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.

Page 318 of 501 · 20 per page

• From Querelle (1953)

  She couldn't go on. T\1adame Lysiane sat up, switched on the light again. Robert looked at her, surprised. "Listen, I don't care what you say, man . . . ( Robert's awkwardness, his basic indifference toward women had prevented him from acquiring an even minimally courteous way of addressing them. To speak tenderly to a woman, to acknowledge her femininity, woul3 have made Robert look ridiculous to himself) . . . you're just being difficult. Jo and me, we're the way we are because that's the way we are, goddammit. Right from the start . . ." "But it does bother me. And I have no reason to keep it a secret." She was the boss lady. For a long time now that resemblance had tortured and persecuted her lovely flesh. She was the patronne. The brothel was a great piece of property. If Robert was a handsome male-one •'who could afford to"-she herself was a strong female, strong by virtue of her money, her authority over the girls, and the solidity of her prose. 441t exhausts me! it exhausts me, to think about how alike you are." She suddenly heard herself, plaintive as any weak little woman. "Now you just stop that, do you hear me. I'm telling you, there ain't nothing one can do about it." Robert sounded angry. At the beginning of the scene he had thought, mistakenly, that his mistress was alluding to some very tenuous sentiments that only a woman as distinguished as herse1f was able to experience, but as she kept on about it, he became annoyed . .. I can't help it, how could I. Back when we were little kids they couldn't tell us apart." l\.1adame Lysiane drew a deep breath, as if preparing for her very last sigh. Before he opened his mouth and while he was saying what he had just said, Robert knew, although vaguely, that it would hurt her terribly, but while he didn't really want to do that, maliciously, with a clean yet obviously dim conscience, he 184 I JEAN GENET

• From Escape (2007)

  Barbara was typical of a woman exalted in her status as the favorite wife. She genuinely believed she was superior to us all. As a favorite wife, both she and her children were untouchable. Her children looked down on their half siblings as inferior, which was also common in these large polygamous families. The caste system in Merril’s family was entrenched before I even arrived. But in that our family was an exception. Warren’s new decree meant other families would now become more like ours. Many men in the FLDS tried to be fair to all their wives. They felt it was their religious duty not to play favorites. There were schedules for sex in the home so no one felt hurt or left out. If a man had three wives, each woman knew that according to the schedule, she would sleep with her husband every third night. But this new sex policy gave men a freedom they never had. There was no longer any obligation to sleep with a woman unless he wanted to have a child with her. So expectations about decency were off. Once free from sleeping with a wife, most men singled out their favorites and locked in a caste system in their families. Caste systems in families are breeding grounds for family members to harm one another. As the months and years wore on, Warren would underscore this by preaching that a man had the right to treat one wife better than another if she was more worthy of love. Sex was the only hope a woman had in this life. If she pleased her husband sexually, she and her children would be protected by him. Since he was her passport to eternal life, she could not risk displeasing him sexually. So it was emotionally destabilizing to women when their husbands only had sex with them once a month or stopped altogether when they were pregnant. Their chances to seduce, impress, and satisfy their husbands were so drastically limited it threatened their very being. But, like everything else, this new decree was done in the name of God. Warren was preaching that Christ would come to our community because we were pure and abstained from sex except to create children. He preached that we were now living at a higher spiritual plane, but to me, it felt that we had crossed a new and dangerous threshold. One morning when I was in the bathroom vomiting, Tammy came and pounded on the door. “Carolyn, Merril had a heart attack this morning. The ambulance is here to take him to the hospital. Barbara’s going with him and the rest of us will meet them at the ER.” Tammy drove the small family car and I sat in the backseat, upset and so sick it was hard to stop vomiting. What if Merril died?

• From Escape (2007)

