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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  FOREWORDIt’s very hard to write a foreword for a book that has shaped my life as much as it did my mother’s. Would either of us be anything without the incredible success of Fear of Flying? Would I have the career I have today, writing for Vanity Fair and punditing, if my mother had not become famous from a book she wrote before I was born? It’s an impossible question to answer, but one that I come back to again and again: how much of my success is due to hers? Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night haunted by just how much of my life is tied to her and to this book. I became a writer because I thought that was what people did. As a kid, I don’t think I even knew there were any careers besides policewoman and writer of autobiographical novels—and possibly communist who went to jail due to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Maybe I wanted to become a writer to get her to pay attention to me or to respect me or to just be interested in me. I am not sure why I fell down this very-hard-to-maneuver rabbit hole, but the minute I became a writer (I published my first book in 2000), my entire life became inextricably bound to a novel written in 1973, when I was negative five. There are many, many women (and men, too) who found themselves in the story of Isadora Wing, but I am not one of those people. When I was growing up, women my mother’s age would stop us in stores and restaurants, look earnestly into her eyes and tell her how the book had changed their lives. It changed the trajectory of my life, too, just in a completely different way. I do not have a normal relationship with the book or the author. I think of this book as the reason I have a career today but also as the anvil my mother could never get out from under. So you can see why I found this assignment very intimidating. It’s just a book, I told myself, but it’s a book that means very different things to me than it does to anyone else. I was not inspired to find sexual freedom by reading about Isadora’s adventures! In fact, I felt deeply uncomfortable with the content—but that was probably pretty healthy, since Isadora was basically my mother. On top of that, I knew many of the people the characters were based on, which adds a truly disturbing dynamic to the experience of reading such an explicit book.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  My first movement was one of repulsion and retreat. My second was like a friend’s calm hand falling upon my shoulder and bidding me take my time. I did. I came out of my daze and found myself still in Lo’s room. A full-page ad ripped out of a slick magazine was affixed to the wall above the bed, between a crooner’s mug and the lashes of a movie actress. It represented a dark-haired young husband with a kind of drained look in his Irish eyes. He was modeling a robe by So-and-So and holding a bridgelike tray by So-and-So, with breakfast for two. The legend, by the Rev. Thomas Morell, called him a “conquering hero.” The thoroughly conquered lady (not shown) was presumably propping herself up to receive her half of the tray. How her bedfellow was to get under the bridge without some messy mishap was not clear. Lo had drawn a jocose arrow to the haggard lover’s face and had put, in block letters: H.H. And indeed, despite a difference of a few years, the resemblance was striking. Under this was another picture, also a colored ad. A distinguished playwright was solemnly smoking a Drome. He always smoked Dromes. The resemblance was slight. Under this was Lo’s chaste bed, littered with “comics.” The enamel had come off the bedstead, leaving black, more or less rounded, marks on the white. Having convinced myself that Louise had left, I got into Lo’s bed and reread the letter. 17Gentlemen of the jury! I cannot swear that certain motions pertaining to the business in hand—if I may coin an expression—had not drifted across my mind before. My mind had not retained them in any logical form or in any relation to definitely recollected occasions; but I cannot swear—let me repeat—that I had not toyed with them (to rig up yet another expression), in my dimness of thought, in my darkness of passion. There may have been times—there must have been times, if I know my Humbert—when I had brought up for detached inspection the idea of marrying a mature widow (say, Charlotte Haze) with not one relative left in the wide gray world, merely in order to have my way with her child (Lo, Lola, Lolita). I am even prepared to tell my tormentors that perhaps once or twice I had cast an appraiser’s cold eye at Charlotte’s coral lips and bronze hair and dangerously low neckline, and had vaguely tried to fit her into a plausible daydream. This I confess under torture. Imaginary torture, perhaps, but all the more horrible. I wish I might digress and tell you more of the pavor nocturnus that would rack me at night hideously after a chance term had struck me in the random readings of my boyhood, such as peine forte et dure (what a Genius of Pain must have invented that!) or the dreadful, mysterious, insidious words “trauma,” “traumatic event,” and “transom.” But my tale is sufficiently incondite already.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Judy vented her frustrations with being a wife and mother in the early 1970s by putting it all into the mouth of a proxy: Ellie Newman. In the beginning of It’s Not the End of the World , mother of three Ellie is raging after Bill gets home late from work and then starts complaining that dinner is cold. The fight escalates, and Karen notes that they’ve been arguing a lot recently, including one time the previous week when Ellie baked a cake for the family and ended up smashing it on the floor. She’d frosted it with mocha icing instead of the usual chocolate. When Bill snipped that he hated mocha icing but would scrape it off, Ellie got livid and hurled the whole dessert—plate and all—to the ground. In the subsequent weeks and months, after Ellie and Bill announce their plans to split, Ellie starts opening up to Karen about why the marriage isn’t working for her. At first, she offers simple reasons: “Daddy and I just don’t enjoy being