pecks, no kissing, no massage, no strokes. Nothing. Sorry, you guys.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Ryan said nothing at the time, but he was shocked. “How was I supposed to know she felt that way? She always looked happy enough to me. I thought she had what she wanted. I thought I was the only one feeling restless.” Now, he was divided. On one hand he was angry that she hadn’t lived up to his expectations; on the other, he was anxious about what her polemic said about him. “In my mind, she’s a rock, I’m the squirmy one. I’ve had to work hard at being who I thought she wanted me to be, creating this life together. I felt put down. If she feels trapped, mired in drudgery, what does that make me?” “Do you need her to acknowledge your hard work?” I asked. “I guess so. Somehow her doubts diminished the value of my efforts. But then, this weird thing happened.” He paused before speaking again. “I started to like it.” “Explain,” I said. “It’s like I did a complete 180. I couldn’t interrupt her, which I probably would have done if we’d been alone—not that she would ever say this stuff to me, anyway. Besides, I was intrigued. She felt just like I did; she was saying the very same things I didn’t dare say. She wanted more. She was hungry, too. She missed her freedom. She kept becoming more interesting to me, more foreign. The wine really loosened her tongue.” “What else did she say?” I, too, was curious. The actor in him couldn’t resist playing her part. “‘ I feel like we’re just stuck together,’” he said, again imitating her voice. “‘Sometimes I fantasize about other lives, other men. Not any one man in particular—I just imagine a clean slate, unencumbered, no history, no problems. Someone I could be different with. I get so resentful that I am stuck in this house, in this family, inside my body. All I want to say is leave me alone, don’t bother me.’” Ryan shared with me the unexpected denouement of the evening. “I started out shocked and then defensive and then angry. But, weirdly, the more she was going on and on, the more I wanted her. She was on fire. At first I thought, oh, just quit the diatribe; but then I was captivated by her, I identified with her, and in a strange way I felt closer to her and more turned on than I had in a long time. My fascination with Barbara vanished. And I knew that if I’d married Barbara I’d be longing for Christine.” “And you didn’t have to work for it,” I say. “I couldn’t have sent you home with an assignment that would have had this kind of result.” I explain to him that his renewed desire came from her reassertion of her separateness and her dreams. When she voiced her unrequited longings, she gave Ryan permission to unleash his.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Ryan repeated these words in a dazed voice as if he still couldn’t quite believe hearing them. At my prodding, he told me the rest of his wife’s remarks—that she felt she had always just done what was expected of her, that this was easier than figuring things out on her own. He continued, his tone both mocking and full of admiration as he expertly mimicked his wife. “‘I know it’s not right to complain when you have it all,’ she says. ‘Where’s my gratitude? I’m blessed with the kids, with Ryan, the remnants of a decent career, good friends. When you don’t have it—the family, the marriage—you romanticize it. At least I did. But then when you do have it, you feel trapped. I have my blissful moments, but mostly I’m mired in drudgery.’” Ryan said nothing at the time, but he was shocked. “How was I supposed to know she felt that way? She always looked happy enough to me. I thought she had what she wanted. I thought I was the only one feeling restless.” Now, he was divided. On one hand he was angry that she hadn’t lived up to his expectations; on the other, he was anxious about what her polemic said about him. “In my mind, she’s a rock, I’m the squirmy one. I’ve had to work hard at being who I thought she wanted me to be, creating this life together. I felt put down. If she feels trapped, mired in drudgery, what does that make me?” “Do you need her to acknowledge your hard work?” I asked. “I guess so. Somehow her doubts diminished the value of my efforts. But then, this weird thing happened.” He paused before speaking again. “I started to like it.” “Explain,” I said. “It’s like I did a complete 180. I couldn’t interrupt her, which I probably would have done if we’d been alone—not that she would ever say this stuff to me, anyway. Besides, I was intrigued. She felt just like I did; she was saying the very same things I didn’t dare say. She wanted more. She was hungry, too. She missed her freedom. She kept becoming more interesting to me, more foreign. The wine really loosened her tongue.” “What else did she say?” I, too, was curious. The actor in him couldn’t resist playing her part. “‘ I feel like we’re just stuck together,’” he said, again imitating her voice. “‘Sometimes I fantasize about other lives, other men. Not any one man in particular—I just imagine a clean slate, unencumbered, no history, no problems. Someone I could be different with.

