Anxiety

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 History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  April 17 and 18, 1521. See Lit. in § 53. On the day after his arrival, in the afternoon at four o’clock, Luther was led by the imperial marshal, Ulrich von Pappenheim, and the herald, Caspar Sturm, through circuitous side-streets, avoiding the impassable crowds, to the hall of the Diet in the bishop’s palace where the Emperor and his brother Ferdinand resided. He was admitted at about six o’clock. There he stood, a poor monk of rustic manners, yet a genuine hero and confessor, with the fire of genius and enthusiasm flashing from his eyes and the expression of intense earnestness and thoughtfulness on his face, before a brilliant assembly such as he had never seen: the young Emperor, six Electors (including his own sovereign), the Pope’s legates, archbishops, bishops, dukes, margraves, princes, counts, deputies of the imperial cities, ambassadors of foreign courts, and a numerous array of dignitaries of every rank; in one word, a fair representation of the highest powers in Church and State.362 Several thousand spectators were collected in and around the building and in the streets, anxiously waiting for the issue. Dr. Johann von Eck,363 as the official of the Archbishop of Treves, put to him, in the name of the Emperor, simply two questions in Latin and German,—first, whether he acknowledged the books laid before him on a bench (about twenty-five in number) to be his own; and, next, whether he would retract them. Dr. Schurf, Luther’s colleague and advocate, who stood beside him, demanded that the titles of those books be read.364 This was done. Among them were some such inoffensive and purely devotional books as an exposition of the Lord’s Prayer and of the Psalms. Luther was apparently overawed by the August assembly, nervously excited, unprepared for a summary condemnation without an examination, and spoke in a low, almost inaudible tone. Many thought that he was about to collapse. He acknowledged in both languages the authorship of the books; but as to the more momentous question of recantation he humbly requested further time for consideration, since it involved the salvation of the soul, and the truth of the word of God, which was higher than any thing else in heaven or on earth. We must respect him all the more for this reasonable request, which proceeded not from want of courage, but from a profound sense of responsibility. The Emperor, after a brief consultation, granted him "out of his clemency" a respite of one day. Aleander reported on the same day to Rome, that the heretical "fool" entered laughing, and left despondent; that even among his sympathizers some regarded him now as a fool, others as one possessed by the Devil; while many looked upon him as a saint full of the Holy Spirit; but in any case, he had lost much of his reputation.365 The shrewd Italian judged too hastily. On the same evening Luther recollected himself, and wrote to a friend: I shall not retract one iota, so Christ help me."366

• From Trash (1988)

  The night before we moved Mama into MacArthur, the thunking refrain went on too long. I made myself lie still as long as I could, but eventually I sneaked out to check on Arlene. The lights were dimmed way down and the television set provided most of the illumination. The stair-stepper was set up close to the TV, and my mouth went dry when I saw my little sister. She was braced between the side rails, arms extended rigidly and head hanging down between her arms. I watched her legs as they trembled and lifted steadily, up and up and up. A shiver went through me. I tried to think of something to say, some way to get her off those steps. Arlene’s head lifted, and I saw her face. Cheeks flushed red; eyes squeezed shut. Her open mouth gasped at the cold filtered air. She was crying, but inaudibly, her features rigid with strain and tightened to a grotesque mask. She looked like some animal in a trap, tearing herself and going on—up and up and up. I watched her mouth working, curses visible on the dry cracked lips. With a low grunt, she picked up her speed and dropped her head again. I stepped back into the darkened doorway. I did not want to have to speak, did not want to have to excuse seeing her like that. It was bad enough to have seen. But I have never understood my little sister more than I did in that moment—never before realized how much alike we really were. Jack has been sober for more than a decade, something Jo and I found increasingly hard to believe. Mama boasted of how proud she was of him. Her Jack didn’t go to AA or do any of those programs people talk about. Her Jack did it on his own. “Those AA people—they ask forgiveness,” Jo said once. “They make amends.” She cackled at the idea, and I smiled. Jack asking forgiveness was about as hard to imagine as him staying sober. For years we teased each other, “You think it will last?” Then in unison, we would go, “Naaa!” Neither of us can figure out how it has lasted, but Jack has stayed sober, never drinking. Of course, he also never made amends. “For what?” he said. For what? “I did the best I could with all those girls,” Jack told the doctor, the night Arlene was carried into the emergency room raving and kicking. It was the third and last time she mixed vodka and sleeping pills, and only a year or so after Jack first got sober, the same year I was working up in Atlanta and could fly down on short notice. Jo called me from the emergency room and said, “Get here fast, looks like she an’t gonna make it this time.”