together,” Ellie tells her impatient daughter. “We don’t love each other anymore.” Soon, however, Ellie shares her intention to go back to school to study English Literature. “I had you when I was just twenty,” she says to her oldest child, Jeff, over a family dinner with the three kids. “I think I might like to get my degree. I never really had a chance to find out what I might be able to do.” The children—Jeff especially—are annoyed by this development, and even more so when Ellie changes her tune yet again and reveals that she’s taking a part-time job as a receptionist at an insurance company. At that point their aunt Ruth, who is Ellie’s overbearing older sister, questions Ellie’s judgment. “The children need you at home, Ellie,” Ruth tells her. “They’re in school all day,” Ellie assures her. “They won’t even know I’m gone.” Woven throughout the pages is the sense that Ellie is aching for purpose, a vocation to transport her beyond the walls of her home. It’s a quest that Judy—along with the feminists propelling the movement in general—knew particularly well. Writing cured Judy of the housewife’s blight. The constant buzz of ideas—which she jotted down in notebooks, on file cards, on tissues, and in the margins of old shopping lists—was better than any doctor’s prescription. A deep wound had been treated and cauterized: “It was like the bacteria, the bad bacteria was coming out that was making me sick,” Blume said at an event in 2015. “I never got sick again in the same way, that way. I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and get going.” The transformation made her wonder what her life would have been like if she’d figured this all out sooner. Thinking about it, she simultaneously resented and got sad for her mom. Essie never had anything beyond a husband and kids to keep her busy.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  I was not yet thirty when I started the book, but I felt my options were already gone.” Judy had discovered that working on a novel—from the early stage, of making up the characters, to the final phases, of polishing it with Jackson—offered her a welcome reassurance: life could still surprise her. As she chipped away at Are You There God? , she found herself diligently taking notes on a yellow pad as new ideas and themes surfaced, working out Margaret’s unique relationship with God, for instance, and how the young character felt about her pubescent body. Margaret was quite a bit easier to evoke than Winnie. Maybe it’s because in Judy’s best moments of writing, Margaret was emerging, all but fully formed, from somewhere deep inside her own consciousness. And Jackson was shaping up to be the ideal literary midwife. By the time Judy was ready to share her draft of the novel— which she plunked out on her typewriter in a wildly creative six-week burst, in between cooking, cleaning, and playing rounds of golf—she and Jackson had already established their routines. Judy would come by the Bradbury Press office, where she’d ask him to open his windows to let in some air. Then they’d sit down at his desk and talk for hours at a clip. They’d lay out the printed manuscript between them and flip through the pages, one by one. Jackson, who would have already discussed the draft with Verrone, came armed with their combined thoughts and his pencil. As he and Judy chatted, he’d scribble and erase. By the time they finished, Judy would leave with her marked-up novel, the margins filled with Jackson’s handwritten notes. With Are You There God? , one of Jackson’s biggest concerns had to do with Margaret’s new best friend, Nancy. In one of the book’s most emotional moments, Nancy sends Margaret a postcard from Washington, DC, with just three words: “I GOT IT!!!” Margaret rightly understands this to mean Nancy’s first period: a milestone that’s taken a competitive turn for the PTS’s. Margaret, feeling left behind, is devastated. “I ripped the card into tiny shreds and ran to my room,” she says in the book. “There was something wrong with me. I just knew it. I flopped onto my bed and cried.” Here, Jackson didn’t worry about the subject matter. Instead, he wondered—is Nancy telling the truth? Judy, who had been preoccupied with Margaret’s internal experience, hadn’t even considered it. But sure enough, when she thought it over, she realized that yes, Nancy was lying. In the final draft of the novel, Margaret finds out Nancy lied when she spends the day in New York City with the Wheeler family. Nancy gets her first period in the bathroom of a steak house after a trip to Radio City, and—caught with her pants down, literally—begs Margaret not to expose her to the other girls.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Ann is patient to a fault with her youngest son, barely cracking when he’s so rowdy around her husband’s biggest advertising clients that they flee the apartment, taking their account with them. Warren Hatcher, the dad, is a bit of a hothead, but Ann, a stay-at-home mom, remains steady throughout the book, at least up until the denouement when Fudge eats the turtle. “Oh no! My angel! My precious little baby!” she shouts when she realizes what he’s done. In the next book, Superfudge , Warren takes a leave from his job to write a book, and Ann considers what her life might look like after her kids are grown up. One evening, she tells Peter she’d like to go back to school and get a degree in Art History. The Hatchers have just had a third baby, nicknamed Tootsie, and Peter can’t understand why his mother would even be thinking about another major change. “Someday she’ll grow up and go to school and I’ll want to have a career,” Ann tells him. Peter is nonplussed. But by the time Superfudge was published in 1980, Judy’s own life had changed dramatically. Tales was a great success and some of her earlier novels, including Are You There God? , had found a slew of new readers after coming out in paperback. The freedom—financial, creative—emboldened her. In between Tales and Superfudge , Judy Blume became a star. Chapter Eight Mothers “One thing I’m sure of is I don’t want to spend my life cleaning some house like Ma.” Judy’s illnesses didn’t start with her marriage. She had always been a delicate kid. In seventh grade, she had a massive outbreak of eczema, worsened