• From Story of O (1954)

  O was standing in the middle of the room, facing René. He told her to turn around; she was rooted to the spot. “She also crosses her legs,” Jacqueline added, “but that you won’t be able to see, of course. As you won’t be able to see the way she accosts the boys.” “That’s not true,” O shouted, “you’re the one!” and she leaped at Jacqueline. René grabbed her just as she was about to hit Jacqueline, and she went on struggling in his arms merely for the sake of feeling weaker than he, of being at his mercy, when, lifting her head, she saw Sir Stephen standing in the doorway looking at her. Jacqueline had thrown herself down on the sofa, her tiny face hardened with anger and fear, and O could feel that René, though he had his hands full trying to subdue her, had eyes only for Jacqueline. She ceased resisting and, crestfallen at the idea of having been found wanting in the presence of Sir Stephen, she repeated, this time almost in a whisper: “It’s not true, I swear it’s not true.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Not only had the divine wrath been placated through the Father’s own action in sending the Son; the punishment for sin had already been meted out. The more one emphasized Jesus’s wrath-bearing death in the sinner’s place, the less one could then ask the sinner to bear any subsequent punishment. Luther’s protest of 1517 thus kept the medieval picture of God’s wrath, but insisted that this wrath was quenched by God’s love through the death of Jesus. Exactly one hundred years earlier, a traveling monk called Poggio Bracchiolini discovered a previously lost manuscript of Lucretius’s first-century BC masterpiece, De Rerum Natura, which forms an elegant, poetic exposition of the Epicureanism that would then make such an impact on Europe. Bracchiolini too was reacting against the medieval vision of an angry God. But whereas Luther kept the wrath of God and declared that the wrath had fallen on Jesus, Bracchiolini followed the ancient Epicureans in proposing that God, or the gods, were a long way away and were unconcerned with human affairs and certainly not angry about anything in our world. Both were reacting against the same medieval excess, Bracchiolini by denying it altogether and Luther by interposing Jesus and his death. Both have had a long and continuing influence in Western culture. The other great Reformation protest was against the medieval Roman Catholic doctrine of the Mass. In particular, the Reformers objected strongly to the idea that the priest at the altar was sacrificing Jesus all over again, thus making the benefit of his atoning death available for all those who witnessed the event. (Watching Mass being celebrated was deemed to be as effective as actually receiving Communion, if not more so.) Here again the doctrine of penal substitution provided a strong, sharp answer: Jesus died in our place once for all, ephapax (as Paul puts it in Rom. 6:10); as a result, the priest could not be sacrificing Jesus again in the Mass. The Mass was thus vilified as doing blasphemous violence to the unique, one-off self-offering of Jesus by attempting to add to the “finished work of Christ” some extra “works” on the part of the congregation, or at least the celebrant. This question thus became further muddled as the specter of “justification by works” loomed up behind, enabling the Reformers to accuse their Roman opponents of not only adding to the already complete sacrifice of Christ, but also bringing their own “works” into play to supplement what Jesus had already achieved. The question of whether medieval Catholics actually taught all this is beside the point, since the Reformers certainly thought they did. As with purgatory, there is also more than a hint that there are social and cultural forces at work behind the theology as people came to reject the power exercised, through the Mass, by the clergy.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Once again I had played the balloon-headed Charlie Brown trying to kick the football that Lucy invariably pulls away at the last second. By the time our next session rolled around, my anger matched Irene’s. That session was less like therapy than a wrestling match. It was the most serious fight we had had. The accusations gushed out of her: “You’ve given up on me! You want me to compromise by killing vital parts of myself!” I made no pretense of empathizing or understanding her position, “I’m sick and tired,” I told her, “of your minefields. I’m sick and tired of your setting tests for me that more often than not I fail. And of all the tests, this is the dirtiest, most treacherous one. “We have too much work to do, Irene,” I finished, taking a line from her dead husband. “We don’t have time for this bullshit.” It was one of our best hours. At its end (after, of course, another skirmish about ending on time and her accusing me of throwing her out of the office) our therapeutic alliance was stronger than ever. Neither in my textbooks nor in my supervision or classroom teaching would I ever dream of advising a student to tangle angrily with a patient; yet such a session invariably moved Irene forward. It was the metaphor of the black ooze that guided these efforts. By making contact, emotional contact, by wrestling with her (I speak figuratively, though there were times when I felt we were on the brink of a physical struggle), I was proving again and again that the black ooze was a fiction that neither tarred, nor repelled, nor endangered me. Irene clung so strongly to the metaphor that she was convinced each time I approached her rage that I would either abandon her or die. Finally, in an effort to demonstrate once and for all that her anger would neither destroy me nor drive me away, I laid down a new therapy ground rule: “Whenever you really explode at me, we will automatically schedule an extra appointment that week.” This act proved highly effective; in retrospect, I consider it inspired. The black-ooze metaphor was particularly powerful because it was overdetermined: it was a single image that satisfied and expressed several different unconscious dynamics. Grief rage was one important meaning. But there were others; for example, the belief that she was poisonous, contaminated, fatally jinxed. “Anyone,” she said to me one session, “who sets foot in the black ooze is signing their own death warrant.” “So you dare not love again because you can offer only a Medusa-love that would destroy anyone who approaches you?” “All the men I’ve loved have died—my husband, my father, my brother, my godson, and Sandy, whom I’ve not yet told you about—a mentally ill boyfriend who twenty years ago committed suicide.” “Coincidence again!