• From Trash (1988)

  “Well . . .” She’d hesitated, then shrugged. “No more than working for a living and taking care of my mother.” Margaret works as the head teller at a midtown bank, a job that’s a little like living on the firing line in a small-arms tournament. She spends her weekends picking up after her mother, a beautiful but prematurely senile woman whose four married children have left her to Margaret to nurse and protect. “Mama shit on that blue chintz couch again last week, and you know how embarrassing that is for her. Took me three hours to get it even half clean. I’m thinking I may have to re-cover it, but then I suppose she’ll just have another accident. The doctor said I should have the furniture covered in plastic, that it’s just gonna get worse, but damn, I can’t do that to her. It took her so long to get some nice things, and she loves them so.” I didn’t tell her what I thought, that mostly Mama didn’t notice much of what she sat on anymore. It’s taken Margaret years to be able to afford to buy her mother the things they both always wanted, and it would break Margaret’s heart to give any of it up. Instead I’d changed the subject with a story about my mama’s attempts to get flowers to grow in her swampy yard. Margaret and I both know that some time in the next year she’s gonna have to give up and put her mama in a hospital of some kind. It’s one of the things neither of us discusses with Paula. If Paula were to make one of her righteous comments about Margaret’s mother and the wisdom of nursing homes, Margaret might do something sudden and terrible. “I only hope you know what you’re doing.” Paula slaps her glass down and glares at Margaret and me. For a moment I’ve lost the thread of the conversation, something I’ve been doing a lot lately. The fact is I have been drinking too much, and not sleeping and not eating, and half the time I can’t quite keep up with what’s going on around me. It’s as if I wander away in my mind. Everything someone says reminds me of something someone else said, and I never get around to paying attention to the here and now. I’ve even gotten lost on the way to work, missed my subway stop, and took the whole day off as a result. This time I decide to pull myself together. Paula is looking angry, and Margaret is looking confused. I shrug in Paula’s direction and fish a piece of ice out of my water glass to rub across the back of my neck.

• From Trash (1988)

  “A glass of water,” she said. She leaned over the table to line up her closing shots. I brought her a glass of water. “You’re good,” I told her, wanting her to talk to me about how she had learned to play pool, anything but family and all this stuff I so much did not want to think about. “Children.” She stared at me again. “What about children?” There was something in her face then that waited, as if no question were more important, as if she knew the only answer I could give. Enough, I told myself, and got up without a word to get myself that can of Pabst. I did not look in her eyes. I walked into the kitchen on feet that felt suddenly unsteady and tender. Behind me, I heard her slide the cue stick along the rim of the table and then draw it back to set up another shot. Play it out, I cursed to myself, just play it out and leave me alone. Everything is so simple for you, so settled. Make babies. Grow a garden. Handle some man like he’s just another child. Let everything come that comes, die that dies; let everything go where it goes. I drank straight from the can and watched her through the doorway. All my uncles were drunks, and I was more like them than I had ever been like my aunts. Aunt Alma started talking again, walking around the table, measuring shots and not even looking in my direction. “You remember when y’all lived out on Greenlake Road? Out on that dirt road where that man kept that old egg-busting dog? Your mama couldn’t keep a hen to save her life till she emptied a shell and filled it again with chicken shit and baby piss. Took that dog right out of himself when he ate it. Took him right out of the taste for hens and eggs.” She stopped to take a deep breath, sweat glittering on her lip. With one hand she wiped it away, the other going white on the pool cue. “I still had Annie then. Lord, I never think about her anymore.” I remembered then the last child she had borne, a tiny girl with a heart that fluttered with every breath, a baby for whom the doctors said nothing could be done, a baby they swore wouldn’t see six months. Aunt Alma had kept her in an okra basket and carried her everywhere, talking to her one minute like a kitten or a doll and the next minute like a grown woman. Annie had lived to be four, never outgrowing the vegetable basket, never talking back, just lying there and smiling like a wise old woman, dying between a smile and a laugh while Aunt Alma never interrupted the story that had almost made Annie laugh.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  Wilhelm and my stepfather, about the moon. He walked around me as I talked and got out my paints. He was high on possibilities, on hope, beer, and smoke. He reminded me that he had come over to take me to the dance at the canteen. “No!” I told him. “No, I can’t. Today I made a promise to myself, and I can’t risk getting sent home. I need to paint.” The incantations of the Doors wound through the campus and through the door of the studio, tempting me. “You’re running away from yourself,” he said. “You’re hiding from reality. Let’s go! Besides, I need you for courage to check somebody out for me. Aieeeee.” I knew he meant Lewis. And when I thought of Lewis, I remembered Lupita and the deal Clarence had going. Tonight was the deadline. I had to find Lupita and warn her before it was too late. The canteen was jammed. Herbie immediately pulled me out onto the dance floor. Dancing was like painting, like flying. Through rhythm I could travel toward the stars. Herbie and I could stay on the dance floor for hours, and if we stayed in the canteen and danced I couldn’t drink or get into any other kind of trouble. While we danced I kept my eyes on the door, looking for Lupita. We danced every dance until a Mexican song interrupted us and all the Apache girls flooded the dance floor. While they weaved back and forth to the bright music of the ranchero, Herbie bought us Cokes, and I looked around the room for Lupita. I didn’t see her anywhere. I didn’t see Clarence either. Georgette stood outside the glass doors of the entrance. She was small and alone. I watched her ask to borrow a cigarette from another student. She lit it. I remembered the night she upset the whole dorm with her panicked run from the ghost chasing her, and the big stink her roommates had caused when they demanded she move from their room. I felt sorry for the girl with the scratchy army blanket draped over her shoulders. The ghost had not reappeared, but the fear followed her. I spotted Clarence coming up out of the dark, from the direction of the ditch. He was smiling and laughing too hard, walking with Lewis. Lupita wasn’t with them. Clarence grabbed Georgette a little roughly. She smiled and melted into him, and then they came through the door and onto the dance floor, Lewis following behind them. Georgette beamed and made sure I saw her. “Where’s Lupita?” I demanded. A knot formed in my stomach. Georgette glared at me. “She’s on Venus,” said Clarence, and he and Lewis laughed. I didn’t like the sound of their sly laughter. I pulled a reluctant Herbie behind me. “We have to look for Lupita,” I urged. He slid out the door of the packed canteen with me.