by an allergy to the ointment a doctor prescribed to soothe it. “This ‘flare-up,’ as the doctors called it, caused a disfiguring rash that covered my whole body,” Blume wrote in Letters to Judy . “My face swelled and my eyes shut… I felt very sorry for myself.” She got sick with mono her first semester in college and had to come home from Boston University to recuperate in New Jersey. She spent a month weak and glassy-eyed in bed, staring at the walls, and by the time she felt better, she was so embarrassed that she decided to transfer to NYU. “I never want to see Boston again,” she informed Rudolph and Essie. She needed a fresh start, somewhere she wouldn’t be the sickly girl who vanished after orientation. Her body had been uncooperative throughout much of her teens and twenties. Although there hadn’t been long-lasting repercussions of her various ailments, she could easily imagine what that might feel like for a junior high student. Deenie is the story of a thirteen-year-old aspiring model who gets diagnosed with scoliosis and has to wear a bulky back brace. But scratch the surface and you’ll see that Blume’s 1973 novel is also a story about mothers and daughters. Ellie Newman’s journey is about slow but steady self-actualization.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  . tione irrepit cubiculum et pyxidem depromit arcula; quam ego amplexus ae deosculatus prius, utque mihi prosperis faveret volatibus deprecatus, abiectis pro- pere laciniis totis, avide manus immersi et haurito plusculo uncto corporis mei membra perfricui. Iam- que alternis conatibus libratis brachiis in avem si- milem gestiebam : nec ullae plumulae nec usquam pinnulae, sed plane pili mei crassantur in saetas, sed cutis tenella duratur in corium et in extimis palmulis 134 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK III I shall become a bird, I will take heed that I come nigh no man’s house: for how prettily and wittily would these matrons handle their lovers if they were owls: for when they fly into any place by night and are taken, they are nailed upon posts, and so they are worthily rewarded with torment because it is thought that they bring evil fortune to the house by their ill-omened fight. But I pray you(which I had almost forgotten) tell me by what means, when I am an owl, I shall return to my pristine shape and become Lucius again ?" “ Fear not for that,” quoth she, “ For my mistress hath taught me the way to bring all to pass, and to turn again the figures of such as are transformed into the shapes of men. Neither think you she did it for any goodwill or favour to me, but to the end I might help her and minister this remedy to her when she returneth home. Consider, I pray you, with yourself, with what frivolous trifles and herbs so mar- vellous a thing is wrought, for I give her nothing else, save a little dill and laurel-leaves in well- water, the which she drinketh, and washeth herself withal." Which. when she had often spoken she went all trembling into the chamber, and took a box out of the coffer, which I first kissed and embraced, and prayed that I might have good success in my pur- pose to fly. And then I put off all my garments and greedily thrust my hand into the box and took out a good deal of ointment, and after that I had well rubbed every part and member of my body, I hovered with mine arms, and moved myself, looking still when I should be changed into a bird as Pam- phile was; and behold neither feathers did burgeon out nor appearance of wings, but verily my hair did turn into ruggedness and my tender skin wore tough 135

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  And then my mother would turn her hardworking, always shifting, tumbling scrutiny on me. She and I enjoyed a perfect communication, or so she said. I was a man far more mature than the riffraff she was dating. I was beautifully sensitive to the slightest shift in her moods. If I weren’t her son, I’d be her best friend—or she’d marry me. And yet (the wheels whirred faster and faster) without a man to emulate I was in danger of developing abnormally. I mustn’t be a mama’s boy, I mustn’t become effeminate. I mustn’t lean on her too much. That was the real reason she was so eager to remarry, to provide me with a suitable male role model. Children of broken homes were known to grow up wounded, their sexuality damaged. “Are you developing normally?” she asked when I was ten. I told her something that astounded her, though I thought it would please her: “I don’t want to go through puberty.” I cited my sister. “She’s already acting like a nut. I see myself standing on a hill above a lonesome valley I’ll never be able to cross. I’ll probably never be this calm again.” My sister, my mother and I—three unhappy people, and yet my mother’s ceaseless optimism didn’t even grant us the dignity of suffering. “Kids,” she said, driving us away from school on a weekday, “we’re going on vacation. Isn’t that wonderful! We’re off to Florida! Isn’t that exciting?” In every way we had more fun than other people and were superior to them. At Christmastime Mother would count up her cards as though they were a precise numerical rendering of her worth; if someone neglected to send her a card, she’d worry about it, question herself, seem wounded—and then she’d dismiss the offender from her thoughts, even her life (“He wasn’t much of a friend. I don’t know why I hang around such crummy people”). My sister and I have been left alone in the hotel room all day. Mother is off on a date after work. We’ve been instructed to take our meals in the dining room downstairs (“I’ll be home when I’m home—don’t worry about me”). I’m ten, my sister is fourteen. She’s interested in being a nurse. She has “sterilized” Mom’s scissors and tweezers under hot tap water. Out of her allowance she’s bought some gauze in a long roll. She convinces me to lie down and play sick. “You poor guy,” she says in a sweet, unfamiliar voice, “just look at this burn!” She is the consoling, sympathetic nurse. “Yeah, it really hurts. You see, I was boiling some water—” “Sh-h-h!” she urges me. In real life she’s always shutting me up; in the fiction of the hospital she’s silencing me in the interest of my recovery. “You’ll feel much better once I change your dressing.