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  “There’s plenty to do here if you kids would just take a little initiative,” Dwight said. “When I was growing up we didn’t have all the things you kids have, we didn’t have record players, we didn’t have TVs, all of that, but we were never bored. We were never bored. We used our imaginations. We read the classics. We played musical instruments. There is absolutely no excuse for a kid to be bored, not in my book there isn’t. You show me a bored kid and I’ll show you a lazy kid.” My mother glanced at Dwight, then turned back to Norma and Skipper. “You’ll be graduating this year, right?” she said to Skipper. He nodded. “And you have another year,” she said to Norma. “One more year,” Norma said. “One more year and watch my dust.” “How’s the school here?” “They don’t have one. Just a grade school. We go to Concrete.” “Concrete?” “Concrete High,” Norma said. “That’s the name of a town?” “We passed it on the way up,” Dwight said. “Concrete.” “Concrete,” my mother repeated. “It’s a few miles downriver,” Dwight said. “Forty miles,” Norma said. “Come off it,” Dwight said. “It’s not that far.” “Thirty-nine miles,” Skipper said. “Exactly. I measured it on the odometer.” “What’s the difference!” Dwight said. “You’d bellyache just as much if the goddamned school was next door. If all you can do is complain, I would thank you to just stow it. Just kindly stow it.” Dwight kept looking back as he talked. His lower lip was curled out, and his bottom teeth showed. The car wandered the road. “I’m in fifth grade,” Pearl said. Nobody answered her.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  At that moment, I suggest—and this is one of the main arguments of the present book—those who read the text in this new way are in imminent danger of exchanging the ancient Israelite covenantal context of the notion of redemptive suffering for a very different context, namely, a pagan one. And however much a generous reading of the ancient non-Jewish world may discern in it several true signposts pointing toward what in retrospect turns out to be true, that is no excuse for exchanging the full biblical truth for the damaged signpost. This dilemma emerges in the two contexts in postbiblical Jewish literature where the theme of Isaiah 53—of suffering as the means, not merely the occasion, of forgiveness and restoration—is invoked. These reflect the time of intense suffering in the 160s BC, when the small and struggling Jewish nation was overrun by the energetically paganizing Syrians. Those who died in that struggle were hailed as martyrs, and in the retelling of their stories we find passages that might be echoing Isaiah 53 or might be echoing the pagan stories of vicarious death. Here is the seventh of seven brothers confronting Antiochus Epiphanes not only with warnings of divine punishment, but also with a claim about the redemptive value of the martyrs’ sufferings: We are suffering because of our own sins. And if our living Lord is angry for a little while, to rebuke and discipline us, he will again be reconciled with his own servants. . . . I, like my brothers, give up body and life for the laws of our ancestors, appealing to God to show mercy soon to our nation and by trials and plagues to make you confess that he alone is God, and through me and my brothers to bring to an end the wrath of the Almighty that has justly fallen on our whole nation. (2 Macc. 7:32–33, 37–38) The implicit echo of Isaiah 53 is not the only biblical allusion here. The “trials and plagues” that this young martyr invokes upon the pagan tyrant send us back to the story of Moses and Pharaoh, in which God inflicted “plagues” on the Egyptians as the prelude to the dramatic rescue of Israel from slavery. That, presumably, is part of the point. When Israel is enslaved and suffering, what is required is a new Exodus. The Maccabean martyrs look back to the first Exodus in order to suggest that it is time for a second one. But this new Exodus will have to do something extra, something the first one had not. It will have to deal with the sins (v. 32) because of which the Jewish people are suffering. The new Passover, if and when it comes, will also have to be the ultimate and exile-ending “dealing with sins.” This martyr at least is claiming that his own suffering will be part of that. Perhaps, he suggests, it will complete that process.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  The topic was raised by those he calls, rather nastily, “false believers secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might enslave us” (2:4). Had Jerusalem decided in favor of circumcision for gentile Christians, Paul’s mandate from God would have been negated. You can still sense his shock throughout all of 2:1–14. Apart from his specific no-concession mood, what he said to Peter at Antioch was not actually in line with his own basic theology. We leave that for now, but return to this problem of the eucharistic meal in mixed Christian communities—not at Antioch, but in Rome—in Chapter 6 and find there a very different solution from a not so angry Paul. But, in any case, the result at Antioch was a serious breach between Paul, the other apostles, and “even Barnabas” that inevitably and necessarily left Paul free to go westward to the Aegean Sea on his own independent mission based primarily at Corinth and Ephesus. He went not only independently from Barnabas, but differently from Barnabas. And the difference was not just in geography, but in strategy. PAUL’S URBAN MISSIONARY STRATEGY Paul was a city person, and the whole of his activity as an apostle was in cities. In this respect he was very different from Jesus, who grew up in a small village and whose public activity was rural, concentrated in villages and small towns in the countryside. Though Paul moved through rural areas as he traveled from city to city, there is no indication in Acts or his letters that he ever sought to make converts in the villages and towns through which he passed. Paul not only focused on cities but mostly on cities that were capitals of Roman provinces: from birth in Tarsus of Cilicia, through