• From Trash (1988)

  She looked nervous and changed the subject but let me walk her back to her office. On her desk, there was a new edition of Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages. I laid my notebook down on top of it, and took them both when I left. Malinowski was a fast read. I had that one back a day later. She was going through her date book looking for a free evening we could have dinner. But exams were coming up so soon. I smiled and nodded and backed out the door. The secretary, used to seeing me come and go, didn’t even look up. I took no other meals with professors; didn’t trust myself in their houses. But I studied their words, gestures, jokes, and quarrels to see just how they were different from me. I limited my outrage to their office shelves, working my way through their books one at a time, carefully underlining my favorite passages in dark blue ink—occasionally covering over their own faded marks. I continued to take the sociology professor’s classes but refused to stay after to talk, and when she called my name in the halls, I would just smile and keep walking. Once she sat beside me in a seminar and put her hand on the back of my neck where I was leaning back in my chair. I turned and saw she was biting her lips. I remembered her saying, “Your family is very poor, aren’t they?” I kept my face expressionless and looked forward again. That was the afternoon I made myself a pair of harem pants out of the gauze curtains from the infirmary. My parents came for graduation, Mama taking the day off from the diner, my father walking slow in his back brace. They both were bored at the lunch, uncomfortable and impatient to have the ceremony be over so we could pack my boxes in the car and leave. Mama kept pulling at the collar of my robe while waiting for the call for me to join my class. She was so nervous she kept rocking back on her heels and poked my statistics professor with her elbow as he tried to pass.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  He went to her house and found a party going on. His daughter was wrapped in blankets on the floor and could have been stepped on, he said, so he picked her up and fled with her and his mother back to Oklahoma. I thought to myself when I heard the story, I guess it’s all right for him to party because he’s a man. And he had his mother to take care of the baby. In the black-and-white photograph of his daughter, small frame houses were in the background. I determined that if he was not at the bus station to meet me, I would try to locate his mother’s house from the photograph. To find it would be difficult, as all the houses looked the same. What if I could not find the house? What if I did find him and he refused to help or denied he knew me? He met me at the bus station, giving no explanation about not writing or not having sent for me, or about the lack of a bus ticket. We immediately pawned my turquoise ring for food. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] He put me up temporarily in the living room of two of his friends. The house was filthy, with stacks of dishes and uneaten food and piles of clothes through the place. I cleaned. He brought his daughter over to me every morning for child care. She was inquisitive, talkative, and ever hyper. She could not stop moving—opened every drawer, every closet, pulling everything out. The first day she unlatched the screen door and ran down the street, laughing as I chased her. That living arrangement was for just a week. My husband-to-be was concerned about his mother finding out about me. He next attempted to hide me by putting me up at his grandmother’s house and staying there with me at night. But it is impossible to hide a pregnant woman, or anybody else, in a close Indian community in which everyone knows everyone else’s business, or thinks they do. Word got out, especially after I was seen sitting in the town square with his grandmother, who spent the crisp mornings with her friends under the eaves of the old bandstand. I enjoyed that time with them. They were the heart of the nation and made note of the current state of affairs as they watched people enter and leave the bank and the various establishments and agencies around the square. They didn’t say much, and I didn’t understand much of their Cherokee. To be included in this daily meeting under the oak trees gave me a fresh peace that was rare everywhere else. Once when my boyfriend’s grandmother got her monthly check we ate lunch at the diner across the street. I watched her unclasp her black patent leather bag and empty the basket of crackers into it to take home. I tried to duck, but my growing belly made it impossible.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Brockett frowned, and stared thoughtfully into the fire. There was something that he wanted to say to Stephen, a warning that he was longing to give, but he did not feel certain how she would take it—no wonder that wretched girl was not fit, forced to lead such a deadly dull existence! If Stephen would let him he wanted to advise, to admonish, to be brutally frank if need be. He had once been brutally frank about her work, but that had been a less delicate matter. He began to fidget with his soft, white hands, drumming on the arms of the chair with his fingers. ‘Stephen, I’ve been meaning to speak about Mary. She struck me as looking thoroughly depressed the last time I saw her—when was it? Monday. Yes, she struck me as looking thoroughly depressed.’ ‘Oh, but surely you were wrong . . .’ interrupted Stephen. ‘No, I’m perfectly sure I was right,’ he insisted. Then he said: ‘I’m going to take a big risk—I’m going to take the risk of losing your friendship.’ His voice was so genuinely regretful, that Stephen must ask him: ‘Well—what is it, Brockett?’ ‘You, my dear. You’re not playing fair with that girl; the life she’s leading would depress a mother abbess. It’s enough to give anybody the hump, and it’s going to give Mary neurasthenia!’ ‘What on earth do you mean?’

