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 The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Mostly they wanted their children to have protected years, which as loving parents they could relive with them and through them and enjoy vicariously. Children were also welcome because, despite their own experiences, the women and men felt that children would strengthen the marital bond. Women who missed their fathers while growing up treasured watching their husbands care for and interact with their children. Their yearning for the “dad I never had” was vanquished in part by seeing the smiles on their children’s faces as Daddy walked through the door and by the squeals of laughter that accompanied games of horsy or piggyback. For women, the decision to have a child was also mixed because it brought up again the issue of whether or not they could trust their husbands to be there. In fact, a fifth of the children were born out of wedlock, and none of the women in this group was in a stable or even a good relationship during the pregnancy. Most of these single mothers are having a very difficult time. Only a few have found stable partners and they are not working in jobs that pay well. After one or more abortions, they had decided to bring the child to term. Most had wanted a baby since early adolescence to offset their loneliness. These women spoke about their children with great love, and the ones I saw were well cared for at great sacrifice by mothers who had only a little help from their families. For the women who had children within a marriage, several obsessed about whether they should take their husband’s name because in the case of divorce, they reasoned, he might be more likely to provide support for a child that bore his name. The decision of some women to quit work full-time was also colored by their fear of relying on the continued presence of their husband to provide for the family. They also struggled with how many children to have. Most opted for one or two. A few had three. Every part of their lives—in love, marriage, and parenthood—evoked new promises and old disappointments. The men spoke of their growing wish to become fathers in the context of their relationships. One young man told me, “I think I’m finally ready to be a doting father.” Unlike men from intact families, they did not take fatherhood for granted.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I succeeded in maintaining order in Syria, but could see flame in the eyes of beggars sitting at the doors of the synagogues, and mute sneers on the heavy lips of the camel drivers, a hatred which after all we did not merit. The Jews and Arabs had made common cause from the beginning against a war which threatened to ruin their commerce; but Israel took advantage of the times to throw itself against a world from which it was excluded by its religious frenzies, its strange rites, and the intransigence of its god. The emperor, returned with all speed to Babylon, delegated Quietus to chastise the rebel cities: Gyrene, Edessa, Seleucia, great Greek centers of the Orient, were set on fire as punishment for treasons planned at mere caravan stops or contrived and directed from Jewries. Some time later, in visiting these cities for reconstruction, I passed beneath colonnades in ruins and between rows of broken statues. The emperor Osro�s, who had subsidized these revolts, immediately took the offensive; Abgar rose up in resistance to re-enter demolished Edessa; our Armenian allies, on whom Trajan had thought he could depend, lent a helping hand to the Persian war lords. Without warning, the emperor found himself at the center of an immense field of battle where he had to face the enemy on all sides. He wasted the winter in the siege of Hatra, a virtually impregnable fortress situated in the heart of a desert; it cost our army some thousands of deaths. His stubbornness became more and more a form of personal courage: this ailing man would not let go. I knew from Plotina that Trajan still refused to name his heir, in spite of the admonition of a brief paralytic attack. If this imitator of Alexander were to die, in his turn, of fever or intemperance in some unhealthy corner of Asia this foreign war would be complicated by civil war; a struggle to the death would break out between my supporters and those of Celsus or of Palma. Suddenly reports ceased almost completely; the thin line of communication between the emperor and me was maintained only by the Numidian bands of my worst enemy. It was at this period that I ordered my physician for the first time to mark with red ink on my chest the position of my heart; if it came to the worst, I did not intend to fall, alive, into Lusius Quietus' hands. The difficult task of pacifying the adjacent islands and provinces was now added to the other duties of my office, but the exhausting work of daytime was nothing in comparison with the length of the restless nights. All the problems of the empire fell upon me at once, but my own plight weighed upon me even more. I desired the supreme power. I desired it that I might put my own plans into effect, try my remedies, and restore peace.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  But as children they did not mention these events and as adults they did not recall such dinners in their memories of growing up. Even the children in the remarried families did not talk about their family dinners together except early on in the remarriage when the children wondered where the new stepparent would sit and whether he would occupy Dad’s or Mom’s vacant place. Somehow these occasions lacked the symbolic power of belonging to a family, as they did for children in intact homes. A Sense of History WITH THE VISION of a mom and dad at either end of a dinner table, I said to Gary, “Tell me about your folks.” Gary leaned back and stretched out his long legs. Suddenly he jumped up, went over to the piano, and brought back a framed photograph. “This will help to explain it,” he said, handing it to me. “It’s my favorite picture of my parents.” Taken when Gary’s parents were in their twenties, the father was leaning casually against a tree, his head thrown