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The Polynesians, especially those on the happy isle to which fortune had blown the good doctor, countered this insecurity by carrying their babies on their backs in a sling pitched so high that Baby’s eyes peered out over Mama’s head. This literally superior position insured the infant against all future anxiety and guaranteed him a life-long serenity. Eager to spread these advantages to America, O’Reilly insisted his patients emulate the Polynesian mode of transporting a baby. I saw those patients, men and women alike, all over town, sheepishly stepping over snowdrifts or gliding down supermaket aisles, their infants, petrified with fear, squawling and clutching locks of parental hair. But this practice figured as only one of the many ways in which O’Reilly reformed our lives. Unlike those tight-ass Freudians, he said, who never suggested anything, who judged silently and interpreted rarely, he quite cheerfully broadcast his wisdom by spilling handfuls into fertile minds he himself had furrowed. He believed that since I’d missed out on a loving childhood I had to feel my way backward in time, to regress in order to be raised all over again by him. “An adult,” he said, “has no right to expect unqualified love, but a child does. That’s what I’m offering you: love with no strings tied.” He invariably made that mistake—“tied” not “attached.” Sometime during each session he would repeat this extraordinary assertion of his love, and each time I felt embarrassed, for I couldn’t help noticing how poorly he remembered the names of my parents and best friends and the major facts of my life. Perhaps foolishly, I thought of knowledge as a necessary if not sufficient condition for love. When I told him of my doubts about him he chastised me for being overly cerebral. “But you see,” he said, “that’s your unconscious pushing me aside because on some level you realize how much I love you. You’re afraid of intimacy. Real love would force you to discard the mother imago you’ve introjected.” Spring approached and the gold Buddha grew more resplendent as rain washed away winter smuts. Although we were hundreds of miles inland, on some days the air smelled of salt and I half expected to see a gull perching on the statue’s topknot like Maitreya, the Bodhisattva of the future.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Because I wouldn’t have known how to say it then, but Steve’s finger in my cunt felt good. At the same time, I knew that soft, mushy feeling to be the enemy. If I yielded to that feeling, it would be goodbye to all the other things I wanted. “You have to choose,” I told myself sternly at fourteen. Get thee to a nunnery. So, like all good nuns, I masturbated. “I am keeping myself free of the power of men,” I thought, sticking two fingers deep inside each night. Dr. Schrift didn’t understand. “Ackzept being a vohman,” he hissed from behind the couch. But at fourteen all I could see were the disadvantages of being a woman. I longed to have orgasms like Lady Chatterley’s. Why didn’t the moon turn pale and tidal waves sweep over the surface of the earth? Where was my gamekeeper? All I could see was the swindle of being a woman. I would roam through the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking for one woman artist to show me the way. Mary Cassatt? Berthe Morisot? Why was it that so many women artists who had renounced having children could then paint nothing but mothers and children? It was hopeless. If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter which way you turned. Either you drowned in domesticity (and had Walter Mittyish fantasies of escape) or you longed for domesticity in all your art. You could never escape your femaleness. You had conflict written in your very blood. Neither my good mother nor my bad mother could help me out of this dilemma. My bad mother told me she would have been a famous artist but for me, and my good mother adored me, and wouldn’t have given me up for the world. What I learned from her I learned by example, not exhortation. And the lesson was clear: being a woman meant being harried, frustrated, and always angry. It meant being split into two irreconcilable halves. “Maybe you’ll do better than me,” my good mother said. “Maybe you’ll do both, darling. But as for me, I never could.” TENFreud’s House It is really a stillborn thought to send women into the struggle for existence exactly as men. If, for instance, I imagined my sweet, gentle girl as a competitor, it would only end in my telling her, as I did seventeen months ago, that I am fond of her and that I implore her to withdraw from the strife into the calm uncompetitive activity of my home. —Sigmund Freud

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  My father, who had attended only a year or two of school, or my mother, who has never learned to read or write any language? Our tribe, too busy with the daily preoccupations of its difficult life, had no knowledge of the passionate discussions of middle-class families concerning the future of their children. My immediate future, in school, was always far too uncertain to allow any long-term planning. So I quietly made the most of this honor of having to mark time for a full year and completed a second year of the same grade, winning all the prizes. These easy prizes indeed had more influence on my future, perhaps, than any precocious success at the school certificate might have had. Toward the end of my second year, Graziani, our Italian school porter, came into the classroom one day and said to Monsieur Marzouk that the school principal wanted to speak to me. To speak to me? Me, of all people? The principal? The school principal was in our eyes a very important person, so majestic and distant that he was almost a legend. His orders were abstract commands, impersonal, communicated to us by signs like the orders of a divinity. But why to me? I could see no connection. On one or two occasions a pupil had had some contact with the principal, but always as the result of a catastrophe or some grave misdeed. The principal had, for instance, broken the news to Nataf Pipo, in the fifth year, of his mother’s death, which had occurred suddenly at ten in the morning. And Brami Pinhas, in the third year, had also been summoned to the principal’s office, because he had thrown an inkwell against the wall; he had then been expelled and subsequently became insane. My heart beat so violently I could feel it thump beneath my ribs. The orders of the principal required immediate execution, so I stood up at once and left the room, my knees already weak. I walked across the yard that was strangely empty at this hour, though intensely alive with the concealed presence of a thousand silent children. This magic silence, the unbelievable concentrate of a thousand shouts, was ready, I felt, to explode in all directions as soon as Graziani’s bell should ring.