• From Trash (1988)

  Days, I went to training sessions, memorized codes, section numbers, and memo formats. Nights, I wrote my stories. I would pull out scraps of paper at work to make notes about things I wanted to write about, though most of those scraps just wound up tucked in my yellow pad. What poured out of me could not be planned or controlled; it came up like water under pressure at its own pace, pushing my fear ahead of it. By the end of the month, I’d taken to sitting on the motel roof—no longer stoned, but still writing. By then I was also writing letters to all the women I really didn’t expect to see again, explaining the things that writing my stories had made real to me. I did not intend to mail those letters, and never did. The letters themselves were stories—mostly lies—self-justifying, awkward, and desperate. I finished that month, got assigned to a distant city, put away my yellow papers, and moved—making sure no one who knew me from before could find me. I threw myself into the women’s community, fell in love every third day, and started trying to be serious about writing—poems and essays and the beginnings of stories. I even helped edit a feminist magazine. Throughout that time I told stories—mostly true stories about myself and my family and my lovers in a drawl that made them all funnier than they were. Though that was mostly a good time for me, I wrote nothing that struck me as worth the trouble of actually keeping. I did not tuck those new stories away with the yellow pads I had sealed up in a blanket box of my mother’s. I told myself the yellow pages were as raw and unworked as I felt myself to be, and the funny stories I was telling people were better, were the work of someone who was going to be a “real” writer. It was three years before I pulled out those old yellow sheets and read them, and saw how thin and self-serving my funny stories had become.

• From Trash (1988)

  “The children of the poor,” she told us, “the children of the poor have a lack of brain tissue simply because they don’t get the necessary vitamins at the proper age. It is a deficiency that cannot be made up when they are older.” A stroke of her thumb and she turned her back. I stood in the back of the room, my fingers wrapping my skull in horror. I imagined my soft brain slipping loosely in its cranial cavity shrunk by a lack of the necessary vitamins. How could I know if it wasn’t too late? Mama always said that smart was the only way out. I thought of my cousins, bigheaded, watery-eyed and stupid. Vitamin D! I became a compulsive consumer of vitamin D. Is it milk? We will drink milk, steal it if we must. Mama, make salmon stew. It’s cheap and full of vitamin D. If we can’t afford cream, then evaporated milk will do. One is as thick as the other. Sweet is expensive, but thick builds muscles in the brain. Feed me milk, feed me cream, feed me what I need to fight them. Twenty years later the doctor sat me down to tell me the secrets of my body. He had, oddly, that identical gesture, one finger on the ear and the others curled to the cheek as if he were thinking all the time. “Milk,” he announced, “that’s the problem, a mild allergy. Nothing to worry about. You’ll take calcium and vitamin D supplements and stay away from milk products. No cream, no butterfat, stay away from cheese.” I started to grin, but he didn’t notice. The finger on his ear was pointing to the brain. He had no sense of irony, and I didn’t tell him why I laughed so much. I should have known. Milk or cornbread or black-eyed peas, there had to be a secret, something we would never understand until it was too late. My brain is fat and strong, ripe with years of vitamin D, but my belly is tender and hurts me in the night. I grinned into his confusion and chewed the pink-and-gray pills he gave me to help me recover from the damage milk had done me. What would I have to do, I wondered, to be able to eat pan gravy again?

• From The Decameron (1353)