back, laughing. He was tall and fair, with tightly curled blond hair, and he wore sideburns, which were then very fashionable. Gary’s mother was much shorter than her husband and had very dark, exotic, Barbra Streisand—like looks. She was standing in profile, both hands around one of her husband’s arms, looking intently up at him. “That’s kind of how they are,” Gary continued, as both of us gazed at the photo. “They’re so different but I think that’s what brought them together, being really different. Later on, though, it caused a lot of friction.” He set the picture on the coffee table in front of us. “I’d like to hear about them.” Gary then launched into a detailed description of his parents’ courtship—who said what, when, and where, almost as if he’d been a fly on the wall. As he talked, I mentally added him to the growing list of other children from intact families who recounted similar courtship stories. They described how their parents decided to have children, a fact (or myth) that was important because it cemented their sense of being wanted from the outset. In hearing these stories, I realized again how much these young adults saw themselves within the context of their family’s history—and how children of divorce did not share this feeling. If the latter knew the story of their parents’ courtship, they didn’t mention it spontaneously. It probably would have been painful for them to think about. In some interviews, children of divorce asked me to repeat what they’d said at earlier meetings as if to turn the pages of an imaginary family photo album, enabling them to reconnect with the past. The loss of continuity with family history is a consequence of divorce that we have overlooked.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  The child of divorce is thought to experience one huge loss of the intact family after which stability and a second, happier marriage comes along. But this is not what happens to most children of divorce. They experience not one, not two, but many more losses as their parents go in search of new lovers or partners. Each of these “transitions” (as demographers call them) throws the child’s life into turmoil and brings back painful reminders of the first loss. National studies show that the more transitions there are, the more the child is harmed because the impact of repeated loss is cumulative. 1 The prevalence of this instability in the lives of these children hasn’t been properly weighed or even recognized by most people. While we do have legal records of second, third, and fourth remarriages and divorces, we have no reliable count of how many live-in or long-term lovers a child of divorce will typically encounter. Children observe each of their parents’ courtships with a mixture of excitement and anxiety. For adolescents, the erotic stimulation of seeing their parents with changing partners can be difficult to contain. Several young teenage girls in the study began their own sexual activity when they observed a parent’s involvement in a passionate affair. Children and adolescents watch their parents’ lovers, with everything from love to resentment, hoping for some clue about the future. They participate actively as helper, critic, and audience and are not afraid to intervene. One mother returning home from a date found her school-age children asleep in her bed. Since they’d told her earlier that they didn’t like her boyfriend, she took the hint. Many new lovers are attentive to the children, regularly bringing little gifts. But even the most charming lovers can disappear overnight. Second marriages with children are much more likely to end in divorce than first marriages. Thus the child’s typical experience is not one marriage followed by one divorce, but several or sometimes many relationships for both their mother and father followed by loss or by eventual stability. 2 Karen’s experience is typical of many that I have seen. Her father’s second wife, who was nice to the children, left without warning three years into the marriage. After she was gone, her father had four more girlfriends who caused him a great deal of suffering when they also left. Karen’s mother had three unhappy love affairs prior to her remarriage, which ended after five years. Obviously Karen and her siblings experienced more than “one divorce.” Their childhoods were filled with a history of new attachments followed by losses and consequent distress for both parents. Karen’s brother, at age thirty, told me: “What is marriage? Only a piece of paper and a piece of metal. If you love someone, it breaks your heart.” In this study, only 7 of the original 131 children experienced stable second marriages in which they had good relationships with a stepparent and stepsiblings on both sides of the divorced family.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  In case of disaster they would know how to rally round me the fidelity of a part of the army. My adversaries would have to reckon with the presence of this aged sufferer from gout, who was setting forth only in order to serve me, and with this woman who could exact of herself the long endurance of a soldier. I watched them depart, the emperor on horseback, firm and admirably placid, the patient group of women borne in litters, Praetorian guards mingled with the Numidian scouts of the redoubtable Lusius Quietus. The army, which had passed the winter on the banks of the Euphrates, moved forward as soon as its chief arrived; the Parthian campaign was beginning in earnest. First reports were magnificent: Babylon conquered, the Tigris crossed, Ctesiphon fallen. Everything, as always, gave way before the astonishing mastery of this man. The prince of Characene Arabia declared his allegiance, opening thus the entire course of the Tigris to the Roman barges. The emperor embarked for the port of Charax at the head of the Persian Gulf. He was nearing the fabled shores. My fears persisted, but I hid them like something criminal; to be right too soon is to be in the wrong. Worse still, I was beginning to doubt my judgment; had I been guilty of that base incredulity which keeps us from recognizing the grandeur of a man whom we know too well? I