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  At inspection stations on highways entering Arizona or California, a policeman’s cousin would peer with such intensity at us that my poor heart wobbled. “Any honey?” he would inquire, and every time my sweet fool giggled. I still have, vibrating all along my optic nerve, visions of Lo on horseback, a link in the chain of a guided trip along a bridle trail: Lo bobbing at a walking pace, with an old woman rider in front and a lecherous rednecked dude-rancher behind; and I behind him, hating his fat flowery-shirted back even more fervently than a motorist does a slow truck on a mountain road. Or else, at a ski lodge, I would see her floating away from me, celestial and solitary, in an ethereal chairlift, up and up, to a glittering summit where laughing athletes stripped to the waist were waiting for her, for her. In whatever town we stopped I would inquire, in my polite European way, anent the whereabouts of natatoriums, museums, local schools, the number of children in the nearest school and so forth; and at school bus time, smiling and twitching a little (I discovered this tic nerveux because cruel Lo was the first to mimic it), I would park at a strategic point, with my vagrant schoolgirl beside me in the car, to watch the children leave school—always a pretty sight. This sort of thing soon began to bore my so easily bored Lolita, and, having a childish lack of sympathy for other people’s whims, she would insult me and my desire to have her caress me while blue-eyed little brunettes in blue shorts, copperheads in green boleros, and blurred boyish blondes in faded slacks passed by in the sun. As a sort of compromise, I freely advocated whenever and wherever possible the use of swimming pools with other girl-children. She adored brilliant water and was a remarkably smart diver. Comfortably robed, I would settle down in the rich postmeridian shade after my own demure dip, and there I would sit, with a dummy book or a bag of bonbons, or both, or nothing but my tingling glands, and watch her gambol, rubber-capped, bepearled, smoothly tanned, as glad as an ad, in her trim-fitted satin pants and shirred bra. Pubescent sweetheart! How smugly would I marvel that she was mine, mine, mine, and revise the recent matitudinal swoon to the moan of the mourning doves, and devise the late afternoon one, and slitting my sun-speared eyes, compare Lolita to whatever other nymphets parsimonious chance collected around her for my anthological delectation and judgment; and today, putting my hand on my ailing heart, I really do not think that any of them ever surpassed her in desirability, or if they did, it was so two or three times at the most, in a certain light, with certain perfumes blended in the air—once in the hopeless case of a pale Spanish child, the daughter of a heavy-jawed nobleman, and another time—mats je divague.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot.” Eliza yawns loudly. “Will everyone be there?” “I hope so.” Miri doesn’t ask who Eliza means by everyone. Maybe the boys and their friends. Silence. “Eliza...are you still there?” “Where else would I be?” “Okay, then,” Miri says, trying her best to keep it upbeat, positive. “Take care and I’ll see you soon. Bye, honey.” Eliza shouts, “You know I don’t like goodbyes!” She slams down the receiver. How is it that Miri, who longed for a daughter after two sons, has wound up with an angry, sullen child like Eliza? She’s still trying to figure out where it went wrong but can’t put her finger on it. She unpacks, hanging up her suit for tomorrow, and sets her toiletries on the little shelf above the bathroom sink. She studies herself in the mirror. It’s unsettling how different she looks away from home, away from the familiar reflection in her bathroom mirror. Last time she looked at herself in a mirror in Elizabeth she was fifteen and growing out her Elizabeth Taylor haircut. Now she’s fifty. Jesus, fifty! And her hair is long, lightly permed, with golden highlights. An improvement, she thinks. She’s in good shape, runs five miles a day, but instead of running from someone—Rusty, Mason, Natalie—the way she did that year, she runs to clear her head, to give herself a burst of energy that carries her through the day. Christina has been trying to prepare her for seeing Mason tomorrow by dishing out small bits of information—his wife, Rebecca, will be visiting her ailing parents in Sarasota, his daughter and twin sons are all at college—but Miri hasn’t been willing to talk about it. “Please...” she said to Christina. “That was so long ago. We were just kids.” She knows Christina doesn’t buy her nonchalance but she lets it go. Miri can’t admit she’s nervous about seeing him. Come on, who wouldn’t be nervous about seeing her first love? Who wouldn’t want her old boyfriend to find her attractive? If you don’t want that, you don’t go to high school reunions, you don’t go to the thirty-fifth commemoration of the worst year of your life. Besides, she’s not fifteen anymore. She’s not that girl whose heart was broken on a sunny afternoon in May. She’s a woman, married with three children and a career. She’s responsible, dependable, mature. Right? she asks herself. Right, she