  When he heard both of them saying the same thing, Calandrino was quite certain he was ill, and asked them in tones of deep alarm: ‘What am I to do?’ So Bruno said: ‘I reckon you ought to return home, go straight to bed, keep yourself well covered up, and send a specimen of your water to Master Simone,2 who as you know is a close friend of ours. He’ll soon tell you what you have to do. We shall come with you, and if anything needs to be done, we’ll attend to it.’ So together with Nello, who now came up and joined them, they returned with Calandrino to his house, where he made his way to his bedroom, feeling as though he were on his last legs, and said to his wife: ‘Come and cover me up well; I’m feeling very poorly.’ He accordingly got into bed, and dispatched a servant-girl with a specimen of his water to Master Simone, whose surgery at that time was situated in the Mercato Vecchio, at the sign of the pumpkin. Turning to his companions, Bruno said: ‘You stay here with him, whilst I go and see what the doctor has to say, and fetch him back here if necessary.’ ‘Ah, yes, there’s a good fellow!’ said Calandrino. ‘Go to him and find out for me how matters stand. Goodness knows what’s going on inside my poor stomach. I feel awful.’ Bruno therefore set off for the doctor’s, arriving there ahead of the girl carrying the specimen, and explained to Master Simone what they were up to. So that when the girl turned up with the specimen, Master Simone examined it and said to her: ‘Go and tell Calandrino that he is to keep himself nice and warm. I shall be coming round straightway to tell him what’s wrong with him, and explain what he has to do.’ The girl delivered the message, and shortly afterwards the Master arrived with Bruno, sat down at Calandrino’s bedside, and proceeded to take his pulse. Then after a while, in the hearing of Calandrino’s wife, who was present in the room, he said: ‘Look here, Calandrino, speaking now as your friend, I’d say that the only thing wrong with you is that you are pregnant.’ When Calandrino heard this, he began to howl with dismay, and turning to his wife, he exclaimed: ‘Ah, Tessa, this is your doing! You will insist on lying on top. I told you all along what would happen.’ When she heard him say this, Calandrino’s wife, who was a very demure sort of person, turned crimson with embarrassment, and lowering her gaze, left the room without uttering a word. Meanwhile Calandrino continued to wail and moan, saying:

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  They didn’t want a girl with a ghost in their room, and neither did anyone else. My room had an extra bed, and it was decided that she would move to my room. That night and for many nights after, I stayed alert in the dark and didn’t sleep, anticipating the ghost’s return. Georgette’s books were all over the floor. Her plastic beauty case overflowed with makeup and polishes, flooding the counter over the drawers that we were supposed to share. For hours she scraped and rubbed off chipped polish on her nails, then reapplied numerous thick coats, smelling up the room with polish and acetone. She left used dabs of cotton and underwear scattered on the floor. At first I was amused by this alien creature, and told myself that she had made herself her own canvas. But she was getting on my nerves. I spent more and more time in the painting studio or sat on the fire escape, listening to music. One afternoon when I came back to my room from classes, I couldn’t hear anything for the whine blasting from Georgette’s favorite country station. I had just been summoned to meet with the head dorm matron, Mrs. Wilhelm, in half an hour, and after the bare escape I had every reason to be concerned. I had to make a plan about what I would do, where I would run if I got kicked out. “Hey, I need that!” Georgette gestured to me with her nail polish applicator as I turned down the volume, almost muting it. “I had a rough day.” “Peace,” I said, and made the peace sign with my fingers. I turned up the music a notch, then opened the windows to let in some air. I took a deep breath to relieve my panic. I had to get my thoughts straight before going into the meeting with the dorm matron. I had to have a plan. I couldn’t go back to my family, I would tell her. I would kill myself first. I thought about killing myself. Once when the pressure was too much, when the stepfather was bearing down on me, I sneaked a kitchen knife into my bed. I cut myself on the wrist. The cut was superficial. None of our knives were sharp. But the cut temporarily relieved the pressure. I felt calm. Then my mother came into the room, brought there by mother instinct. She lifted my blanket and saw the knife and my cut. Pain broke her face. I never tried it again. When I thought about it, I’d see her face guarding me. Across the way, in the boys’ dorm, I could hear Herbie practicing his guitar. We shared a love for jazz, Jimi Hendrix, and esoteric philosophies.

• From Trash (1988)

  God knows I hate that job, but thinking about looking for another one makes my stomach ache and my throat go dry. It makes me want to drink lots of beer and smoke endless cigarettes. What I’ve actually been doing is staying up late baking coffee-fudge cookies, eating them till I puke, and then going to bed to cry myself to sleep. I get to work late, barely able to sit at my keyboard. If they weren’t already going to lay me off, they’d fire me. “You haven’t quit yet, huh?” Paula waves her hand as if warding off smoke, though the air conditioner over our heads has already sucked up the thin blue cloud. It’s the reason I got here first and sat in just this seat—now I can just smile and not reply. I’ve known Paula a long time, and no response is always best with her unless you’re prepared to sit still for several hours of exhaustive argument, something I haven’t wanted to do since we left the feminist collective where we both used to live. “You’ve got such an addictive personality. Can’t you see what those cigarettes are doing to you?” I smile determinedly and take another drag. About five years ago Paula won an award for her presentation to the therapists’ collective on how fingernail biting was a form of subliminal alcoholic behavior. Since then she’s become the world’s expert on addictive behavior, talking on the radio and writing a pithy little column for the local women’s paper. Margaret jokes that Paula can spot addiction indicators faster than most people can locate a taxi. It gets tiresome for her old friends, but most of us pretend to ignore it. Occasionally Margaret and I even talk about how tolerant we all seem to have become of each other. “It’s getting older,” Margaret thinks. I tell her that all that has happened is that we’ve worn each other down. It’s a conversation we have often, every time Paula or Jackie does something that gets us mad, and Margaret and I have a tacit agreement to head off arguments when we can. This time Margaret fails me. “Paula’s right,” she says, pausing to lick salt off the rim of her glass. “You really ought to take a close look at yourself, girl.” “Don’t want to get too introspective.” I pull smoke deep into my lungs and try to look amused rather than brooding. Margaret’s eyebrows go up quizzically, and I know it’s time to get to the point of this little gathering. “I thought we were here to talk about Jackie.” That sets Margaret to nodding. “Oh Lord, don’t tell me.” Paula leans forward in her seat and grips her wineglass more tightly. “What’s she done now?” “It’s the worst. You won’t believe it.” Margaret’s voice is a little loud and excited.