experience in Antioch of Syria, and on to Thessalonica of Macedonia, Corinth of Achaia, and Ephesus of Asia Minor. What, then, was life like in those cities, even—or especially—in those large provincial capital cities? Paul’s cities. Travelers today in search of the past in the Mediterranean world see ruins that are “monumental”—structures that have survived for two thousand years: streets, sewers, and arches; temples, forums, and porticoes; aqueducts, fountains, and baths; odeons, theaters, amphitheaters, and hippodromes. In some cities, villas—homes of the wealthy and powerful—have also survived. We see the grandeur of the past, and it is impressive. But we do not see how “ordinary” people lived. Their buildings and neighborhoods are gone, too poorly constructed to endure centuries of time. Few visual cues of their existence help today’s travelers to imagine their lives. Indeed, it is easy to forget they were ever there. Yet it was among ordinary urban people that Paul lived and carried out his apostleship. The “ordinary” people of that world were the vast majority of the urban population. They were the urban working class.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Murat became irritated, fussed through the essay, and at last found what had made him angry enough to grade it so low. Ben Smaan had written of the “admirable” Robespierre and the “Age of the Enlightenment” when the one was branded in our class as the most bloodthirsty of tyrants and the other as the darkest period in the history of France. This quarrel did not concern me personally; but Murat’s injustice and the solidarity that I wished to express toward Ben Smaan as well as the huge admiration I felt for the French Revolution, perhaps also the expectation that I too would get an unfair grade, made me intervene impulsively and brutally, as always when justice seemed to me in danger. “A gang of degenerate bandits, and the most shameful period in the history of France,” Murat repeated firmly. “The most generous and the most honorable!” I shouted. My voice came from the back of the classroom and was veiled with emotion in spite of myself. “Who shouted?” he asked, surprised and angry. “I did!” I replied in the same passionate tone that revealed that I was ready for anything. My intention to provoke him was obviously insolent. Usually, the pupils took advantage of the slightest chance to laugh and imitate animal cries. Murat would then treat them as idiots and pretend to be angry while the class laughed all the more at his tenderness toward his pupils. This time, however, they all felt that something uncommon had occurred and, in their surprise, were silent. Murat, for once, was up against a real show of fervor and no longer knew what to answer. He merely muttered: “All right, all right, shut up!” He then quickly went on to criticize the next composition. Ben Smaan smiled at me and waved his plump hand. I realized I had been fortunate. Murat had not insisted. Had he not retreated, I would never have been able to control myself. During the recess, Ben Smaan joined me and said he wished to talk with me alone. I said I was prepared to listen, but he frowned with his eyes almost closed in his broad face and said mysteriously that he would rather we went somewhere out of the way. So we made a date to meet in town. He then told me he was the local secretary of a political youth movement composed only of native Africans and asked me to join it. I was delighted but a little embarrassed. Of course, I suffered from my growing awareness that I was alien in the eyes of Europeans, but it had not yet occurred to me to make a move toward the Moslems for I thought of this road as closed. “Precisely,” said Ben Smaan, “that is something new in our program: we would like to have some Jews too, so as to express the aspirations of the whole Tunisian nation.” “But are we a part of the nation?”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  How we are saved is closely linked to the question of what we are saved for. This had a particularly sharp focus at the time of the Reformation. In sixteenth-century Europe, a great many people worried a lot about the doctrine of purgatory, the belief that after death faithful Christians could expect to spend time in a place of punishment and purgation where sins were finally dealt with before they might finally enter heaven. Luther’s early protest was fueled by his angry rejection of the corrupt practice whereby people could buy “indulgences” that would allow relatives or friends to get out of purgatory, or at least get through it more quickly. Purgatory gripped the imagination of late medieval Europe to a degree almost impossible to imagine today. The rich, and not least the royal, often left copious sums of money to fund “chantries” in which prayers would be offered for their souls in purgatory. Behind all this was the great heaven-and-hell scheme of Western eschatology, which we see in literary works like those of Dante and in majestic visual art like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes. Bodily resurrection remained the official dogma, but the late medieval period more and more envisaged the ultimate promised future not as a new creation, but as the picture of “heaven” common to this day in Western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant. Many dictionaries still define “eschatology” using the terms “death, judgment, heaven, and hell,” often known as the “Four Last Things.” It is possible to combine this with a belief in ultimate new creation, but most people who have been taught the traditional fourfold scheme don’t even realize that this alternate schema is an option, far less that it is the biblical option. The Reformers by and large rejected not only the abuses connected with purgatory (selling indulgences and the like), but the doctrine itself. In part this may have been because they saw this teaching being used as a weapon by the clerical elite to maintain social and dogmatic control. But their objections were set out in robustly theological and biblical terms. They insisted that the Christian soul went immediately to heaven after death. (Some tried to combine this with the New Testament’s sense of a time lag before the ultimate new creation, teaching that the soul might in some sense “sleep” in between bodily death and bodily resurrection; but the point, again, was “no purgatory.”) These issues remained unresolved and are not relevant to our present discussion, except as the context for the truly important thing. The rejection of purgatory precipitated a fresh emphasis from a new angle on an interpretation of the cross that echoed, but also differed from, that of Anselm.