  Harrison had a hard time sleeping at night. I gave him chloral hydrate, a strong sedative, but it did not always work. In an effort to wean him off the IV therapy, his doctors had given him a drug to control his neuropathy, but it sent him into major anxiety attacks. For weeks, it felt that I was always on the phone with Harrison’s doctors, constantly juggling medications, adding here, subtracting there, to try and find the balance that would stop the spasms and his screaming. One day blurred into the next. Despite his feeding tube, which pumped nutrition into him twenty-four hours a day, Harrison had a hard time maintaining weight. He was switched from a high-calorie formula to a lower-calorie one because he had a leak of his lymphatic fluids. Lymphatic fluids are produced by fat, so with less fat in his system, the leak slowed. The fat content of his diet had to be closely monitored until he healed. But he lost weight with the low-calorie formula. I was supposed to try to wean him off the feeding pump and feed him directly because I could get more food into him that way. But when I tried that he’d get sick and throw up. I didn’t have time to think. I was sleep-deprived and burned out from the relentless stress and fear of seeing my healthy baby boy, who had been just on the verge of walking, reduced to screaming spasms that were stripping him of every ability he once had. His vomiting led to a case of aspiration pneumonia. Do I call an ambulance today or not? That thinking went on for months. The minute it looked like he was having difficulty breathing I called for help. The local ambulance had to come (even without Merril’s okay) because Harrison was now known to the system and was being watched. I was on the phone with his doctor all the time, and if the ambulance refused to transport us there would have been an uproar. Finally, Harrison’s doctor in St. George said he needed to go back on IV therapy because he was not improving enough and was still constantly plagued by spasms. With two IV treatments a week, he got a little relief from the spasms. Initially, his doctor felt it wasn’t helping him enough to warrant continuing, but finally she realized that any relief at all was a plus for both of us. So we made regular trips to St. George for IV therapy and frequent trips to Phoenix to see his oncologist. Cathleen volunteered to drive me to Phoenix, which was an enormous relief because it was eight hours away. I was terribly concerned when I had to leave my other children at home to take Harrison to the doctors. This was the first time in my married life when I hadn’t also had a full-time job. So I was home more, but consumed by the demands of Harrison’s care.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  I was weeding old clothes out of my drawers when I found the vibrator. Still purple, still sparkly. I turned it on. The batteries still worked. I removed my clothes and lay on the bed. The breeze from the open window was sharp and my nipples grew hard. Alone in the house, I imagined my husband, how we used to make love. How he’d say, so gently, You can come again. I know you can. And he’d give me that gift. And now, how I couldn’t stand to kiss him. He tasted like copper in my mouth. Intimacy replaced by something far more desperate. He’d been staying up late, unable to sleep. His speech, fast and hard, like a train with no destination. It scared me. Instead of sex, I’d pull off his pants. How he’d be so hard, which always surprised me because we’d done nothing to get to that point. He was always ready. How he’d put his hand on my head and move me. I contributed nothing but an open cavity. As I rubbed my nipple lightly with a finger, pleasure rippled through my body, a feeling I’d not had in months. I turned the vibrator on and spread my legs. But it was awkward. I didn’t know whether to put it in me or on me. All I felt was a deadening throb. your clit will go numb That hairy man behind. The dildo jamming again and again into the woman’s gaping hole. I turned the vibrator off. In the wake of its buzz, an aching silence. It was so quiet in Connecticut. Cars rarely passed our house. No sidewalks. Trees competing for open sky. I closed my eyes and laid the vibrator on my belly, crossing my hands over it. It’s hard to tell people when something is wrong. Hard to whisper, out loud, that your husband might be going crazy. Because maybe it’s not him, it’s you. The woman married to the bright, young doctor. The woman with two beautiful daughters and two acres of land and two cars. The woman at the party who grabbed the vibrator. I CAME OUT THE FRONT DOOR, WRAPPED IN MY BATHROBE, vibrator in hand. In front of our house a doe stood, head raised to the branches of a laurel tree, pulling off leathery leaves with her teeth. She skittered off as I made my way into the yard. It felt good to be outdoors. How desperately I longed for the seasons to turn. Animals, plants, the land—they demanded nothing from me. For once I was glad our house was set back from the road, surrounded by a dense cover of trees. No one could see me out here.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Afraid that he might seem tactless and rile the boss, Querelle did not pursue the question. The main parlor of the brothel was silent and empty. It seemed to be recording their meeting, quietly, attentively. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, the ladies would be having their meal in the "refectory." There was no one about. On the second floor, in her room, Madame Lysiane was doing her hair by the light of a single bulb. The mirrors were vacant, pure, amazingly close to the unreal, having nobody and nothing to reflect. The boss tilted and drained his glass. He was a formidably husky man. If he had never been really handsome, in his youth he had no doubt been a fine specimen, despite the blackheads, the hair-thin black wrinkles on his neck, and the pockmarks. His pencil-line mustache, 30 I JEAN GENET trimmed "American style," was undoubtedly a souvenir of 1918. Thanks to those doughboys, to the Black Market, and to the traffic in women he had been able to get rich quick and to purchase La Feria. His long boat trips and fishing parties had tanned his skin. His features were hard, the bridge of his nose finn, the eyes small and lively, the pate bald. "What time d'you think you'll get here?'' "I'll have to get organized. Have to get the bag out of there. No problem, though. I've got it figured out. " With a flicker of suspicion, glass in hand, the boss looked at Querelle. "Yeah? But, make no mistake, you're on your own. It's none of my business." Mario remained motionless, almost absent: he was leaning against the counter with his back reflected in the mirror behind him. Without a word he removed his elbows from the counter, thus changing his interesting posture, and went to the big mirror next to the proprietor: now it looked as if he were leaning against himself. And now, faced with both men, Querelle experienced a sudden malaise, a sinking of the heart, such as killers know. Mario's calmness and good looks disconcerted him. They were on too grand a scale. The brothelkeeper, Norbert, was far too powerful-looking. So was Mario. The outlines of their two bodies met to form one continuous pattern, and this seemed to blur and blend their muscular bodies as well as their faces. It was impossible, the boss couldn't be an informer; but then it seemed equally out of the question for Mario to be anything but a cop. Within himself, Quere11e felt a trembling, a vacillation, almost to the point of losing himself, by vomiting it all out, ail that he reaUy was. Seized by vertigo in the presence of these powerful muscles and nerves that he perceived as towering above him-as one might when throwing one's head back to appraise the height of a giant pine tree-that kept on doubling and merging again, crowned by Mario's beauty, but dominated by Norbert's bald head and buUish neck, 31 I QUERELLE