• From Trash (1988)

  Snacks would be granola, fresh fruit, and peanut butter on seven-grain bread. For breakfast she wanted me to cook grits in a twenty-quart pan, though she wasn’t sure margarine wouldn’t be healthier than butter, and maybe most people would just like granola anyway. “They’ll want doughnuts and coffee,” I told her matter-of-factly. I had a vision of myself standing in front of a hundred angry lesbians crying out for coffee and white sugar. Lee soothed me with kisses and poppy-seed cake made with gluten flour, assured me that it would be fun to run the kitchen with her. The week before the conference, Lee went from church to campus borrowing enormous pots, colanders, and baking trays. Ten flat baking trays convinced her that the second dinner we had to cook could be tofu lasagna with skim-milk mozzarella and lots of chopped carrots. I spent the week sitting in front of the pool table in Jay’s apartment, peeling and slicing carrots, potatoes, onions, green and red peppers, leeks, tomatoes, and squash. The slices were dumped in ten-gallon garbage bags and stored in Jay’s handy floor-model freezer. I put a tablecloth down on the pool table to protect the green felt and made mounds of vegetables over each pocket corner. Every mound cut down and transferred to a garbage bag was a victory. I was winning the war on vegetables until the committee Lee had scared up delivered another load. I drank coffee and chopped carrots, ate a chicken pot pie and peeled potatoes, drank iced tea and sliced peppers. I peeled the onions but didn’t slice them, dropped them into a big vat of cold water to keep. I found a meat cleaver on the back porch and used it to chop the zucchini and squash, pretending I was doing karate and breaking boards. “Bite-sized,” Lee told me as she ran through, “it should all be bite-sized.” I wanted to bite her. I drank cold coffee and dropped tomatoes one at a time into boiling water to loosen their skins. There were supposed to be other women helping me, but only one showed up, and she went home after she got a rash from the tomatoes. I got out a beer, put the radio on loud, switching it back and forth from rock and roll to the country-and-western station and sang along as I chopped. I kept working. The only food left in the apartment was vegetables. I wanted to have a pizza delivered but had no money. When I got hungry, I ate carrots on white bread with mayonnaise, slices of tomatoes between slices of raw squash, and leeks I dipped in a jar of low-sodium peanut butter. I threw up three times but kept working. Four hours before the first women were to arrive I took the last bushel basket of carrots out in the backyard and hid it under a tarp with the lawn mower.

• From Trash (1988)

  “Goddamn,” I whisper now, and start the kata over a fourth time. Liquid and gold, my knees come up and my fists punch out. The kata, the dance, takes me up, makes me over. I let go of Liz and Judy and all of them. I come back into stance, with my hair loose and damp on my neck, the smell of my own body like wine in the morning sun. “Goddamn!” I hiss the word between my teeth and look up to see myself standing with my head back and face glowing in the reflected windows. The whisper carries distinctly in the morning quiet. I can almost see the ripple of it in the grass. “Goddamn.” Violence Against Women Begins at Home P aula swears that if I joined her yoga class, I would never need another chiropractor in my life. She may be right. Margaret says it’s sex. “Everything is about sex, but a bad back? That’s the worst. It’s the congestion, all that compression and tension. You know, tighter and tighter. You got to have a release, and sex is the thing that’ll do it for you.” I nod and light another Marlboro. Last week, my boss finally told me they were going to have to lay me off the first of next month. I’ve been swinging back and forth from exhilaration to a kind of mad dread since then. God knows I hate that job, but thinking about looking for another one makes my stomach ache and my throat go dry. It makes me want to drink lots of beer and smoke endless cigarettes. What I’ve actually been doing is staying up late baking coffee-fudge cookies, eating them till I puke, and then going to bed to cry myself to sleep. I get to work late, barely able to sit at my keyboard. If they weren’t already going to lay me off, they’d fire me. “You haven’t quit yet, huh?” Paula waves her hand as if warding off smoke, though the air conditioner over our heads has already sucked up the thin blue cloud. It’s the reason I got here first and sat in just this seat—now I can just smile and not reply. I’ve known Paula a long time, and no response is always best with her unless you’re prepared to sit still for several hours of exhaustive argument, something I haven’t wanted to do since we left the feminist collective where we both used to live. “You’ve got such an addictive personality. Can’t you see what those cigarettes are doing to you?”