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  At the Gare du Nord, I find a telephone and try to place a person-to-person call. But I’ve forgotten every word of French I ever knew and the operator’s English leaves much to be desired. After an absurd dialogue, many mistakes, bleeps and wrong numbers, I am put through to my own home number. The operator asks for “le Docteur Wing,” and far off, as if under the whole Atlantic Ocean, I hear the voice of the girl who has sublet our apartment for the summer. “He’s not here. He’s in Vienna.” “Madame, le Docteur est à Vienne,” the operator echoes. “Ce n’est pas possible!” I yell—but that’s the extent of my French. As the operator begins to argue with me, I become increasingly tongue-tied. Once, years ago, when I traveled here as a college student, I could speak this language. Now I can hardly even speak English. “He must be there!” I shout. Where is he if not at home? And what on earth will I do with my life without him? I quickly put through a call to Bennett’s oldest friend, Bob, who has our car for the summer. Bennett would be sure to contact him first. Surprisingly, Bob is home. “Bob—it’s me—Isadora—I’m in Paris. Is Bennett there?” Bob’s voice comes back faintly. “I thought he was with you.” And then silence. We’ve been cut off. Only it is not quite total silence. Is that the sound of the ocean I’m hearing—or do I imagine it? I feel a tiny rivulet of sweat trickle down between my breasts. Suddenly Bob’s voice surfaces again. “What happened? Did you have a…” Then gurgling interference. Then silence. I envision some giant fish gnawing on the Atlantic cable. Every time the fish chomps down, Bob’s voice goes dead. “Bob!” “I can’t hear you. I said: did you have a fight?” “Yes. It’s too hard to explain. It’s awful. It’s all my…” “What? I can’t hear you…. Where’s Bennett?” “That’s why I’m calling you.” “What? I didn’t catch that.” “Shit. I can’t hear you either…. Listen, if he calls, tell him I love him” “What?” “Tell him I’m looking for him.” “What? I can’t hear you.” “Tell him I want him.” “What? I can’t hear you.” “Tell him I want him.” “What? Would you repeat that?” “This is impossible.” “I can’t hear you.” “Just tell him that I love him.” “What? This is a horrible conn…” We are cut off for the last time. The operator’s voice intervenes with the news that I owe 129 new francs and 34 centimes. “But I couldn’t hear anything!” The operator insists that I owe it anyway. I go to the telephone cashier, look in my wallet and find I have no francs at all, old or new. So I have to go through the hassle of changing money and fighting with the cashier, but finally I pay. It’s just too much trouble to protest further.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Christina Dr. O seemed tense at the office. Daisy was sweeping up more figurines than usual. Christina kept count of them. One day there were five dwarfs left on the shelf, and the next, only three. A few days later Daisy took her aside. “He can’t decide whether to take the offer to open a practice in Las Vegas or not. His friends are building a modern medical-dental center and they’re begging him to come. If he does, I’m willing to go with him. What about you, Christina—would you consider starting a new life after graduation?” “You mean move to Las Vegas?” “If he decides to go.” “I don’t know. Jack would have to want to go, too.” “You should tell him there will be great jobs for an electrician out there. Think of all the hotels they’re building.” “But it’s so far away.” “It is far away. I can’t deny that.” “My parents...” “I know. It’s hard to leave family behind.” “They’d never agree to let me go.” “But you’d have plenty of vacation time to come home and visit. And you could make it a two-year commitment, like going away to college, except instead of paying, you get paid. You’d make good money, too.” “But I wouldn’t know anyone.” “You’d know me. And Dr. O. And you and Jack would make new friends.” “Jack is 1-A. He could get called up at any time.” “Let’s hope that ridiculous war ends before then.” “Daisy—can I tell you something? You’d have to keep it to yourself. I mean it, no one can know. But if I don’t tell someone, I’m going to explode.” “You can trust me, Christina.” “I know I can.” Daisy waited for more. Christina finally bit the bullet and blurted out, “Jack and I are secretly married. We eloped to Elkton.” Daisy came out from behind her desk. “Oh, Christina.” She put her arms around her. “I hope you’ll be very happy.” Then, “You didn’t have to get married, did you?” Christina laughed. “No. And that doctor you sent me to...he fitted me for a diaphragm so I won’t have to worry.” “When are you going to tell your parents?” “I haven’t figured that out yet.” “Well, don’t say anything about Las Vegas yet. First, Dr. O has to make up his mind. But I have a feeling he’s going to do it, and I admit I’m kind of excited about going. I’m starting to feel like a pioneer.” A pioneer, Christina thought. The Wild West. She’d have to learn to ride a horse, she supposed. The idea of it made her giddy.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The necessity of being constantly on the lookout for his little moustache and open shirt—or for his baldish pate and broad shoulders—led me to a profound study of all cars on the road—behind, before, alongside, coming, going, every vehicle under the dancing sun: the quiet vacationist’s automobile with the box of Tender-Touch tissues in the back window; the recklessly speeding jalopy full of pale children with a shaggy dog’s head protruding, and a crumpled mudguard; the bachelor’s tudor sedan crowded with suits on hangers; the huge fat house trailer weaving in front, immune to the Indian file of fury boiling behind it; the car with the young female passenger politely perched in the middle of the front seat to be closer to the young male driver; the car carrying on its roof a red boat bottom up … The gray car slowing up before us, the gray car catching up with us. We were in mountain country, somewhere between Snow and Champion, and rolling down an almost imperceptible grade, when I had my next distinct view of Detective Paramour Trapp. The gray mist behind us had deepened and concentrated into the compactness of a Dominion Blue sedan. All of a sudden, as if the car I drove responded to my poor heart’s pangs, we were slithering from side to side, with something making a helpless plap-plap-plap under us. “You got a flat, mister,” said cheerful Lo.