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “That’s cool,” Sophie said, and Lionel rolled his eyes. It was the kind of thing you said when you were pretending not to find someone boring. They’d retreated to the inane chatter of dinner parties at last, the shuffling of banal bits of information like so much unwanted food on a plate. “What do you do?” “Oh, I dance. Since I was five. It’s like the one thing I’m good at. Absolutely no money in it, but hey.” “That’s a real thing. Dance. Like, an actual real thing in the world. That’s art.” “Sure, yeah, thanks,” she said. “Actually, Charlie’s a dancer, too.” “Is he?” Lionel asked. Suddenly, the body made sense. “We’re in the grad program.” “How long have you been together?” “Maybe eight months, something like that? I’m bad at this.” She crinkled her eyes and shook her head a little. Charles was looking at them over his shoulder. Sophie waved at him, but Charles shook his head and turned back to look out at the yard. “That’s a long time,” Lionel said. Eight months was forever. A whole life could change in eight months. Or end entirely. “Is it?” Sophie asked. “It doesn’t seem that way. But I guess time flies.” “Yeah. Unless you want it to.” Sophie looked at him sideways. “What are you trying to say?” “Nothing. Well, nothing about you two, anyway,” Lionel said. Sophie watched for a beat longer, and she seemed to make up her mind about something. She said, “He was right. You are hard to talk to.” Lionel felt a frisson then, pleasure and discomfort rubbing up against each other. He hadn’t registered it before, when she’d said that thing about proctoring, but he realized now that they had been talking about him. Lionel ran through what Sophie had said and done since coming to sit next to him, trying to find the subtext. But he found nothing. Just the jangle of her voice, and the warmth of her body next to his under the blanket. Her hand was on his wrist, and then it slid down until her palm cupped his. Her hands were cold, lightly callused, but strong. She flexed her fingers through his and looked at him directly. Lionel wanted to pull his hand away, but he did not. “People are hard,” he said. “Spoken like a true introvert.” “If I were a real introvert, I would have stayed home. Which would have been the wiser choice.” “I think you really believe that,” she said in open awe. “You must really be afraid of yourself.” Lionel shivered. He did pull his hand away from Sophie. But it was just as well, because Charles had jerked the blanket from their legs and whirled it around his shoulders like a shawl. “Some of us are freezing our nuts off out here,” Charles said to them. “I tried to get you to sit with us,” Sophie said. “I didn’t want to,” Charles pouted.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This is not, of course, new; it is remarkable only because the complacent mechanisms of our culture have made this attitude so widespread. There is observable now, moreover, to an extent unprecedented hitherto, an anxiety on the part of Americans concerning themselves and their heritage. This anxiety cannot yet be called probing; Americans are not noted for introspection and rather disapprove of it. R..·uher, we arc approaching a state of mind which closely resembles shock. In Mr. Lockridge's Republic, whatever goes wrong-and noth ing, of course, is irrevocably wrong-there is room for every one and certain things are sure; but this is not any longer true in fact. Time has challenged us, our dream; and we find now that no one is very clear or specific about the nature of the dream. There were always contradictions, but we assumed that they would be taken care of; and since never before have we been in quite so important a position in the world, the con tradictions have never been quite so glaring before. Some thing has gone wrong, no one quite knows where; no one knows where we are going; we seem to be headed in several directions at once. The strain is made a good deal more un bearable by the fact that Americans passionately believe in their avowed ideals, amorphous as they are, and arc terrified of waking from a radiant dream. Raint ree County is a kind of ultimate defense of the dreaming and the dream. It seeks to explain us to ourselves in the light of the irrevocable past. But this can only be done if the past is truly examined. Mr. Lock ridge has, instead, given us the usual, superficial sunlight. He has exploited nearly every possible device to explain away all contradictions. He holds back the darkness by a perpetual in sistence that darkness is not possible; or, at any rate, not pos sible in America, 'the last best hope of earth.' If it is, indeed, the last, best hope we had better find out more about it. And this will demand an understanding which can only be arrived at through a thorough self -appraisal. This might, at once, make us less complacent and more mature; we might discover that affirmation consists of more than a handful of cheerful slogans. Raint ree County, according to its author, cannot be found on any map; and it is always summer 592 OTH ER ES SAYS there. He might also have added that no one lives there any more. 2. PO STSCRIP T: THE MAN The death of Ross Lockridge, Jr. of carbon monoxide poi soning on the night of Saturday, March 6, wrote the grisliest possible finale to his ambitious novel.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Dr. Ngost put a hand on Alek’s arm, and Alek turned his head toward him slowly, away from the scan that showed his insides, ghostly white on a black backdrop. “One step at a time,” he said warmly. “Biopsy. Then we know.” Alek almost repeated the doctor’s words again but stopped himself by biting the very tip of his tongue. He nodded firmly a couple of times, then climbed from the bench. He pulled up his jeans beneath the crinkling paper gown. The room was cool as a small cave. Dr. Ngost watched him dress, and when they shook hands, Dr. Ngost held on just a little longer: “Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay,” he said. • • • On the bus, Alek considered calling his brothers. Grigori was a first-year surgical resident at Mass Gen, and Igor was starting at Columbia medical school. They would know how to explain it to their mother best, how to articulate the parameters of the thing in a way that wouldn’t scare her. It seemed foolish not to call them. The bus turned onto the more corporate corner of Capitol Square. All that chrome and glass against the slate-gray winter sky. Alek had a seat to himself, which felt like a minor miracle. Downtown was emptying before it began to fill again. Luminescent snowdrifts covered bike racks and lampposts. He had pulled up the text chain with Grigori—they hadn’t texted in months, since he’d first arrived in the Midwest, to say that he’d made it. He’d sent a couple pics of the apartment he’d found. It had come furnished and felt lived in. He’d sent both Grigori and Igor pictures of the tub and the room with its decent but kind of soft mattress. And they’d texted back cool and nice and faggot style :). When they were younger, Grigori’s favorite pastime was to pull hairs from Alek’s body. Igor held him while he twisted and tried to get loose. Then Grigori plucked out his eyelashes one at a time, fine white hairs invisible the moment they left his body. Alek remembered the little shooting stars of pain with each hair. He remembered Igor’s sweaty hands holding him down. He remembered the damp odor of their panting filling the closet.