• From Trash (1988)

  I n college I contemplated a career in biology for one long year, and rats—fat gray ones with minuscule wires in their skulls or slender white ones trailing colored threads to mark the buried electrodes. The animal labs were in a cinder-block building set away from the campus. I went there like a pilgrim to stare into the cages and finger the plush on a monkey’s neck, the monkey bent to a frame that kept his razor teeth from my flesh. After a while the teeth were gone with the larynx, and he only spat when I came to see him. It hurt me that he could not bite; the rats at least kept their teeth. I told myself that the security of a career in science demanded sacrifice. I would have to get used to rats with wires and monkeys without teeth. But it was hard, hard. I hated the whitewashed walls and the raw, shrinking creatures under my hands as much as the implacable mechanical motions of the professors in rubber gloves. After I got the job of cleaning up the lab, my dreams were full of monkeys’ teeth and the sibilant scratches of rats’ nails on Formica counters. On those rare nights when Toni and I could sleep over at a friend’s house in the city, I would wake shuddering, feeling her arms around me like the wires that trussed the monkeys. “You are one restless woman,” Toni would tell me in the morning, showing me the scratches I’d made on her arms and back. “Can’t lie still to save your life.” More out of guilt than desire, I’d kiss her shoulders and slide down between her legs to ease with my tongue what I could not cure with words. I felt about oral sex with Toni the way my roommate in the dorm felt about transcendental meditation. At the point at which my neck began to ache and my fingers spasm on her thighs, I would begin to feel righteous. The longer it took to get her off, and the greater the ache in my neck and back, the farther away I would go in my mind until finally it was as if I were not making love to Toni but to myself. I became a point of concentration, icy and hot at the same time. When she began to babble those love words that meant she was just about to come, my own thighs would shake sympathetically. I rarely came making love to Toni, but nothing made me feel so balanced as an hour or two pushing my tongue between her swollen labia. It was expiation and penance. It was redemption.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  He went up to her and engaged her in conversation, passing from subject to subject till he came to an understanding with her and took her back to his cell, making sure that no one was watching. But being carried away by the vigour of his passion, he threw all caution to the winds, and whilst he was cavorting with the girl, the Abbot, who happened to have risen from his siesta and was quietly walking past the monk’s cell, heard the racket that the pair were creating. So that he might recognize the voices, he crept softly up to the door of the cell, stood there listening, and came to the definite conclusion that one of the voices was a woman’s. His first impulse was to order the door to be opened, but he then decided to deal with the matter differently and returned to his room, where he waited for the monk to come out. The monk, albeit he had taken the greatest of pleasure and delight in the young woman’s company, suspected none the less that something was amiss, for it had seemed to him that he could hear the shuffling of feet in the corridor. He had therefore applied his eye to a tiny aperture, from which he had obtained an excellent view of the Abbot, standing there listening. He was thus well aware that the Abbot had had the opportunity of knowing that the girl was in his cell, and consequently he was very worried, for he knew he would be punished severely on account of all this. But without betraying his anxiety to the girl, he quickly ran his mind over various expedients to see if he could chance upon one that might do him some good, and hit upon a novel piece of mischief, which would have precisely the effect he was seeking. Pretending to the girl that he thought they had spent sufficient time together, he said to her: ‘I am just going to find a way of letting you out of here without your being seen. So stay here and make no sound till I return.’ He then emerged from his cell and, having locked the door, went straight to the Abbot’s room and handed him his key, this being the usual practice whenever any monk was going out. Then without so much as batting an eyelid, he said: ‘Sir, this morning I was not able to bring in all the faggots that were cut for me, so with your permission I should like to go to the wood and have them brought in.’

• From Trash (1988)