had forgotten that certain beings shift the boundaries of destiny and alter history thereby. I had uttered blasphemy against the Genius of the emperor. I was consumed with anxiety at my post: if by chance the impossible were to take place, was I to play no part? Since everything is always easier than to exercise common sense, the desire seized me to don once more the coat of mail of the Sarmatian wars, using Plotina's influence to have myself recalled to the army. I envied the least of our soldiers their lot on the dusty roadways of Asia and the shock of their encounter with Persia's mailed battalions. This time the Senate voted the emperor the right to celebrate not one triumph but a succession of triumphs which would last as long as he lived. I myself did what the occasion demanded: I ordered festivities and went to offer sacrifice on the summit of Mount Casius. Suddenly the fire which was smoldering in that land of the Orient burst forth everywhere at one time. The Jewish merchants refused to pay tax at Seleucia; Gyrene straightway revolted, and the Oriental element of the city massacred the Greek element; the roads by which Egyptian grain was brought to our troops were cut by a band of Zealots from Jerusalem; at Cyprus the Greek and Roman residents were seized by the Jewish populace, who forced them to slay each other in gladiatorial combats.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘For God’s sake!’ The reply was desperate, muffled and close at hand. ‘Open the bloody door—please!’ I can only have taken a second to work this out, but already there came the pent-up banging I’d heard before. I crossed the room to a smaller door whose handle I tried and a moment later turned its stiff brass key; it was a door which was rarely locked, but which, gratifyingly, still could be if need be. Charles was not gratified. He had retreated to the other side of what was evidently a little dressing-room, with a chest-of-drawers, an open wardrobe, and a corner washbasin against which he leant, red in the face, his tie and collar undone, a look of both apprehension and fury on his face. He made me think of a boxer, penned in his corner, honour-bound to make a final and fatal sortie. He had no idea who I was. ‘Where’s Lewis?’ Though questioning me he seemed to look through me. He was out of breath. ‘Has Graham gone?’ I went towards him with my arms open, but he stepped forward with no purpose of greeting or reconciliation. He lurched past me, though I turned to support him and in the event merely pawed at his shoulder, and followed him closely into the bedroom. There he grappled with a chair which was lying on its side on the floor; the stooping and the effort seemed too much and I stepped around him to help. ‘Charles, it’s William.’ He took no notice of this until he had righted the chair, and dropped on to it heavily. Then he looked at me silently and intently. ‘They’ve gone,’ he said, after a while in which I squatted in front of him and watched him with an anxious smile. ‘They locked me in there—or Lewis did. He didn’t want me to get involved. Look at this room.’ Already Charles was struggling to his feet, though he reached towards me, and I felt he had gone through a transformation, and while doubting its logic, accepted that I was there. I held his considerable weight against me, while his left arm draped round my shoulders and we tottered towards the bed like a pair of drunks. When we got to it he held out his other arm in an eloquent gesture of amazement and desolation.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  [image file=image_rsrc3P5.jpg] CHAPTER 11The Queering of Homo sapiensFor decades, those iconic New Yorker couple-in-bed cartoons portrayed exclusively heterosexual couples. Like many American cultural institutions, however, The New Yorker has slowly begun to acknowledge the existence of gay and lesbian couples and to include them in occasional couple-in-bed cartoons. The first ones have been quite prim in comparison to the frequent depictions of postcoital heterosexual couples under rumpled sheets, and, indeed, one of the earliest gay-couple-in-bed cartoons insightfully explored the anxiety surrounding the awkward intercultural negotiation required to bring the simple fact of gay couples sharing a bed into the public conversation. In a brilliant 1999 cartoon by William Haefeli, two men, fully clothed in winter overcoats, are lying next to each other on a smallish, bare mattress among many in a big department store showroom. One man comments to his partner, “I still think we should get a queen-sized mattress—despite the obvious jokes it will invite among the sales staff.” Like traditional New Yorker cartoons, the previous chapters on the evolution of human sexuality in this book could be viewed as reinforcing a heteronormative concept of “human nature”—the idea that heterosexuality is the only “natural” human sexual behavior, the only one that is somehow sanctioned by evolutionary science. However, diversity of sexual preference is a profoundly human characteristic that must be accounted for in any natural history of human desire. Sexual diversity poses distinct challenges to evolutionary explanation. How can evolution account for sexual behavior that is not directly related to reproduction—sperm meets egg? One of the most exciting aspects of this emerging theory of aesthetic evolution is the possibility that it sheds light on this enduring mystery of variation in human sexual desire. Understanding the origin of variations in sexual desire requires that we focus specifically on the evolution of the subjective desires of individuals—that is, the individual aesthetic experiences of sexual attraction. I will not be talking here about the evolution of sexual identity—that is, the conceptual categories of heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and so on. The idea that sexual behavior is a marker or definition of a person’s identity is actually a quite modern, cultural invention—perhaps only 150 years old. Because we live in a society that is accustomed to conceiving of sexual behavior in terms of sexual identity, we tend to think that sexual identity categories are biologically real and, therefore, require scientific explanation. The problem is that scientific research on the origin of “homosexuality” seeks to explain the evolution of a social construct. As David Halperin, professor of English at the University of Michigan, explained to me, “Proposing a theory about the evolution of homosexuality is like proposing a theory of the evolution of hipsters or yuppies!” Sure enough, an ample scientific literature on the “evolution of homosexuality” gets this issue mostly wrong and has undermined itself as a result.