• From Escape (2007)

  But Rosie came to Colorado City occasionally to visit. When she did, Linda had to move out of her bedroom and sleep with Annette and me so Rosie could have it. Linda seemed the most wary of Rosie and concerned about the situation. Her fear was that Rosie would steal Dad away from Mom. Linda became the watcher, making note of things that Dad did with Rosie that he didn’t do with Mom. He spent a lot of time with Rosie in Linda’s bedroom when she visited and certainly seemed happier when she was around. We all knew how tense my parents’ marriage had become. Mom seemed to get a lot quieter once Dad married Rosie. Dad had bought Mama a TV several years before he married Rosie, to placate her. She always complained about not being able to watch TV the way she had when we lived in Salt Lake. It was completely against our religion to have a television set, but my father ignored that and just bought one. The reception was terrible; there were only two channels that were even remotely viewable. But when Dad and Rosie went into Linda’s bedroom, we all sat with Mom in the front living room and watched TV. I remember going to visit Rosie when I went to Salt Lake with my parents. I was impressed that she had her own small house and car. She also had her nursing career. Her freedom and autonomy over her own life made an impact on me. Rosie had more independence than any woman I had ever known. But her freedom was short-lived. Rosie became pregnant shortly after she married my father, and she moved into Linda’s bedroom in our house in Colorado City a month before her baby was born. My mother’s sixth child, a boy, was born a few months before Rosie’s daughter. The dynamic in our family shifted. Rosie and my mother were competing for Dad’s attention. The two babies were compared to each other all the time. We all watched to see which baby Dad seemed to prefer or spend the most time with. My mother could see how happy Dad was with Rosie, so she worked hard to try to outdo her. If Rosie cooked a lovely dinner, Mom put twice the effort into the next meal she made. Mama had her ways of doing things in the house that she insisted Rosie follow. Sometimes I’d hear Mom saying to her friends that only she, not Rosie, really understood what Father wanted and how to please him. There would be times when my mother would accuse Rosie of being selfish and not working hard enough to please my dad.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  By the end of the first day’s marathon, Bella got laughter and cheers when she broke the tension by saying, “Good night, my loves!” — MY SURPRISE DUTY AT the conference was a last-minute request from the various women-of-color caucuses to be a kind of scribe. I was to go from one hotel room to the next, one meeting to the next, writing down concerns that were shared by all, combining language for their approval, and appending issues that were unique to each. The goal was to compose a substitute for the so-called Minority Women’s Plank that had come up from individual state conferences, yet women of color hadn’t been able to meet as a group. Asian Americans were spread from Hawaii to New York. The Hispanic Caucus was mainly Chicanas on one coast and Puerto Ricans on the other. African Americans came from everywhere, and members of the American Indian and Alaskan Native Caucus were the most spread out of all. Houston was their first and only chance to meet and come up with a plank that included their shared and specific issues. Yet if they met during the day, they would miss crucial floor votes. As usual, double discrimination meant double the work. I was to be what they referred to cheerfully as “our token,” that is, the only one who wasn’t a woman of color, going early in the morning or after hours at night from one drafting group to the next as they met in different hotel rooms. I would combine language where possible and list unique issues, then give the result back for the approval of all. This was an honor, but it also upped my already high anxiety level. I was afraid I would mess up. I wasn’t even sure I could physically get to each meeting in the midst of conference chaos. As I went from one caucus to the next, I saw women camped out on every surface around breakfast or late-night snacks, from Houston’s idea of bagels to Tex-Mex pizzas. Among the three hundred African American delegates were legislators skilled in parliamentary procedure and women who’d never been to a conference before, Deltas in silk dresses and students in army boots, radicals with no faith in voting and civil rights veterans like Dorothy Height, who had worked for voting rights since she was a young woman meeting Eleanor Roosevelt.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  In the host’s bathroom, Lionel tried to be easy. His pulse thumped in his thighs, and he thought the force of it would make him slip from his perch on the edge of the toilet. The motion of it made him dizzy. He hated that he had let Charles’s remark, casual and dismissive as it was, jam him up. He’d let it rule him, but worse still, he’d let on how much it bothered him. Lionel stood, bent over the sink, and splashed cold water onto his face. The faucet handles screamed when he twisted them, and the head gave a jittery, anxious stream. He drank from his cupped palms, trying to get his pulse down. He found the water a little soapy, and the dizziness remained, that teetering, swaying sensation, as if his legs might go out from under him. There was a hard knock on the door. “Two minutes,” Lionel said. He ran the faucet again to give the person on the other side the idea that he was washing his hands. His mother would have told him to comb his hair and said that he had the bad habit of letting white people see him nappy and disheveled. He always wanted to tell her when she got on him about it that white people were just people, but he knew that it was a naive and stupid thing to say, because white people were white people. Back in the care facility, his mother had told him that his aunts and uncles down home, which was what she called her own hometown in eastern Georgia, thought his current state was because he’d been ripping and running with all them white kids at school and math camp. His aunts and uncles saw his desire to kill himself as an extension of all those things they didn’t like or understand—how he talked, how he saw things—and they blamed his father and his father’s ways for that. It was dumb. It was pointless. It was nobody’s fault. Things happened. When he cracked the door open, he didn’t immediately see anyone. It was only after emerging fully into the narrow hallway, lined with photos of the host and his family, that Lionel saw Charles leaning against a shut door with his eyes closed. “You good?” Charles asked. “Looks like I should be asking you that.” “I didn’t want to come to this thing.” “Then why did you?” Lionel rested his back against the wall. Directly across from him was a photo of the host as a child, head thrown back in ecstasy. He looked happy. Pleased. A woman in white shorts stood next to a tall bush with a muted expression. “Sophie,” Charles said. “Sophie wanted to come.” “Which one is she?” “The blond one.” Lionel turned his head enough to look through the kitchen doorway and out into the living room. “The flexible one?”

• From Escape (2007)

  But a week earlier he’d started screaming and wouldn’t stop. Twenty-four hours later in a Las Vegas hospital, he was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. The tumor had grown into an area that controlled his breathing. He was put on life support, but there was absolutely no hope. His parents signed papers allowing him to die. I could not, would not, even begin to imagine how his mother could cope with the pain from such a catastrophic and unexpected loss. When I got back from the store I found Harrison and held him close. With long, curly eyelashes that touched the tip of his brows, Harrison was so pretty he could have been mistaken for a baby girl. He was a tease who loved to play peek-a-boo and cuddle and to be held. LuAnne, who was eight when Harrison was born, gravitated to him right away and considered him her baby, mothering him in every way she could think of. He was chubby and an excellent eater. Harrison thrived. He met every developmental milestone on time or ahead of schedule. His first birthday was coming up on May 17, 2000, my fourteenth wedding anniversary. I marveled at how healthy he was. He bounced back from illnesses faster than any of my other six babies had. Without a doubt, he was my dream baby. A week later I was mopping the floor. Harrison was sitting nearby and smiling at me. I smiled back at him, then his smile vanished. The right half of his body went into a spasm that lasted for about thirty seconds. I ran across the wet floor and grabbed him. But the spasm had stopped and another smile lit up his face. I was worried. I called the night clinic and made an emergency appointment for him. He was checked out and everything seemed perfectly normal. But I felt uneasy. I had never seen anything so sudden and so frightening sweep over a child before. Two days later he had another spasm. I had started working at the grocery story to save money for my escape. Barbara told me about it when I got home. She said it had happened while she was feeding him lunch. But once again, he’d bounced back quickly and seemed fine. I made an appointment for Harrison in St. George. But the weekend before our scheduled visit he had another spasm, and this time it didn’t stop and it controlled his entire body. I was at my father’s doing laundry and we called an ambulance. Several tests were done in the ER, but the cause of the spasm could not be found. He was admitted and the pediatrician did more tests the next day. At one point, a doctor told me Harrison had the hiccups. He was making a sound similar to hiccups, but I knew that wasn’t it.

• From Escape (2007)

  I was pregnant with my fifth child and was too weak from morning sickness to take part. In our version, Maria was a nanny sent from one large polygamous family to another. Captain Von Trapp was not a widower but a married man with a large family. He had recently been introduced to the principle of plural marriage and was thinking about joining the FLDS. He hired Maria because he respected her father and knew he needed her to take care of his very large family. These two large families created parts for many of the children. But then Margaret needed parts for sons and daughters-in-law. So there were characters in the script that seemed to wander in and out from nowhere. Margaret dreamed of having an orchestra provide the music, but the reality was she was stuck with our little FLDS band. She dressed them up in formal wear so they looked like a professional orchestra, but when the band started playing the score from the real Sound of Music the audience laughed because they sounded so amateurish. The gist of the plot was that everyone was trying to escape the Nazis and flee to America to join the work of God. The play ended with a musical talent show while German soldiers stood guard. Merril’s sons-in-law played the Germans. After each talent number the actors pretended to flee to the mountains to escape. When the show ended everyone was hiking through the mountains to safety. But then the German soldiers came frantically searching after them. Uncle Rulon’s sons, Leroy and Warren Jeffs, who had married into Merril’s family, appeared in full Nazi regalia and were the last to march across the stage. The audience was laughing, unaware of the shadow falling across our community. It was the shadow of a totalitarian society that would one day consume every aspect of our lives and be under the control of Warren Jeffs. Warren’s Rise to Power All my pregnancies had been awful, but my fifth pregnancy was the first that was life-threatening. The pregnancy began with the same severe illness and vomiting. But this time I continued to menstruate. Shirley, the nurse practitioner I saw, said it was not unusual for a woman to have one period after becoming pregnant. She listened to the baby’s heartbeat, said it was normal, and sent me home. Two nights after Shirley told me not to worry about the bleeding I awoke because I was soaked. I turned on the light and saw that I was covered in blood. There was a pool of blood in the bed. I was hemorrhaging. I panicked and got in the shower, and the bleeding stopped. I taught my second graders the next day, thinking that I had probably miscarried and that my pregnancy was over. But my morning sickness continued. I saw Shirley a week later and she ordered an ultrasound.