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Paul’s counsel near the end of the section suggests an additional problem: “So then, my brothers and sisters, when you come together to eat, wait for one another” (11:33). The implication is clear: some arrived early and began to eat and drink at once. Who would arrive early? Not those who had to work for a living, but those who had leisure—that is, the wealthy and powerful. And so eating together a shared meal framed by the breaking of the bread and the passing of the cup was not happening. Thus the way the Lord’s Supper was practiced at Corinth reflected the social hierarchy and inequality of that world. This is what Paul protests against, and this is the context for his warning: Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves. (11:27–29) In some Christian denominations, the words about partaking “in an unworthy manner” have been understood to mean in an unworthy state of repentance, and “without discerning the body” as referring to failing to discern the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine. But in Paul’s context, something simpler and at the same time more important is meant: “discerning the body” refers to the community as the body of Christ. The way the Lord’s Supper was being practiced at Corinth denied the equality of life “in Christ,” life in the body and Spirit of Christ. Instead, it perpetuated the gulf between rich and poor and conformed life “in Christ” to the normalcy of this world. Instead, “in Christ” everybody is to be at the same table and eat the same meal. Don’t literalize this—it’s not about monotony of food, though it precludes monopoly of food. Within the community, everybody is equal and should get the same—it is a share meal, a sharing of God’s stuff, of God’s earth. Everybody gets enough. This is the supper of the Lord. HIERARCHY AND SPIRITUAL GIFTS IN CORINTH The community in Corinth was divided not only by hierarchy and inequality based on material wealth and power. Some were also claiming superiority based on the possession of particular spiritual gifts. The issue was speaking in tongues, or glossolalia, to use the technical term. Some saw glossolalia as a public manifestation of having received the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, and therefore as evidence of spiritual superiority. The problem and Paul’s response take up the next three chapters of his first letter to Corinth, 12–14.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  As I had never played except with my sister, I stayed away from the others, feeling vaguely ill at ease and hostile. All around these savage trespassers, the whole street remained silent and deserted, expressing its disapproval of their strange liveliness in the heart of my own kingdom. Suddenly, the game stopped because of a nigat, a draw. All the players uttered one single yell in a single clear-cut peal, after which they relaxed, joking and jeering before deciding to play another game. Chouchane, the tailor, and Fraji were both considered too weak and were refused by both teams, ruthlessly sacrificed. As for myself, I approved this decision. Without wasting time, the game began again, a bit further away from the garbage cart. Chouchane and Fraji, both disappointed, continued to gravitate around the stakes of the players, although the latter kept a watchful eye on them, and had to content themselves with kibitzing and giving advice that nobody followed. Fraji finally lost interest in the battle and, having nothing better to do, became aware of the presence of the garbage cart, pushed it forward with one hand, and then took hold of the two shafts. The mountain of refuse began to tremble, with avalanches of green and red vegetable peel rolling down its sides. Fraji then discovered the real use of this godsend: he set his right foot on the hub of one wheel, grasped the rail of the cart with the palms of his hands, and began to climb the whole edifice. Scarcely hesitating, he dug his little legs deep into the rotting garbage and stood up, staring all around and quite surprised at what he saw: himself towering above us all, above the whole world, on a many-colored throne made of butcher’s wrapping paper, egg shells, and vegetable peelings. The meat flies, all green and gold as they rose disturbed, made a moving halo around him, glistening in the sun. Then he raised his hands to the sky and exclaimed, proud as a crowing cock and convinced of the truth of his claim: “I’m the king of the castle, I’m the king of the castle!” The other urchins paid little attention to this claim, all of them tense in the moment of silence that comes before the apricot kernels are thrown. Only Chouchane was watching him and exclaimed: “Yes, you’re king of the outhouse!” As for me, I was furious at hearing this dirty little rascal, to whom we actually gave food and who wore my old clothes, utter such impertinences. I was indeed the only uncontested king of the whole alley, and Kalla would have been able to testify to the validity of my claim had she not been away at the bath house. So I approached him, full of noble anger, and placed my hand, the heavy hand of the owner, on his sleeve, on the sleeve of my own sweater:

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Hitler develop his atomic bomb before we developed ours, and we would all be speaking German today. Mr. Mitchell relied heavily on audiovisual aids in teaching his classes. We saw the same movies many times, combat documentaries and FBI-produced cautionary tales about high-school kids tricked into joining communist cells in Anytown, U.S.A. On our final examination Mr. Mitchell asked, “What is your favorite amendment?” We were ready for this question, and all of us gave the correct answer—“The Right to Bear Arms”—except for a girl who answered “Freedom of Speech.” For this impertinence she failed not only the question but the whole test. When she argued that she could not logically be marked wrong on this question, Mr. Mitchell blew up and ordered her out of the classroom. She complained to the principal but nothing came of it. Most of the kids in the class thought she was being a smarty-pants, and so did I. Mr. Mitchell also taught PE. He had introduced boxing to the school, and every year he organized a smoker where hundreds of people paid good money to watch us boys beat the bejesus out of each other. Miss Houlihan taught speech. She had adopted some years back a theory of elocution that had to do with “reaching down” for words rather than merely saying them, as if they were already perfectly formed in our stomachs and waiting to be brought up like trout from a stock pond. Instead of using our lips we were supposed to simply let the words “escape.” This was hard to get the hang of. Miss Houlihan believed in getting the first thing right before moving on to the next, so we spent most of the year grunting “Hiawatha” in a choral arrangement she herself had devised. She liked it so much that in the spring she took us to a speech tournament in Mount Vernon. The competition was held outside, and it started to rain while we sat declaiming in The Great Circle. We wore Indian costumes made from burlap sacks that had once held onions. When the burlap got wet it started to stink. We were not the only ones to notice. Miss Houlihan wouldn’t let us quit. She walked around behind the circle, whispering, “Reach down, reach down.” In the end we were disqualified for keeping time on a tom-tom. Horseface Greeley taught shop. At the introductory class for each group of freshmen it was his custom to drop a fifty-pound block of iron on his foot. He did this as an attention-getter and to show off his Tuff-Top shoes, which had reinforced steel uppers. He thought we should all wear Tuff-Tops. We couldn’t buy them in the stores but we could order them through him. When I was in my second year at Concrete an impetuous freshman tried to catch the block of iron

• From White Oleander (1999)

  She’d had her revenge, she had won, but it was like she didn’t even know it. She was drifting outside the limit of all reason, where the next stop was light-years away through nothing but darkness. How lovingly she arranged the dark leaves, the white blooms. A POLICE OFFICER showed up at our apartment. The officer, Inspector Ramirez, informed her that Barry was accusing her of breaking and entering and of trying to poison him. She was completely calm. “Barry is terribly angry with me,” she said, posing in the doorway, her arms crossed. “I ended our relationship several weeks ago, and he just can’t let go of it. He’s obsessed with me. He even tried to break into this apartment. This is my daughter, Astrid, she can tell you what happened.” I shrugged. I didn’t like this. It was going way too far. My mother kept going without missing a comma. “The neighbors even called the police that night. You must have a record of it. And now he’s accusing me of breaking into his house? That poor man, really, he’s not all that attractive, it must be hard for him.” Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway. Oh Inspector Ramirez, her eyes said, you’re a good-looking man, how could you understand someone as desperate as Barry Kolker? After he left, how she laughed. THE NEXT TIME we saw Barry was at the Rose Bowl Flea Market, where he liked to shop for ugly gag gifts for his friends. My mother wore a hat that dappled her face with light. He saw her and turned away quickly, fear plain as billboards, but then he thought again, turned back, smiled at us. “A change of tactic,” she whispered. “Here he comes.” He walked right over to us, a papier-mâché Oscar in his hands. “Congratulations on your performance with Ramirez,” he said, and held it out to her. “Best actress of the year.” “I don’t know what you mean,” my mother said. She was holding my hand, squeezing it too tight, but her face was smiling and relaxed. “Sure you do,” he said. He tucked Oscar under his arm. “But that’s not why I came over. I thought we could bury the hatchet. Look, I’ll admit I went too far calling the cops. I know I was an asshole, but for Christ’s sake, you tried to destroy the better part of a year’s work. Of course my agent had a preliminary draft, thank God, but even so. Why don’t we just call it a draw?” My mother smiled, shifted to the other foot. She was waiting for him to do something, say something. “It’s not like I don’t respect you as a person,” he said. “And as a writer. We all know you’re a great poet. I’ve even talked you up at some of the magazines.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Actually, at the level of mere speech and challenged as I was, I would have said anything. I couldn’t see immediately what this would all imply if acted out in life. Yes, I told them, I rejected everything that anyone wanted to impose upon me gratuitously; the vanity of these practices seemed to me quite obvious. Great problems, true values, and a serious philosophy of life were elsewhere; I found them each day at school, in books, in literature, philosophy, and politics. Were we heading toward a Socialist society? Is poetry rooted in mysticism? Would the machine age bring social justice? Are art and morality bound together? Here were problems that were far more noble than whether one should ride a streetcar on the Sabbath. It exasperated me that I must, in spite of myself, concern myself with absurdly small matters, be involved in sacred triviality. My mother put her finger to her forehead, rolled her eyes, and simulated intense joy. This signified that I was either joking or insane. That was clear. But it was wrong of me to have carried this thing so far on a Sabbath, especially in front of my father, a good but irritable man. “Shut up,” she