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  This is far and beyond what most adolescents are expected to achieve. Given the normal challenges of growing up—which they had to accomplish on their own—it’s no surprise that children of divorce get waylaid by ill-fated love affairs and similar derailments. Most are well into their late twenties and thirties before they graduate into adulthood. My analysis may not seem to match the pseudomaturity exhibited by many children of divorce who often appear on a fast track to adulthood. Compared with youngsters from more protected families, they get into the trappings of adolescent culture at an earlier age. Sex, drugs, and alcohol are rites of passage into being accepted by an older crowd. At the same time, they’re independent and justifiably proud of their ability to make their own decisions and to advise their parents. But let’s not be fooled by the swagger. The developmental path from adolescence into adulthood is thrown out of sync after divorce. Many children of divorce can’t get past adolescence because they cannot bring closure to the normal process of separating from their parents. In the normal course of adolescence, children spend several years in a kind of push and pull pas de deux with their parents, slowly weaning themselves from home. But Karen hardly experienced this separation process. By the time she left for college at age eighteen, she was still tied to her parents by her needs and theirs. And she was not alone. By late adolescence most children of divorce are more tied to their parents and paradoxically more eager to let go than their peers in intact families. Like the folk story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, the divorce is as sticky as the tar that held the rabbit. The young people want out but can’t move on because of unfinished business at home. Children of divorce are held back from adulthood because the vision of it is so frightening. From the outset, they are more anxious and uncomfortable with the opposite sex and it’s harder for them to build a relationship and gradually give it time to develop. Feeling vulnerable, bewildered, and terribly alone, and driven by biology and social pressures, these young men and women throw themselves into a shadow play of the real thing involving sex without love, passion without commitment, togetherness without a future. (We’ll explore what happens to children of divorce who marry impulsively and early marriages in Chapter 14.) The fact that Karen and others were able to turn their lives around is very good news for all of us who have been worried about the long-term effects of divorce on children. It sometimes took many years and several failed relationships, but close to half of the women and over a third of the men in our study were finally able to create a new template with themselves in starring roles. They did it the hard way— by learning from their own experience. They got hurt, kept going, and tried again.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  For children, divorce is a watershed that permanently alters their lives. The world is newly perceived as a far less reliable, more dangerous place because the closest relationships in their lives can no longer be expected to hold firm. More than anything else, this new anxiety represents the end of childhood. Karen confirmed this change in several of our follow-up interviews. Ten years after her parents’ divorce, I learned that she was attending the University of California at Santa Cruz so that she could run home on weekends and be available for crises. And there were plenty of those, mostly involving both her younger brother and sister. When she was twenty, she told me angrily, “Since their divorce I’ve been responsible for both my parents. My dad became a pathetically needy man who always wants a woman to take care of him. I’m the backup when his girlfriends leave him. My mom is still a mess, always involved with the wrong kind of men. I’ve had to take care of them as well as my brother and sister.”

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Some terrible loss will change my life, and it only gets worse as things get better for me. Maybe that’s the permanent result of my parents’ divorce. Gavin says I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve learned to contain it. I no longer wake up in terror when I go to sleep happy, but this feeling does not ever go away.” “So how did you make up your mind to marry him?” I asked. “Well, it’s strange, but a near catastrophe made me change my mind. Gavin was in Nashville, giving a talk, and on the drive home was caught in a freak ice storm. He got pulled off the road in the middle of nowhere by the highway patrol and couldn’t get to a phone for eight hours. I was home, waiting for him, hearing about all sorts of fatal accidents on the roads. I was beside myself. Anything could have happened to him.” “You must have been scared out of your mind.” “Oh, yes,” said Karen. “It was ghastly. I just knew it was the disaster that I always expected and that it would blow my life away. But something really important happened to me at the same time. I realized that whether we married or not, life is always chancy. If I marry him, I might lose him. If I don’t marry him, I might lose him. So I could lose him either way. And that’s when I realized that I want to hold on to Gavin for the rest of my life and for whatever happens. I said yes, let’s get married.” Smiling at her calculation, I said, “So you decided to take a chance, to reach out for what you really want?” “That’s right, although it’s still hard for me to know what I want. But I’ve learned what I don’t want. I don’t want another edition of my relationship with Nick or with my mom or dad.” “And what do you want?” “I want a lover and a husband. I’m no longer frantic to find just anybody. I’m no longer afraid to be alone. I can stand on my own two feet.” Her last words were unforgettable. She seemed to be talking more to herself and only partly to me. “My co-workers say that I have an old soul. I’ve always felt that I would die young, that so much unhappiness was compressed into the early part of my life that it made sense. But maybe the second half of my life is the part that I will enjoy more. I never had a childhood. I always took care of everything.” A smile broke across her face. “You know, I like the kind of woman I’m becoming. I love the man I’m marrying. I like my kindness and my sensitivity. I love my work. I’m on a good path.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Vibrant flowers bursting in pink, orange, and yellow surround her—a contrast to the brown lawn and bushes that are dry and barren from the winter. I take in the breadth of the house; how ordinary it is: yellow shingles and weathered wooden shutters with nailed-in plastic cutout images of horses and buggies. I notice the cracked cement of the driveway; the neglected trees and bushes that are years overdue for trimming. I exit the car and cross the street slowly, ignoring my nervousness in order to open the chain-linked gate and walk the broken path to the front door. This close to the flower beds, I see that the clusters of silky color are artificial bouquets stuck upright in the frosted soil. I step toward the front door—protected by an exterior storm door framed with Police Youth League and Jesus and Mary decals. Jesus’ face is plastered on stickers representing every phase of his life, and as I move to open the storm door, the inner door suddenly opens. A woman shrunken by age appears. She’s wearing a flowered knee-length day dress, slippers, and a tightly sprayed white bouffant. “Regina?” she asks. “Yes. Hello, Julia.” She opens the door and moves to me on the porch. I stay still while, with wide eyes, she examines me—first my hair, then my face and my clothes . . . then finally my hand as she takes it in hers. Suddenly, her small frame opens, her arms stretching in an invitation for me to walk into them for a hug. I freeze: it’s almost too much to take in. By the look on her face, it’ll be devastating for her if I refuse, so I fix my arms around her in a political hug—a guarded non-embrace. For a moment we remain this way—Julia, breathing me in; and me, telling myself it’s safe to soften to her affection. Finally, she moves away but keeps a gentle hold on the sleeve of my coat. “Go on, dear,” she says. “Please, make yourself at home.” Passing through the front door to the living room, I look in at the worn carpeted steps leading to the second floor. It’s as if I’m outside of myself, watching a movie of this moment: I recognize all of this place. I know what lies up those stairs—three bedrooms and a yellow bathroom. My eyes move toward the dining area with its oval table and the plastic-covered chair they used to sit me in, propped up on phone books and pillows so I could reach the table. If I walk through the dining room, I’ll find the kitchen, with a yellow and brown linoleum floor, a small stove tucked in the corner, and the large window above the sink where I used to bathe.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  I wish I could debate with her, but the fact is a towel’s probably the best we’ve got. We’ve been trying to get her to sleep on her own, rather than with Camille or me, so enticing her with the mattress as opposed to a less comfortable box spring should help our efforts. I reach into her garbage bag and pull out a polyester romper that I used to wear when I was about the same age. It has blue shorts with a cuff and a light blue sleeveless button-down top that’s attached to the shorts. Rosie steps in through the unbuttoned neck opening as I hold it up. We button it up together, taking turns. Then I pull her hair back to help cool her face, fastening it with a rubber band I’d had on my wrist. I kiss her forehead and pat her tummy. “Go help Camille and Norm find money. I’ll be down in a minute.” Rosie’s long ponytail sways back and forth with her skip. The dirt that’s collected in the folds behind her knees and her black-bottomed feet make me cringe as I try to recall the last time any of us bathed in a real bathtub. (Gas station sinks don’t count.) Rosie disappears around the corner and descends the stairs to join the hunt for our dinner fare. I fold her pajamas, put them on her bed for later, then move from room to room, opening up the windows in an attempt to cool off the floor. Somehow, I resolve, we’ll get to eat and sleep tonight. At a skinny five-foot-two, Camille and I are the same size. Her thick brown hair curls from the summer heat, framing her round face and almond eyes. “Look what I found stuffed into one of Cookie’s bras,” Camille says, unwrinkling a five-dollar food stamp. I squish my nose. Her bra ? “It’s a wonder it survived. Have you checked the basement?” Camille reasons that five dollars will be enough to get us through the grocery store without creating any suspicion. We know that kids as disheveled as we are will be pegged as shoplifters; but also, if we don’t act correctly they’ll suspect worse: that we’re unsupervised. Then the store manager will call in the police, then the police will bring in child welfare agents, and the agents will instantly see through our lies and realize that we are on our own. We’ll lose any control that we have over our lives . . . and worse, we’ll lose Rosie and Norm. No matter what horrible circumstances Cookie dumps us into, it will always be better than being separated and put into foster care. Over the years, Camille and I have perfected our food-shopping routine because we understand the consequences of any possible misstep. By now it’s three in the afternoon, and all the children’s shows are for kids younger than Rosie. I turned the TV knob to our favorite soap opera, General Hospital .

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  One day, while I am eating the school’s free breakfast, Mrs. Young crouches next to my cafeteria table. “Would you like to come with me to the office?” she asks, and I oblige her, feeling safe that we have the same thing in mind. Together with the principal, we fill out registration forms for Norman, Rosie, and me so we can get credit and finish out the school year. The only thing that will get you out of your situation is to stay in school, Regina. I remember Ms. Van Dover’s words, so I perform well on Mrs. Young’s tests and participate not like my life depends on it, but because my life depends on it. I keep to myself during free time so that none of my classmates will ever ask to come to my house. When Mrs. Young sees me reading at recess, she gives me work sheets to practice long division and encourages me to take a stab at the challenge questions in our science books. The more work I have, the safer I feel. Holding it together with a job is stressing Cookie to proportions we’ve never seen before. Making it worse is the fact that summer’s fast approaching, and the taste of independence that Cherie and Camille had living on their own is inspiring them to lash out. “I’ve got five kids, a household to manage, and a paycheck to keep!” Cookie says. “And now you sluts want to give me attitude?” Cookie stays out all night at bars or rolls out of bed just as we’re heading out the door to school. On the rare occasion she’s home when we are, the beatings are guaranteed and more brutal than ever. We all go into full-fledged survival mode and stay out of the house as much as we can when she’s home. On the school bus, Camille adopts the nickname “Dancing Queen,” swaying and boogying to kids’ boom boxes and starting impromptu dance parties, in an attempt to preserve her fast-fleeting days as a teenager. When I ask her whether she ever flirts with boys when she goes to dances at the community youth center, she looks at me dubiously. “Haven’t you seen how Cookie behaves with men?” she says. “Believe me, I’m not dancing to meet boys. I dance so I can be me. It’s the only time I can really be a teenager.” One night, I pray Camille will have beat me home when it takes me until almost seven to arrive from school. Instead I open the front door to find chicken cutlets frying on the stove, and Cookie, who turns to me with her eyes blazing. “Where the hell were you?” she says. I hesitate, until I blurt it out. “I was looking for my coat.” She burns holes through me with her eyes, spurring me to share more. “It disappeared from my locker today.” “Good goddamn job, you dumb shit. It’s gonna be a cold, wet April.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Alan tells me that the call at three o’clock Geraldine has is with President Clinton’s New Americans committee. “She’s a big supporter of mine, Regina. All you have to do is fax her a memo, then go down there and walk her through it. Give her all the data she requested. Anything extra you know about these ethnic leaders, include it. We have two hours. I’ll put you in a cab so you can meet her at her office to go over the list.” “Meet her?” I feel sweat break out of the pores in my scalp. “Alan, I can easily do that over the phone.” Alan looks at me sternly. “Regina, get in a cab and go over to meet her. This opportunity will never come again.” Spring flowers blossom on the trees along the route our taxi takes from our office across from City Hall straight up toward SoHo, to Lafayette Street. Geraldine Ferraro’s office sits on the top floor of a quaint redbrick building with a black awning over her son’s restaurant, Cascabel. As her no-nonsense secretary eyes me from her desk, I begin outwardly perspiring. The harder I focus on controlling my rising nervousness, the harder it exits my pores. I breathe inconspicuously, deeply in and out, and begin counting to calm myself, watching Geraldine through the glass window into her office. Inside the sunny, warm-toned room she moves about assuredly and with grace, her voice rising only once on the phone. It hits me: meeting Geraldine Ferraro is like meeting Amelia Earhart. Geraldine is a woman who’s blazed trails in the face of the barriers women in politics—and in society—have faced, paying no mind to the thousands of critics who wanted her to fail. She persevered, believing that fighting and being defeated would be better than not fighting at all; but here she is, right in front of me, wearing a soft peach-toned turtleneck scented with something close to Chanel, pearl earrings, and a smile spread across her perfectly proportioned face. “Regina,” she says. “Please. Come in.” Finally able to focus on our work, I’ve ceased my sweating episode. After a few minutes of going over the list together, Geraldine leans forward over her desk and asks me: “Regina, would you mind staying and participating in my call?” “Your call . . . with the White House?” “Yes. I’m just thinking—you seem much more comfortable discussing the individuals on this list than I am.” I try to think of some reason I need to run back to the office, then I remember Alan’s words: This opportunity will never come again. She directs me away from her desk to the couch in her sitting area, taking a seat across the coffee table in a sturdy armchair.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  As rescuers, most young women like Karen are used to giving priority to the needs of others. Indeed, they are usually not aware of their own needs or desires. Karen confessed that she had never in her life thought about what would make her happy. “That would be like asking for the moon,” she said. “I was always too worried about my family to ask for me.” As a result, these young women are often trapped into rescuing a troubled man. How can they reject a pitiful man who clings to them? The guilt would be unbearable. Others find troubled men more exciting. One young woman who had frequent contact with both parents during her growing up years explained: “I think I subconsciously pick men who are not going to work out. Men who are nice and considerate bore me. My latest is irresponsible. I don’t trust him. I’m sure he cheats. But he’s the one I want.” WHAT PROMPTS SO many children of divorce to rush into a cohabitation or early marriage with as much forethought as buying a new pair of shoes? 3 Answers lie in the ghosts that rise to haunt them as they enter adulthood. Men and women from divorced families live in fear that they will repeat their parents’ history, hardly daring to hope that they can do better. These fears, which were present but less commanding during adolescence, become overpowering in young adulthood, more so if one or both of their parents failed to achieve a lasting relationship after a first or second divorce. Dating and courtship raise their hopes of being loved sky-high—but also their fears of being hurt and rejected. Being alone raises memories of lonely years in the postdivorce family and feels like the abandonment they dread. They’re trapped between the wish for love and the fear of loss. This amalgam of fear and loneliness can lead to multiple affairs, hasty marriages, early divorce, and—if no take-home lessons are gleaned from it all—a second and third round of the same. Or they can stay trapped in bad relationships for many years. Here’s how it works: at the threshold of young adulthood, relationships move center stage. But for many that stage is barren of good memories for how an adult man and woman can live together in a loving relationship. This is the central impediment blocking the developmental journey for children of divorce. The psychological scaffolding that they need to construct a happy marriage has been badly damaged by the two people they depended on while growing up. Let’s look closely at the process of growing up. Children learn all kinds of lessons at their parents’ knees, from the time they are born to the time they leave home.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Will one of the adults ruin the occasion by acting out? The children would hold their breath until the event was safely over. The glow of a family get-together, where the older generations can relax and enjoy the food and laugh at the children’s antics and the children can bask in the family’s admiration, was not part of their storehouse of childhood memories in the same way that it was for those in most intact families . Invisible Structure of Parenting A S G ARY DESCRIBED how he spent his time as a child, it gradually dawned on me that in a well-functioning intact family mothers and fathers are in the background as their children grow up. Their role is to create a safe and supportive place for the children, whose job during elementary and junior high school is to go to school, play, make friends, and simply grow up. From the child’s perspective, children occupy center stage. The parents’ job as producers is to stay in the wings and make sure that the show goes on. They should of course encourage, applaud, feed, and clothe the players. If the children stumble, parents should come out of the wings, help them up, dust them off, and immediately get offstage again. In families like Gary’s, parents keep a close eye on what their children are doing “onstage” at every moment. If the play gets too rough or there is trouble in the classroom, they are front and center, ready to act. At home, they keep up the buzz of a “parenting dialogue,” a conversation that begins with the child’s birth and never ends: How is Gary doing? Does his teacher understand his aptitude for math? Should I talk with her? What should we do about his fighting in the schoolyard? What’s the best way to handle the teacher’s complaints? and so on. The litany is endless. Out of these ongoing dialogues, held after the children are asleep, or when they are thought to be out of earshot, parents evolve a domestic policy for the home and a foreign policy for outside the home. Later, at the dinner table, both adults present a united front to the children. This invisible structure of parenting that supports the growing child and runs interference for her is weakened or lost in the breakup. Karen and her siblings felt that they had been suddenly abandoned, almost orphaned. Their mother was present but so distracted that they could hardly get her attention. And their father was morose and cranky. In divorce, even parents who get along well after the breakup rarely share a strategy for raising their children, although they may come together around an emergency or scheduling.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Clement’s sexual ideology is closer to the monastic desert than we might suppose. “Our antagonists are Olympian in stature and sting, as is said, more sharply than a wasp. Above all plea sure, which not only by day but also by night, in our dreams, bites us and aims to deceive us with its sorcery.” But Clement’s asceticism is lodged within marriage, within the city. Th e endless stream of minute directives for Christian living proff ered by Clement amount to a monastic rule for the Christian house hold. Clement clasped enthusiastically to the Paul of the pastoral letters, who had off ered “so many thousands of commands about marriage, procreation, and the arts of house craft.” Paul’s commands are exuberantly expanded into a punctilious rubric for the Christian life. Time, place, and manner restrictions are unmercifully imposed on the sexual act. Sex was not for the daytime, but neither was the darkness of night to be a veil for hidden excess. Immemorial patterns of sociability are wrapped in new rules of Christian modesty: Clement could prescribe which sorts of dinners to attend and how to behave. If women had to attend social gatherings, they should be entirely covered; the “gravest calumny” that could be leveled against an unmarried T H E W I L L A N D T H E WO R L D  woman was that she was present at a symposium. If young men were present, they were to sit motionless, look down, and keep their legs uncrossed. Men were to eat and drink moderately, but also slowly, with a cultivated air of self- control, pausing frequently, never reaching for food, sharing generously, and departing early. For Clement, the Christian sage could pass through life amid the city, but exposure to so many temptations required unfailing vigilance and supreme control of the will. Clement has what might seem an embarrassing amount of advice on the proper consumption of food and drink. His interest in dietetics and medical lore places him in the mainstream of imperial culture. Clement admired those who abstained from wine completely in the name of chastity and “thought it best if boys and girls are kept apart from this drug completely. It is not advisable to pour liquid heat on smouldering youth. . . . Ramped up by its infl uence, their privates expand and their breasts swell, so that their genitals are an omen, the image of fornication.” Clement would harness conventional medical wisdom in the name of not just healthful balance, but also transformation. “Food is for hunger and drink is for thirst, but it calls for the most acute self- protection against any slip, for one step down the path of wine makes one apt to fall. With care we can keep our souls pure, dry, and luminous.” Th e more extreme regimes of mortifi cation, which will exploit the medical tradition with gusto, lie not far in the future.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  drug search?” I tell one unsuspecting neighbor as she approaches the pay phone, taking a quarter from her pocket. “I heard the R.A.’s going to pull the fire alarm and the police are coming into our rooms to search.” She stares at the phone in confusion, then slinks away. Around midnight, when KiKi brings a group of friends into our room, I slam our door shut behind me and take a spot on the hard couch in the common area near the pay phone. First I lie seething, then tears streak down my temples and into my hair. I think about Mr. Brownstein’s lectures on the role of government in our lives, how it needs to be there as a safety net . . . right now I’m the only one who’s been saved by any net, while my baby sister navigates a high-wire act with no protection whatsoever; no sisters or social workers there to defend her. Exhausted by my tears, I drift to sleep. I’m awakened by the sound of the phone. It’s rung four times when I’m finally within arm’s reach. Then, it stops. I slam my fist against the painted cinder-block wall and press my forehead against the phone. “Dammit!” Then it rings again. “Hello?” “Cherie is flying out to Idaho tomorrow,” Camille says. “And?” “She’s getting Rosie!” “How?” “We’ve got this whole plan. She’s flying into Boise and will rent a car, then she’ll stake out at Rosie’s bus stop. She’ll have to talk fast to convince her to get inside, but when she does, she has a hiding spot where they’ll put on wigs and change clothes.” “Isn’t that a little extreme?” “It’s a small town, Regina. If anybody sees Rosie in a car with Cherie, they’ll call Cookie, then Cookie will call the cops, then Cherie will get arrested. Cherie has to play it safe. Then the two of them will rush to the airport in Boise and fly back to New York.” “You feel like this plan is foolproof?” “As foolproof as it ever will be.” “Okay. I have a test to take tomorrow, then I’ll hop on a bus to Manhattan and catch the train out to you and Frank so we can wait together.” “No, Regina—you have school. You can’t screw it up.” “Camille, I screwed up the thing that’s most important to me in the world the day I signed that affidavit when I was fourteen! Rosie’s life has never been the same, and nothing matters more to me than this.” Two of my neighbors groggily stick their necks out of their rooms. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I whisper into the receiver. “I’ll call you when the train drops me at the Ronkonkoma station.”

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  For women, pudici- tia or sōphrosynē implied both an objective fact and a subjective mode of being; it was a state of body and a state of mind. Fundamentally, pudicitia was the corporal integrity of the free woman, untouched until marriage, vouchsafed for one man within marriage. Sexual modesty was inextricably fused with status, and pudicitia often appears alongside libertas as its in- separable adjunct. Nevertheless, pudicitia was a social rather than a strictly legal concept, and it could, exceptionally, even be predicated of slaves. In a vast and highly stratifi ed slave system, where slaves were delicately inter- twined with the life of the free family, pudicitia was a powerful and impre- cise enough concept that some of its mystique might devolve even on the lowest members of the house hold; but the deeper truth was that, for slaves, access to honor depended on the discretion of the master.  An ancient woman lived every moment engaged in a high- stakes game of suspicious observation. “Th e one glory of woman is pudicitia, and there- fore it is incumbent upon her to be, and to seem, chaste.” In the words of a Christian author, “A woman’s reputation for sexual modesty is a fragile thing, like a precious fl ower that breaks in the soft breeze and is ruined by the light wind.” Th ere were “so many” potential signs of immodesty; her dress, her gait, her voice, her face all acted as external projections of her in- ternal state. Th e woman’s “only protection” was never to become the cause of any gossip. To guard against the attentions of other men, the Roman matron should dress only so nice as to avoid uncleanness, she should always be chaperoned in public, she should walk with her eyes down and risk rude- ness rather than immodesty in her greetings, and she should blush when addressed.  Th e sharpest of these patriarchal prescriptions come from rhetorical school exercises, sources that no doubt caricature contemporary male bom- bast and must be taken with healthful caution. Undoubtedly the scripts of female modesty could be stifl ing. In most quarters women wore their hair  FROM SHAME TO SIN veiled from the time they reached sexual maturity. Coins of the high em- pire advertise pudicitia as a chief imperial virtue, and its image is a Roman matron, hair veiled, hand drawn partly across her face to shield it from full view. Conventional limits on visibility and movement were truly constrict- ing. Even the gentle Plutarch counsels a woman to be most visible in her husband’s presence and to hide when he is away. A woman without a man was “like a city without a wall”; fathers and husbands off ered protection, and protection brings its own types of dependence. But it would be a mis- take to underestimate the room for maneuver left to women.

• From Untrue (2018)

  “I remember the feeling”—here she made a frightened face and gave a little gasp—“of the phone ringing and knowing it was a guy I was sleeping with, and I’d have to pretend it was someone else because Dan was standing right there. It’s exhausting, and the number of heart attacks and stress—it’s complicated to keep all the lies straight. There’s a whole part of it that’s really difficult and tiring! Sometimes I would think, Okay, I’ve got to stop. This is just too hard and dangerous.” Such moments, the frissons of near discovery, are touchstones of narratives with infidelity plots—from Eyes Wide Shut to a YouTube genre called “cheaters getting caught” to Carmen Rita Wong’s novel Never Too Late, with its storyline about high-powered, very married Latina lesbian Magda, whose happy life might be turned upside down by a one-night stand with a woman who has a taste for revenge. Like many women in fiction and life, Annika got too much out of her affairs to stop—including the variety and novelty of sexual experience she craved. “I think no matter how hard you try and how exciting it is, even when your marriage is good—and mine wasn’t, at least in the sex department—you still miss that thing where you’re so excited, and it’s so new, and you can’t eat or sleep, you’re having such an intense time emotionally and sexually with this entirely new person. That’s what I kept going after, what I couldn’t say no to.” Like Sarah and Druckerman’s ladies in Florida, Annika was living what Marta Meana calls “erotic self-focus.” When others saw her as sexy and hot, she did too. Wanting to be wanted, and withering when she was unwanted (or, in the case of Meana’s study participants, wanted) by one man in perpetuity drove Annika and may drive us in ways we might not want to admit but cannot deny.