• From Escape (2007)

  Cathleen broke the news to me about the trip one morning when I walked into the kitchen for coffee. She was washing the breakfast dishes and motioned for me to sit down. “We are going on the largest family trip I have ever been on in my life, and we’re leaving in less than a week.” She looked dazed and stricken. The full horror of our family life was becoming increasingly obvious to her every day. “No one has even started talking about how we are going to take care of the children on this trip. If Barbara and Ruth treat them on the road the way they do at home, then you and I will be doing everything.” I knew she was right. She said we could expect no help from Tammy, who had been completely spoiled and pampered by Uncle Roy’s family. I told her that I didn’t see why we should be made to be responsible for Barbara’s and Ruth’s children. “Carolyn, it’s not about right or wrong. It’s not about fair.” Her voice was firm. “You and I are the only ones in the family fixing meals, combing hair, doing dishes, changing diapers, and cleaning. The trip won’t be any different. We can spend the next few days working around the clock trying to get ready, or we can find the responsibility dumped on us at the last minute with no way of making any provisions to care for the kids—a sad place for both of us.” I started to tremble from nervousness. I’d never had this kind of responsibility before. Cathleen did not seem scared. Nor did she ever mention the word honeymoon. I think she still held out hope that she might be able to escape from her marriage to Merril. We quietly made preparations. Forty-one people—thirty-four of them children—was too large a group to eat in restaurants. We would have to take all our food. Cathleen and I began baking bread and cookies. We packed cereal and lots of snack food such as raisins, pretzels, and gigantic bags of chips that we separated into small zip-top bags. Merril had a charge account with the local grocery store, so after Cathleen and I did five days’ worth of menu planning, we went shopping multiple times. But food was only half the battle. We had to pack clothing, bedding, and other supplies for all the children, four of whom were still in diapers. Planning and organizing were overwhelming. But the worst was yet to come.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O I I I When Dante has recovered from his confusion, and Virgil from the self-reproach caused by his momentary neglect of his charge, the Poets look west toward the mountain. The sun shines behind them and throws Dante’s shadow right before him. Now for the first time he misses Virgil’s shadow, and thinks that he has lost his companionship; but Virgil reassures him. It is nine hour agone since the sun rose in the place where lies that part of him which once cast a shadow. The nature of the aerial bodies in the spirit world is unfathomable by human philosophy, which yearns in vain for solutions of the mysteries of faith. When they arrive at the foot of the mountain, the Poets are at a loss how to scale its precipices; but at their left Dante perceives a group of souls slowly moving toward them from the south. With Virgil’s sanction they go to meet them, and by thus reversing the usual direction which the souls take, following the sun, they excite the amazement of the elect spirits from whom they inquire their way. These sheep without a shepherd—for they are the souls of such as died in contumacy against the Church, and they must dree their rebellion against the chief Shepherd by thirty times as long a space of shepherdless wandering—are yet more amazed than before when they see Dante’s shadow and hear from Virgil that he is still in the first life. They make sign to them to reverse their course; and one of them, King Manfred, when Dante has failed to recognize him, tells the story of his death at the battle of Benevento; of the pitiless persecution even of his lifeless body by the Bishop of Cosenza and Pope Clement. He declares that the Infinite Goodness hath so wide an embrace that it enfolds all who turn to it; explains the limitations of the power of the Church’s malediction, and implores the prayers of his daughter Constance. ALTHOUGH THEIR sudden flight was scattering them o’er the plain, turned to the mount where justice probes us, I drew me close to my faithful comrade; and how should I have sped without him? who would have brought me up the mountain? Gnawed he seemed to me by self-reproach. O noble conscience and clear, how sharp a sting is a little fault to thee! When his feet had lost that haste which mars the dignity of every act, my mind, that erewhile was centred within, widened its scope as in eager search, and I set my face to the hillside which rises highest heavenward from the waters. The sun, that behind us was flaming red, was broken in front of me in the figure in which it had its beams stayed by me. I turned me aside from fear of being forsaken, when I saw only before me the earth darkened.