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Everyone knew Eleanor was the smartest person in their class. So when she said sabotage the rest of them went scrambling for the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Natalie watched but said nothing while the other kids went on and on, their stories of aliens, zombies and sabotage growing from possibility to probability. She shook her head once or twice as if to tell them they had it all wrong, but no one was watching besides Miri. What did Natalie know, or think she knew? They had another safety drill before lunch, proving Mr. Royer, the principal, also believed they were jinxed. A Condolence Call to Mrs. BarnesOn their way to pay a condolence call to Mrs. Barnes, Rusty insisted that Miri practice saying, I’m sorry for your loss. Mrs. Barnes lived in an apartment house on Elmora Avenue near Magie. I’m sorry for your loss, I’m sorry for your loss, Miri repeated. They’d left their house as soon as Rusty had come home from work, run a comb through her hair, freshened her lipstick and spritzed herself with Arpège. “If she offers her hand,” Rusty said, “you shake it.” “ ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ shake shake.” “This is not the time for sarcasm, Miri.” When is the time for sarcasm, Mom? Miri would have liked to say, but she knew better. Instead she said, “I’m not being sarcastic. It’s just…you’re treating me like a six-year-old.” “You’ve never been in this situation and I’m trying to help you through it.” “Nobody’s ever been in this situation.” “Not true, Miri. We’ve been through a war, remember? And we’re fighting another one now. Some mother loses a son every day.” “Can you fight two wars at the same time?” “You mean Korea and something else?” Rusty asked. “Yes, Korea and something else.” “I hope that’s never going to happen. Things are bad enough with Korea.” “So that means it’s a good time to attack us, because we’re busy fighting in Korea. Korea is a distraction, right?” “I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” Rusty said. “Never mind,” Miri told her. She heard Eleanor’s voice in her head. Korea is a distraction. Corinne was at Mrs. Barnes’s apartment, but there was no sign of the rest of the family, which surprised Miri. The small living room was crowded with family and friends who had come to pay their respects to Mrs. Barnes. Mrs. Jones was in the tiny kitchen with her daughter Jamison, serving up plates of sandwiches and cookies. I’m sorry for your loss, Miri practiced inside her head. But it turned out she didn’t get to say it to Mrs. Barnes because Mrs. Barnes was in her bedroom and didn’t come out. The other son was there, so Miri said it to him. And the daughter from Pennsylvania with her husband and little girl. “I’m sorry for your loss.” She felt like an idiot saying it. Each of them took her hand and said, “Thank you.” It wasn’t as hard as she’d thought.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “I’m not exactly his granddaughter.” “But close to it,” Mason said. “Thank you and thank Mr. Ben,” she said to Miri, right before she threw her arms around Mason. “Oh, this wonderful boy. I don’t want to lose. I’ll miss too much. Maybe we should go, too. What you think, Stash? Should we go with Mason, far away?” She knew, too? Stash said, “No, Mama. I like it here.” “He loves new apartment. But I love this handsome boy!” She squished those big breasts against Mason and was headed for a kiss on his mouth, but Mason turned his head at the last minute and the kiss landed on the side of his face, leaving a big red lipstick splotch. Mason untangled himself, never taking his eyes off Miri, as if to say, It’s not my fault, I don’t know what’s going on here...don’t blame me... For a minute Miri’s eyes questioned him, while Polina went on and on. “This wonderful, strong, brave boy.” Polina must have noticed the look on Miri’s face because she said, “Oh no! Mason, you have girlfriend and you didn’t tell me?” She pretend-slapped the side of her head and tried to laugh, not a genuine laugh, a nervous laugh. “I love him like mother,” she told Miri, recognizing her mistake. She could probably get fired for having a thing with one of the boys at Janet. “You understand? Like mother loves son.” Miri never saw a mother kiss her son that way. “I hope my Stash grows up strong and brave like Mason.” Miri didn’t say anything. She and Mason just looked at each other while Polina dug herself in deeper. Stash tugged on Mason’s arm. “Come for sleepover so we can play. Mama has big new bed. I have new bed.” Come for sleepover? Mama has big new bed? Miri felt the panic rising, her heart pounding, the urge to run too strong to resist. She took off, running for her life, leaving her books behind, leaving everything behind. “Miri, wait!” Mason chased after her. “It’s not what you think.” She stopped abruptly and faced him, this boy she loved totally, absolutely, this boy she’d trusted with all her heart, with all her soul. She was crying now, she

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  (I liked that we .) “But she’s got us pegged all wrong.” He raced about the room turning off lights and saying over and over again. “Ooh-la-la,” as though sexual adventure must be French. In the past, whenever the Scotts had come close to a decisive action, they’d annihilated it through paralyzing discussion. That’s what kept them together, I imagine, their Sisyphean talk. He’d annoy her, she’d lapse into ponderous, savage silence, he’d cajole her out of it, she’d tongue-lash him, he’d whimper, then cringingly strike back, she’d retreat, he’d pursue—and all these feints and thrusts they simultaneously analyzed from so many angles and with such a strange blend of vanity, self-hatred, Christian moralizing and cross-cultural reference that finally nothing took place. Rachel didn’t walk out on DeQuincey. DeQuincey didn’t burn his poems, his “life work,” as he threatened to. She didn’t send Tim off to her monster father in Miami (“At least he’s a real man, and absolute evil is preferable, far preferable to your mauvais foi ”). He didn’t run away to become an Augustinian. She didn’t turn on the gas to asphyxiate them all. None of this happened. They outsat each other, the air turned blue with tobacco smoke, irony and exhaustion. Dawn made its killjoy appearance, like a parent returning home to halt the children’s party, by now a seedy, nearly comatose event. But tonight talk wasn’t sapping resolve. In fact tonight the Scotts seemed in collusion, as though they’d decided in advance to seduce me. Given my failure with the black prostitute, I feared I wouldn’t be able to get it up for any woman, much less a teacher’s wife. But I didn’t want to be the one to back down. When we all three finally got into bed, DeQuincey kept the wisecracks coming. He was the eternal kid who’s forgotten to change his underwear, who keeps his socks on and can hardly wait to dive in (“Oh boy, oh boy”). Rachel, however, lost her bravado. She wasn’t frightened or ashamed but she was shy, even a little romantic. She lay between us. DeQuincey took no interest in me; perhaps Christ really had driven out all his homosexual devils. As it ended up, he mounted her while I stroked her face. When we were all dressed again, the Scotts seemed exhilarated—too much so, to my mind, considering how little had happened. Only gradually did I come to understand that whereas the Scotts certainly did have a serious Anglican admiration of sin, they had an equally strong horror of seeming to themselves bourgeois. Their desire to be bohemian outweighed their resolve to be good. Our “orgy,” as they called it, reassured them that their morality must be of a higher sort, no mere suburban primness.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I now think it was a great mistake to move east again and have her go to that private school in Beardsley, instead of somehow scrambling across the Mexican border while the scrambling was good so as to lie low for a couple of years in subtropical bliss until I could safely marry my little Creole for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands and ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of insanity to the other—from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporated—to the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l’âge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillard encore vert—or was it green rot?—bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad. In the days of that wild journey of ours, I doubted not that as father to Lolita the First I was a ridiculous failure. I did my best; I read and reread a book with the unintentionally biblical title Know Your Own Daughter, which I got at the same store where I bought Lo, for her thirteenth birthday, a de luxe volume with commercially “beautiful” illustrations, of Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. But even at our very best moments, when we sat reading on a rainy day (Lo’s glance skipping from the window to her wrist watch and back again), or had a quiet hearty meal in a crowded diner, or played a childish game of cards, or went shopping, or silently stared, with other motorists and their children, at some smashed, blood-bespattered car with a young woman’s shoe in the ditch (Lo, as we drove on: “That was the exact type of moccasin I was trying to describe to that jerk in the store”); on all those random occasions, I seemed to myself as implausible a father as she seemed to be a daughter. Was, perhaps, guilty locomotion instrumental in vitiating our powers of impersonation? Would improvement be forthcoming with a fixed domicile and a routine schoolgirl’s day?

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Right before the controversial books were unshelved from all four high school libraries in the district, Pico said that board members had traveled upstate to attend a conference hosted by the conservative group Parents of New York United. The list of “objectionable” titles came directly from there. “They [the members] did not read the books in their entirety,” Pico explained. “They used a handful of excerpts, a handful of words, a handful of vulgarities to make these books look bad.” Pico, who was lead plaintiff, was deeply invested in the case, but aside from his four co-plaintiffs, his peers weren’t nearly as moved by the issue. The vast majority of his classmates were more concerned about getting into college than they were in taking up the anti-censorship mantle. Even his own family “had a lot of doubts,” he told CNN. “They were not particularly supportive of the lawsuit because they thought it was perceived as troublemaking and that I might not get into college.” But Pico felt like the suit was a calling. He did, in fact, get accepted to Haverford College. And over the next few years, he appeared on Phil Donahue’s show and spoke on panels with Vonnegut and Alice Childress, whose 1973 novel A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich , about a thirteen-year-old getting hooked on heroin, was also being challenged. Initially, a federal district court ruled in favor of the board’s prerogative to remove books on moral or political grounds. Then, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed that decision. The issue went all the way up to the Supreme Court in the early 1980s, with Pico shoring up continued legal support from the New York chapter of the ACLU. In June 1982, the Supreme Court ruled for Pico, with the 5-4 majority arguing that elected school boards do not have the authority to remove books from circulation simply because they dislike them. After that, Long Island officials bickered about how exactly to reinstate the titles; board members tried out a system where the books in question were returned to the libraries but stamped with red ink that said “Parental notification required.” The New York attorney general disagreed with that practice, too, stating that it violated protections around the confidentiality of library records. In the meantime, Pico graduated and took a job in New York with the National Coalition Against Censorship, which was founded in 1974. Ultimately, in January 1983, the school board relented and voted to return the books to shelves without restrictions. But they weren’t happy about it. “Until the day I die, I refuse to budge on my position,” board member Christina Fasulo told the New York Times , representing the minority opinion in the proceedings. “Since when is it demeaning to take filth off library shelves?” The Island Trees school board didn’t go after Judy Blume’s books, but around the same time, in Loveland, Colorado, her novels caught the attention of another group of motivated conservative parents.