said. “You’re beginning to get everything mixed up!” That was her final statement, meaning that I was delirious, that I couldn’t distinguish one thing from another, one value from the next. In her hierarchical universe, this was the worst folly. My father hesitated. Should I go on talking? What was there left to lose? Ignoring my mother’s sideplay and her efforts to save the situation, my father brought out his final test: “I suppose you wouldn’t even circumcise your sons!” I was unable to give tit for tat. I hesitated. Not that I didn’t want to shout: yes, yes, yes! But I was impressed by the gravity of their attitudes and an awareness of their horror. Deeply upset, my mother and the children were silent. My father waited, bewildered by the turn in the situation. “I don’t know,” I muttered at last. We stopped there, my father certainly regretting that he had pushed me so far, and I troubled by my temerity and my ambiguous compromise. My mother was relieved that the interlude was over. Nothing could destroy her animal attachment to her children; although she no longer understood me, this did not bother her, no more than if I had been deaf or blind or dumb. She felt I belonged to her as chicks do to the hen: I was an extension of her own body. The anger and sadness of my father were clear-sighted. We had other channels of communication, but he saw that more of them were being condemned each day.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  The bed, Artemis, and the rest of the room had vanished. Merges stopped hissing. He looked up at Ernest, spittle dripping from his fangs, his muscles tensed. Ernest reached into his overnight bag. “Won’t you have something to eat, Merges?” he said, opening some of the dinner containers he had carried upstairs. Merges peered cautiously into the first container. “Five Mushroom Beef! I hate mushrooms. That’s why she always makes them. That chanterelle ragout!” He uttered these last words in a high-pitched, mocking singsong, then repeated them: “Chanterelle ragout! Chanterelle ragout!” “Here, here,” Ernest said in the soothing drone he used sometimes in therapy sessions. “Let me pick out the beef pieces for you. Oh, my God, I am so sorry! I could have gotten the whole baked cod. Or the Peking Duck. Even the Hunan Meatballs. Perhaps the Pork Shue Mai. Or the Beggar’s Chicken. Or the Ming’s Beef. Or the—” “All right, all right,” Merges snarled. He swiped at the chunks of beef and devoured them in a single gulp. Ernest droned on: “Or I could have gotten the Seafood Delight, the salted shrimp, the whole roasted crab, the—” “You could have, you could have, you could have, but you didn’t, did you? And even if you had, then so what? Is that what you think? That some stale scraps would redress the wrong? That I would settle for leftovers? That I am nothing but brute appetite?” Merges and Ernest stared silently at each other for a moment. Then Merges nodded toward the container with the Rolling Chicken and Cilantro in Lettuce Cups. “And what’s in there?” “It’s called Rolling Chicken. Delicious. Here, let me pick out the chicken for you.” “No, leave it be,” said Merges, batting the container out of Ernest’s hand. “I like the green stuff. I come from a family of Bavarian grass eaters. Hard to find good grass that’s not soaked in dog piss.” Merges gobbled down the cilantro and chicken, then licked the lettuce cups clean. “Not bad. So you could’ve gotten roast crab?” “I only wish I had, but as it was, I got too much meat. Turns out Artemis is a vegan.” “Vegan?” “A vegetarian who eats no animal products at all—not even dairy products.” “So she’s stupid as well as a murdering bitch. And I remind you again that you’re stupid too if you think you’ll redress the wrong by courting my stomach.” “No, Merges, I don’t think that. But I fully understand why you’d be suspicious of me or anyone who approaches you in a friendly fashion. You haven’t been treated well in your life.” “Lives—not life. I’ve had eight of them, and every one, without exception, has ended the same way—in unspeakable cruelty and murder. Look at the last one! Artemis murdered me!

• From White Oleander (1999)

  If I had a father who worked nights for the railroad, I might have had a mother who would listen for the click of the door when he came home, and I would hear her quiet voice, their muffled laughter through the thin walls of the house. How soft their voices would be, and sweet, like pigeons brooding under a bridge. If I were a poet, that’s what I’d write about. People who worked in the middle of the night. Men who loaded trains, emergency room nurses with their gentle hands. Night clerks in hotels, cabdrivers on graveyard, waitresses in all-night coffee shops. They knew the world, how precious it was when a person remembered your name, the comfort of a rhetorical question, “How’s it going, how’s the kids?” They knew how long the night was. They knew the sound life made as it left. It rattled, like a slamming screen door in the wind. Night workers lived without illusions, they wiped dreams off counters, they loaded freight. They headed back to the airport for one last fare. Under the bed, a darker current wove itself into the night. My mother’s unread letters, fluid with lies, shifted and heaved, like the debris of an enormous shipwreck that continued to be washed ashore years after the liner went down. I would allow no more words. From now on, I only wanted things that could be touched, tasted, the scent of new houses, the buzz of wires before rain. A river flowing in moonlight, trees growing out of concrete, scraps of brocade in a fifty-cent bin, red geraniums on a sweatshop window ledge. Give me the way rooftops of stucco apartments piled up forms in the afternoon like late surf, something without a spin, not a self-portrait in water and wind. Give me the boy playing electric guitar, my foster home bed at the end of Ripple Street, and the shape of Yvonne and her baby that was coming. She was the hills of California under mustard and green, tawny as lions in summer. Across the room, Yvonne cried out. Her pillow fell on the floor. I got it for her. It was spongy with sweat. She sweated so much at night, I sometimes had to help her change the sheets. I put the pillow behind her dark hair, pushed the soaked strands from her face. She was hot as a steaming load of wet laundry. The guitar unraveled a song I could only occasionally recognize as “So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star.” “Astrid,” Yvonne whispered. “Listen,” I said. “Someone’s playing guitar.” “I had the worst dream,” she mumbled. “People kept stealing my stuff. They took my horse.” Her felted paper horse, white with gold paper trappings and red silk fringe, sat on the dresser, front leg raised, neck curved into an arch that echoed the frightened curve of her eyebrows. “It’s still there,” I said, putting my hand on her cheek.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “No; I disagree. You’re totally overlooking the training of therapists! That’s what training in my field is all about—to acquire sensitivity, empathy—to be able to enter the world of another, to experience what the patient experiences.” I was irritated all right. And I had learned not to hold back. We worked much better together when I just cut loose with my feelings. Irene could come into my office so depressed she could hardly speak. But once we tangled about something, she inevitably became enlivened. I knew I was assuming Jack’s role here. He was the only one ever to stand up to her. Her icy demeanor was daunting to others (her surgery residents referred to her as “the Queen”), but Jack never deferred to her. She told me he took no pains to conceal his feelings, often walking out of the room muttering, “I don’t have time for this bullshit.” Not only was I irritated at her insistence that only bereaved therapists can treat bereaved patients but I was also angry at Eric for reinforcing her view that bereavement is never-ending. That idea was part of an ongoing debate between me and Irene. I was taking a well-established, sound position, namely, that the work of mourning consists of gradually detaching oneself from the one who died and redirecting one’s energy toward others. Freud first elaborated this understanding of grief in 1915 in Mourning and Melancholia, and since then this approach has been supported by much clinical observation and empirical research. In my own research, completed just before I took on Irene’s case, every single widow and widower I studied gradually detached from the dead spouse and then reinvested in something or someone else. And that was true for even those who had had the most loving of marriages. In fact, we found strong evidence that many of the widows who had had the best marriages went through the bereavement and detachment process more easily than those who had had a deeply conflicted one. (The explanation for this paradox lay, it seemed to me, in “regret”: for those who had spent their lives married to the wrong person, bereavement was more complicated because they also had to grieve for themselves, for their many squandered years.) Since Irene’s marriage appeared to me to have been exceptionally loving and supportive, I had initially predicted a relatively uncomplicated bereavement. But Irene was highly critical of most traditional attitudes about bereavement. She hated my comments about detachment and dismissed my research out of hand: “We bereaved have learned to give the answers investigators want. We have learned that the world wants us to recover quickly and that it becomes impatient with those who cling too long to losses.”

• From White Oleander (1999)

  I heard Silvana come in, settle on her bed. “You thought you were something special, eh? Some hot shit. Now you see, you’re no better than us. You better shut up, or you’ll end up at Mac.” She tossed a dinner roll onto my blanket. I ate it in two bites. It was so good, I almost cried. “What’s Mac?” I asked. I heard her exasperated sigh. “Mac’s where they put you when you got no place to go. You won’t last a day. They’ll eat you for breakfast, white girl.” “Least they get breakfast,” I said. Silvana chuckled in the dark. A car went by outside, its headlights painting the ceiling in moving shadows. “Were you ever there?” I asked. “Nidia,” she said. “Even she said it was tough, and she’s a loca . Better shut up and take it like everybody else. Remember, eighteen and out.” But I was only fifteen. NOW KIKI TORREZ was the pet, the one who sat on Amelia’s right and ate scraps off her plate like a dog. I was both envious and disgusted. It was Kiki who turned the pages of the Argentine scrapbooks and ate butter cookies, while I washed Amelia’s dirty underwear by hand in the sink, scrubbed her bathtub, ironed her clothes and her lace-edged linens, and if I got any idea to ruin anything out of spite, then no dinner. She played us off one another. I stole a can of yams one night, and she made Kiki tell her who did it. I lost more weight, my ribs stuck out like the staves of a boat. I was beginning to understand how one human being could kill another. “You should take in girls,” I heard her tell her friend Constanza one day while I was polishing the silver. “It’s easy money. You can remodel. I’m remodeling the bathroom next.” I polished the intricate coils of the fork handle with a toothbrush. I’d done it yesterday, but she didn’t like that there was still tarnish in the crevices, so I had to redo them. I would have liked to plant it in her gut. I could have eaten her flesh raw. Finally in the darkness of March, after weeks of near-daily phone calls, Ms. Cardoza dumped me and I got a new caseworker, an angel of the Lord called Joan Peeler. She was young, wore black, and had long hair dyed rock ’n’ roll red. She had four silver rings on each hand. She looked more like a poet than a government drone. When it was time to go for our visit, I asked if she knew any coffeehouses. She took me to one on Vermont. We ducked in past a few outside tables occupied by shivering smokers trying to stay dry, and into the warm, humid interior. Immediately, I was overcome by memories, the black walls and fragrance of hippie soup, the table by the cash register cluttered with handbills and flyers and free newspapers.