• From Escape (2007)

  Between nursing Bryson, coping with Harrison, and trying to get my stamina back, I was not exactly in the mood to take on a big bureaucracy, but what choice did I have? I was thinking big picture. I needed a steady income, no matter how small. And I had to find a way to prove that my children were Merril’s without his knowing it. I knew that there was documentation in Merril’s office; he had birth certificates and tax returns. But how to get it was the challenge. Merril’s office was closely monitored when he was away. It was off-limits to anyone else in the family, but the door wasn’t locked. What I decided to do was wait until Merril was out of town and sneak into his office when everyone else in the house was asleep. I set my alarm for 2 A.M. I never went through more than one file at a time. It was too big a risk if I was caught. And I always brought something of Harrison’s with me—such as the dishes I used to feed him that I might be returning to the kitchen—so it would look like I was up because of him. I’d take a flashlight and would lock myself in Merril’s office. But I attempted this only when I knew Merril would be away for two nights, because once I took anything, I had to copy it the next day, then sneak it back into Merril’s office the following night. But I found a treasure trove of documentation. There were tax returns in which he claimed my children as deductions and a letter to the attorney general’s office explaining that he couldn’t pay his medical bills from his heart attack due to his large family. Then he listed all his underage children. I made about eight trips over two months collecting all the documentation I might possibly need. Once I submitted the documentation, all of my children received benefits. Merril knew about this but not how I made it happen. I dutifully turned over the $700 a month I was receiving to him. Little did he know how masterfully I’d outsmarted him. But on my first day of freedom, I called Social Security and told them I had a new address so the money would come directly to me and not to Merril. I also applied for state benefits in Utah, but that was slow going. It took several months, and there was one goof-up after another. Even though the state acknowledged that Harrison’s situation was critical, there was nothing to do to speed up the process, which was agonizingly slow. Harrison and I went for a walk at sunrise every morning after his bath. I pulled him in the wagon down to the reservoir. That black truck was still perched on the hill like a menacing shadow. I felt like I was trapped between a world of freedom and a world of slavery. The truck remained there for several weeks.

• From Escape (2007)

  This philosophy of “perfect obedience produces perfect faith” began sweeping through the community. Warren was assuming more control of the FLDS, claiming he was acting for his father. He began promoting the doctrine of perfect obedience. He preached it and talked about it on tapes, and laminated handmade signs proclaiming it were hung in nearly every home. We were told that every problem a woman faced was because she was not being perfectly obedient to her husband. Women were being instructed to listen to the whispers of God and pray to know their husband’s hearts. A wife’s goal was to be able to meet his every need without ever being asked. If she asked questions when her husband gave her an order, it was only because she still had contamination in her heart. If she was in harmony with him, God’s whisper would have made it precisely clear what was expected of her. But even if a woman did exactly what her husband demanded, he could still find fault with her and accuse her of still not being in perfect harmony with him, because otherwise she’d have understood what he really meant. Linda and I had grown close again after she returned to the community. We’d had almost no contact for nearly five years. Linda was now twenty-seven and was raising five children—her own two and her new husband’s three. She’d managed to get a nursing degree but had to quit working to take care of five preschoolers. Linda’s husband traveled a lot and she began inviting women over for coffee some mornings to break up her loneliness. These became rare forums to talk about what we felt was happening within the FLDS. Had it been known that we were meeting, we would have been reprimanded and seen as being out of harmony with our priesthood training. We kept our coffee parties secret. This was a radical departure for me. For the first time I had women friends outside my family. Compared to Merril’s other wives, I was running in a rowdy crowd and was being exposed to new viewpoints and controversial ideas. All of us, myself included, believed that Uncle Rulon was the true prophet of God, so we would never dream of criticizing anything he said or did. But that still left us room to talk about how people interpreted his teachings and how the new religious doctrines that were coming to us via Warren Jeffs were playing out in people’s lives. These women weren’t afraid to make fun of what they were seeing. “Perfect obedience” was very much on our minds. I remember the morning when one of the women said, “Remember Fascinating Womanhood? We don’t have to be fascinating anymore! The prophet has given us a new answer and we will never have to be abused again. The new answer is obedience!”

• From Escape (2007)

  The ride went smoothly for the first twenty minutes. I didn’t know where we would hide when we reached Salt Lake City. I knew Merril would come after me. I couldn’t stay with family because that would be the first place he would look. I had to find someone my husband would not expect to help us. But who? Maybe I’d knock on strangers’ doors until I found someone who would hide us. Everything changed when we came to a turn-off on the highway and headed toward Salt Lake City instead of St. George, where Harrison’s doctor worked. Betty went ballistic. “You are stealing us! Mother, you are stealing us! Uncle Warren will come and get us.” She was hysterical. “Betty, I can’t steal my own children.” “We don’t belong to you! We belong to the prophet! You have no right to us.” “We’ll see what they say in the courts.” I tried to reason with her. “In the courts real mothers have rights to their children.” Andrew, my seven-year-old, turned around to look at us. “Isn’t Mom taking us to get pictures after the doctor?” “She isn’t taking us for pictures. She’s taking us to hell.” Betty was enraged. “Why are you doing that?” little Andrew asked. “Why are you taking us to hell?” Arthur was quiet but seething. I had put us all at risk and he knew it. Finally he began yelling at Betty to shut up. “There is nothing you can do about this situation, Betty. Calm down. Just be quiet.” Arthur kept saying this over and over. Betty shouted back that the prophet would condemn me to hell. Arthur did not give up. Exhausted, Betty finally relented. Five hours later we arrived in Salt Lake City and went into hiding. For the first time in thirty-five years, I was free. I had eight children and twenty dollars to my name. Within hours, Merril was hunting me down like prey. Early Childhood I was born in the bitter cold but into warm and loving hands. Aunt Lydia Jessop was the midwife who brought me into the world on January 1, 1968, just two hours after midnight. Aunt Lydia could not believe I’d survived. She was the midwife who had delivered babies for two generations, including my mother. When she saw the placenta, she realized that my mother had chronic placental abruption. Mom had hemorrhaged throughout her pregnancy and thought she was miscarrying. But when the bleeding stopped, she shrugged it off, assuming she was still pregnant. Aunt Lydia, the midwife, said that by the time I was born, the placenta was almost completely detached from the uterus. My mother could have bled to death and I could have been born prematurely or, worse, stillborn.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Along the long hardwood hall, with its expensive rug thrown down the middle, more pictures. Upstairs, the home is shut-in and close. Downstairs, there are so many windows, so much clear light, but here it’s a cocoon, a hollow. She passes the boy’s room. On the other side of his door, there is silence. He will not move until someone comes for him. It is his nature. The girl’s door is ajar. Sylvia peers inside. Her low bed, her toys scattered everywhere. A lilac curtain thrown open. Pale light. Her sheets have been dragged from her bed. There is an ugly stain on them, something yellowing, already smelling sour. Sylvia will have to attend to this before the parents return. She leaves the doorway and turns to the parents’ bedroom. There, sure enough, the door is also ajar. Sylvia hears a repetitive creaking. She pushes the door open. The girl throws herself into the air, lands on her back, and bounds back up. “What the hell are you doing?” The girl does not answer. She uses the bed as a trampoline. The Martins have blackout curtains, and there’s just a sliver of light coming in through the tiny space between them. Everything is all velvet upholstery. It’s the sort of room that needs torchlight, which seems incongruous with the sort of brightness that overhead lighting offers. Still, Sylvia flips the switch, and the room is bathed in a harsh white light. The girl is naked. There are scratches up and down her arms, around her back. Her face is blank. She’s lands on her back, climbs to her feet, leaps again into the air, getting God knows what all over the duvet and pillows. There are twigs and dirt in her hair. How has she done this to herself? She looks like a wild thing. “Little beast,” Sylvia says. The girl makes no attempt to stop bouncing. Sylvia grabs her bare ankle. The girl begins to scream, to screech, to holler, to tear at Sylvia’s hands and arms and face. She is strong, and it takes all of Sylvia’s strength to hold her down, to shake her into stillness. “What is your problem?” She gazes up at Sylvia, and for a moment Sylvia thinks she can understand the girl. She knows what it is to be trapped inside a thing, inside a life. She knows what it is to want to tear a hole in everything. But still there is something else. This girl seems bound by nothing at all, except for the moment by Sylvia. There is nothing that can keep her inside herself. It’s the kind of life Sylvia would like to live, but she knows it’s the kind of life that is impossible because the world can’t abide a raw woman. “I know it’s hard,” Sylvia says to the girl. “But you have to try.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “Look at him, poor little fawn, shivering,” Sophie said. She left the sofa again. It gave a whine of protest, the springs shifting. She knelt near them both, close enough that Lionel could feel her, would have brushed against her if he moved. He held still. “Are you cold, Lionel? Do you need a blanket?” Lionel tried to hold himself still, but a tremor spread from the tips of his fingers back up to his wrist, to his arm, to his shoulder. He could feel something vibrate in his lower lip, the side of his face a slow-motion spasm. He tried to be still. To be easy. To be good. But they had hemmed him in. He had nowhere to go. He looked from Charles to Sophie and back, and then to the bookcase, which seemed so comically small compared to all the things it had to hold. Charles kissed his neck again, and Lionel shivered. He hated the simple, easy mechanism of it. How obvious. “What about last night, huh? You didn’t mind me biting you then.” “I don’t mind,” Lionel said. “I don’t mind it.” Charles flicked his tongue against Lionel’s ear. “God,” he said under his breath. “Please.” “How polite,” Sophie said dryly. She was close again, but she was leaning against Charles’s back, her arms wrapped around him. “So well behaved.” Lionel saw Charles look back at her, the cut of his eyes. Then he pulled his arm from Lionel and reached back to grip both of Sophie’s ankles. “Okay, that’s enough,” Charles said. Sophie ruffled Charles’s hair, and then pulled her feet free of him. She hummed to herself as she went down the hall. When they were alone, just him and Charles, Lionel tried to catch his breath. “Why is she doing this?” Lionel asked. “Doing what?” “You know what. You’re as bad as she is.” Lionel heard his voice shake. “She doesn’t care, Lionel. She doesn’t care at all.” “I know. That’s what she said.” “Then what?” “I don’t know,” Lionel said. “I don’t know. I feel weird.” Charles gave him a look that was not lacking sympathy but was a little impatient. He leaned in and pressed their mouths together. He cupped Lionel’s jaw and kissed deeper, more thoroughly, and Lionel relaxed under the steady gentleness of it. He thought of Sophie. He closed his eyes. “It’s okay,” Charles said. “It’s all right.” “What about Sophie?” “Don’t overthink it. This can be whatever you want it to be.” “I don’t know what I want it to be,” Lionel said. Charles kissed him again and then pulled away. “Okay,” Charles said. He stood up. “Okay.”