  Aunt Alma turned around and bumped her hip against the pool table. “Where?” One disdainful glance rendered the pews for what they were— exquisitely uncomfortable even for my hips. Her expression reminded me of my Uncle Jack’s jokes about her, about how she refused to go back to church till they put in rocking chairs. “No rocking chairs here,” I laughed, hoping she’d laugh with me. Aunt Alma just leaned forward and rocked one of the balls on the table against another. Her mouth kept its flat, impartial expression. I tried gesturing across the pool table to my room and the big water bed outlined in sunlight and tree shade from the three windows overlooking it. “It’s cleaner in there,” I offered, “it’s my room. This is our collective space.” I gestured around. “Collective,” my aunt echoed me again, but the way she said the word expressed clearly her opinion of such arrangements. She looked toward my room with its narrow cluttered desk and stacks of books, then turned back to the pool table as by far the more interesting view. She rocked the balls again so that the hollow noise of the thump resounded against the high, dim ceiling. “Pitiful,” she sighed, and gave me a sharp look, her washed-out blue eyes almost angry. Two balls broke loose from the others and rolled idly across the matted green surface of the table. The sunlight reflecting through the oak leaves outside made Aunt Alma’s face seem younger than I remembered it, some of the hard edge eased off the square jaw. “Your mama is worried about you.” “I don’t know why.” I turned my jaw to her, knowing it would remind her of how much alike we had always been, the people who had said I was more her child than my mama’s. “I’m fine. Mama should know that. I spoke to her not too long ago.” “How long ago?” I frowned, mopped at my head some more. Two months, three, last month? “I’m not sure . . . Reese’s birthday. I think it was Reese’s birthday.” “Three months.” My aunt rocked one ball back and forth across her palm, a yellow nine ball. The light filtering into the room went a shade darker. The -9- gleamed pale through her fingers. I looked more closely at her. She looked just as she had when I was thirteen, her hair gray in that loose bun, her hands large and swollen, and her body straining the seams of the faded print dress.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  He hesitated: ‘ Won’t you shake hands? ° ‘ Of course,’ she smiled; ‘ aren’t you my very good friend? But you know, you really must leave me now, Martin.’ 494 THE WELL OF LONELINESS 3 Arter he had gone she lit a cigarette; the action was purely auto- matic. She felt strangely excited yet strangely numb -a most ) curious synthesis of sensations; then she suddenly felt deathly sick and giddy. Going up to her bedroom she bathed her face, sat down on the bed and tried to think, conscious that her mind was completely blank. She was thinking of nothing — not even of Mary. CHAPTER 55 I BITTER and most curious warfare it was that must now be waged between Martin and Stephen, but secretly waged, lest because of them the creature they loved should be brought to suffer; not the least strange aspect being that these two must quite often take care to protect each other, setting a guard upon eyes and lips when they found themselves together with Mary. For the sake of the girl whom they sought to protect, they must actually often protect each other. Neither would stoop to detraction or malice, though they fought in secret they did so with honour. And all the while their hearts cried out loudly against this cruel and in- sidious thing that had laid its hand upon their doomed friendship - verily a bitter and most curious warfare. And now Stephen, brought suddenly face to face with the menace of infinite desolation, fell back upon her every available weapon in the struggle to assert her right to possession. Every link that the years had forged between her and Mary, every tender and passionate memory that bound their past to their ardent pres- ent, every moment of joy — aye, and even of sorrow, she used in sheer self defence against Martin. And not the least powerful of all her weapons, was the perfect companionship and understand- ing that constitutes the great strength of such unions. Well armed she was, thanks to both present and past— but Martin’s sole weapon lay in the future. With a new subtlety that was born of his love, he must lead the girl’s thoughts very gently forward towards a life of security and peace; such a life as marriage with him would offer. In a thousand little ways must redouble his efforts to make himself indispensable to her, to surround her with the warm, happy cloak of protection that made even a hostile world seem friendly. And although he forbore to speak openly as yet, playing his hand with 496 THE WELL OF LONELINESS much skill and patience — although before speaking he wished to be certain that Mary Llewellyn, of her own free will, would come when he called her, because she loved him — yet nevertheless she divined his love, for men cannot hide such knowledge from women.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  On finding himself in the midst of all this commotion, Ruggieri very nearly collapsed with astonishment. He was in no condition to make a dash for it, and in any case he could see that escape was impossible; so he was seized and handed over to the chief magistrate’s officers, who had meanwhile rushed to the scene, having been attracted by all the noise. He was then taken before the chief magistrate, and since he had a very bad reputation he was immediately put to the torture and forced to confess that he had broken into the money-lenders’ house with intent to rob, whereupon the magistrate resolved to have him hanged by the neck at the earliest opportunity. During the course of the morning, the news that Ruggieri had been caught red-handed burgling the money-lenders’ house spread like wildfire through the whole of Salerno. And when the lady and her maid came to hear of it, they were so bewildered and astonished that they almost began to think that instead of actually doing what they had done the night before they had merely been dreaming. What was more, the lady was nearly out of her mind with anxiety at the thought of the danger that Ruggieri was in. Halfway through the morning, the doctor returned from Amalfi and sent someone to fetch his potion so that he could operate on his patient, and when the bottle was found to be empty he made a great commotion and protested that he could not leave anything in his own house without people interfering with it. The lady, who had troubles of her own to think about, lost her temper with him and said: ‘I wonder what you would say if something really terrible had happened, when you create so much fuss over a spilled bottle of water? Isn’t there plenty more of it about?’ ‘My dear,’ said the surgeon, ‘you seem to think that it was ordinary water, but that is not the case. On the contrary, it was a potion specially prepared for putting people to sleep.’ He then told her what he needed it for, and it immediately dawned upon the lady that Ruggieri must have drunk the potion, which explained why they had thought he was dead. ‘We knew nothing of all that,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to make yourself some more of it.’ Seeing that he had no alternative, the surgeon sent out for a second bottle of the stuff, and shortly afterwards the maid, who on the lady’s instructions had gone out to discover what people were saying about Ruggieri, returned to her mistress, saying: