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 Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  1971 “G uess who’s coming to dinner,” Woodell said. He wheeled into my office and handed me the telex. Ki-tami had accepted my invitation. He was coming to Portland to spend a few days. Then he was going to make a wider tour of the United States, for reasons he declined to share. “Visiting other potential distributors,” I said to Woodell. He nodded. It was March 1971. We vowed that Kitami was going to have the time of his life, that he would return home feeling love in his heart for America, Oregon, Blue Ribbon—and me. When we were done with him he’d be incapable of doing business with anyone else. And so, we agreed, the visit should close on a high note, with a gala dinner at the home of our prize asset—Bowerman. IN MOUNTING THIS charm offensive, naturally I enlisted Penny. Together we met Kitami’s flight, and together we whisked him straight to the Oregon coast, to her parents’ oceanfront cottage, where we’d spent our wedding night. Kitami had a companion with him, a sort of bag carrier, personal assistant, amanuensis, named Hiraku Iwano. He was just a kid, naïve, innocent, in his early twenties, and Penny had him eating out of her hand before we hit Sunset Highway. We both slaved to give the two men an idyllic Pacific Northwest weekend. We sat on the porch with them and breathed in the sea air. We took them for long walks on the beach. We fed them world-class salmon and poured them glass after glass of good French wine. We tried to focus most of our attention on Kitami, but both Penny and I found it easier to talk to Iwano, who read books and seemed guileless. Kitami seemed like a man who was importing guile by the boatload. Monday, bright and early, I drove Kitami back to Portland, to First National Bank. Just as I was determined to charm him on this trip, I thought that he could be helpful in charming Wallace, that he could vouch for Blue Ribbon and make credit easier to get. White met us in the lobby and walked us into a conference room. I looked around. “Where’s Wallace?” I asked. “Ah,” White said, “he won’t be able to join us today.” What? That was the whole point of visiting the bank. I wanted Wallace to hear Kitami’s ringing endorsement. Oh well, I thought—good cop will just have to relay the endorsement to bad cop. I said a few preliminary words, expressed confidence that Kitami could bolster First National’s faith in Blue Ribbon, then turned the floor over to Kitami, who scowled and did the one thing guaranteed to make my life harder. “Why do you not give my friends more money ?” he said to White. “W-w-what?” White said. “Why do you refuse to extend credit to Blue Ribbon?” Kitami said, pounding his fist on the table. “Well now—” White said. Kitami cut him off. “What kind of bank is this?

• From City of Night (1963)

  Of course, I wish I could take you out to my new apartment—in Hollywood (though actually it’s closer to Beverly Hills) —but as a matter of fact, I havent really occupied it, yet . You see, theyre remodeling it and the interior decorators want it to be just so —you know how those girls are—and so, in the meantime, Im still living on Spring Street ....” We walked out together, Pauline shrieking to attract attention as she makes her exit. At the landing leading up the steps to the street, I glanced back at the man. He was still looking at me. This time, for once, it turned out Pauline is telling the truth. She was indeed loaded. We took a cab to a place on upper Broadway. The bar turns out to be mostly a spadebar. On the dance floor, spade chicks with classic butts squeezed into gold and orange and red hugging dresses dance with gleamingfaced Negro men. This is not a queer bar—it is an outcast bar—Negroes and vagrant whites, heads and hypes, dikes and queens. On the dancefloor, too, lesbians—the masculine ones, the bull-dikes—dance with hugely effeminate queens, the roles of course reversed but technically legal—broadshouldered women and waspwaist-squeezed youngmen. The dikes are leading the queens. “Isnt this positively mad, honey?” says Pauline, playing for tonight—or until her money lasts—the wealthy woman out on the town with her “escort.” “I have a fine connection here, baby, and we’ll get tanked on bees and pod and then I’ll really show you a sex-scene . Ive been waiting since the first time I saw you.... Huccome youve never made it with me, baby?—youre the only one Ive ever loved!... My God! Those queens dancing with lesbians —ugh! They must be perverts!” I went to the head, and there, sweat-bright spade and fay faces focus intensely on dice, cramped bodies in the tiny room exploding with the odor of maryjane smoke. A droopy-eyed Negro hands me a tiny joint, offers what is hardly a roach now: “Turn on?” “You took so long,” said Pauline when I returned to the table where we were now sitting. “I hope nobody was being naughty with you. I’ll scratch their eyes out!” She goes on like this—but I wasnt really listening. I was still thinking about that man at the Hodge Podge. Somehow, whatever had happened with him, whenever and wherever it had happened, or not happened, was important. I knew that much with certainty. “Why are you so nervous, baby?” Pauline asks me. And then I remembered, suddenly and distinctly. Abruptly, I got up from the table. “Where are you going?”

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  Description: First Edition. | Colorado Springs : WaterBrook, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2019025074 | ISBN 9781601429643 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781601429667 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Christian women—Religious life. | Thought and thinking—Religious aspects—Christianity. Classification: LCC BV4527 .A448 2020 | DDC 248.4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025074 a_prh_5.4_141612160_c0_r4 Be transformed by the renewal of your mind. —ROMANS 12:2 This means it’s possible. Contents Cover Title Page Copyright [image file=Image00022.jpg] ALL THE THOUGHTS 1. Thinking About Thinking 2. What We Believe 3. Spiraling Out 4. Breaking Free 5. Where Thoughts Are Captured 6. Make the Shift [image file=Image00023.jpg] TAKING DOWN THE ENEMIES OF OUR MINDS 7. Drawing Battle Lines 8. Holding Space for Silence I Choose to Be Still with God 9. Lifelines I Choose to Be Known 10. Unafraid I Choose to Surrender My Fears to God 11. A Beautiful Interruption I Choose to Delight in God 12. Less Important I Choose to Serve God and Others 13. Not Overcome I Choose to Be Grateful 14. Run Your Race I Choose to Seek the Good of Others [image file=Image00024.jpg] THINKING AS JESUS THINKS 15. Who Do You Think You Are? 16. Dangerous Thinking Dedication Acknowledgments Notes [image "Part One: All the Thoughts" file=Image00025.jpg] 1 Thinking About Thinking “Take every thought captive.” They say authors write books for two reasons: either the author is an expert on the subject, or the subject makes the author desperate enough to spend years finding the answers. The latter most definitely describes me. This morning I woke up intending to write to you. But first, I thought, I need to spend time with God. So what did I do? I picked up my phone. I noticed an email about something I was working on, in which the sender was “constructively” critical of my work. Just as I decided to set my phone down, something else stole my attention…and the next thing I knew, I was on Instagram, noticing others’ wins and glories contrasted with my work in process that seemed to not be measuring up. In minutes with my phone, I decided that I was an inadequate writer, I was spending my life chasing things that mean nothing because I am nothing, I have nothing to say. I was spiraling fast into discouragement. Then my husband, Zac, came in happy, having just met with God, and I snapped at him. My spiral began to spin faster and more chaotically. In less than an hour, I had diminished myself, criticized all my work, decided to quit ministry, ignored God, and pushed away my greatest advocate and friend. Wow. Brilliant, Jennie. And that was only this morning?

• From Educated (2018)

  They’ll shut down.” “Can’t they fix it?” “Nope, can’t be done,” Dad said. “Man trusted his own strength, and his strength was weak.” At church, Dad warned everyone about Y2K. He advised Papa Jay to get strong locks for his gas station, and maybe some defensive weaponry. “That store will be the first thing looted in the famine,” Dad said. He told Brother Mumford that every righteous man should have, at minimum, a ten-year supply of food, fuel, guns and gold. Brother Mumford just whistled. “We can’t all be as righteous as you, Gene,” he said. “Some of us are sinners!” No one listened. They went about their lives in the summer sun. Meanwhile, my family boiled and skinned peaches, pitted apricots and churned apples into sauce. Everything was pressure-cooked, sealed, labeled, and stored away in a root cellar Dad had dug out in the field. The entrance was concealed by a hillock; Dad said I should never tell anybody where it was. One afternoon, Dad climbed into the excavator and dug a pit next to the old barn. Then, using the loader, he lowered a thousand-gallon tank into the pit and buried it with a shovel, carefully planting nettles and sow thistle in the freshly tossed dirt so they would grow and conceal the tank. He whistled “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story while he shoveled. His hat was tipped back on his head, and he wore a brilliant smile. “We’ll be the only ones with fuel when The End comes,” he said. “We’ll be driving when everyone else is hotfooting it. We’ll even make a run down to Utah, to fetch Tyler.” —I HAD REHEARSALS MOST NIGHTS at the Worm Creek Opera House, a dilapidated theater near the only stoplight in town. The play was another world. Nobody talked about Y2K. The interactions between people at Worm Creek were not at all what I was used to in my family. Of course I’d spent time with people outside my family, but they were like us: women who’d hired Mother to midwife their babies, or who came to her for herbs because they didn’t believe in the Medical Establishment. I had a single friend, named Jessica. A few years before, Dad had convinced her parents, Rob and Diane, that public schools were little more than Government propaganda programs, and since then they had kept her at home. Before her parents had pulled Jessica from school, she was one of them, and I never tried to talk to her; but after, she was one of us. The normal kids stopped including her, and she was left with me. I’d never learned how to talk to people who weren’t like us—people who went to school and visited the doctor. Who weren’t preparing, every day, for the End of the World. Worm Creek was full of these people, people whose words seemed ripped from another reality.

• From Educated (2018)

  I sat slowly, tensely, as if the seat were made of needles. “I’m Charles,” he said. There was a pause while he waited for me to give my name, but I didn’t. “I saw you in the last play,” he said after a moment. “I wanted to tell you something.” I braced myself, for what I wasn’t sure, then he said, “I wanted to tell you that your singing is about the best I ever heard.” —I CAME HOME ONE AFTERNOON from packing macadamias to find Dad and Richard gathered around a large metal box, which they’d hefted onto the kitchen table. While Mother and I cooked meatloaf, they assembled the contents. It took more than an hour, and when they’d finished they stood back, revealing what looked like an enormous military-green telescope, with its long barrel set firmly atop a short, broad tripod. Richard was so excited he was hopping from one foot to the other, reciting what it could do. “Got a range more than a mile! Can bring down a helicopter!” Dad stood quietly, his eyes shining. “What is it?” I asked. “It’s a fifty-caliber rifle,” he said. “Wanna try it?” I peered through the scope, searching the mountainside, fixing distant stalks of wheat between its crosshairs. The meatloaf was forgotten. We charged outside. It was past sunset; the horizon was dark. I watched as Dad lowered himself to the frozen ground, positioned his eye at the scope and, after what felt like an hour, pulled the trigger. The blast was thunderous. I had both palms pressed to my ears, but after the initial boom I dropped them, listening as the shot echoed through the ravines. He fired again and again, so that by the time we went inside my ears were ringing. I could barely hear Dad’s reply when I asked what the gun was for. “Defense,” he said. The next night I had a rehearsal at Worm Creek. I was perched on my crate, listening to the monologue being performed onstage, when Charles appeared and sat next to me. “You don’t go to school,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “You should come to choir. You’d like choir.” “Maybe,” I said, and he smiled. A few of his friends stepped into the wing and called to him. He stood and said goodbye, and I watched him join them, taking in the easy way they joked together and imagining an alternate reality in which I was one of them. I imagined Charles inviting me to his house, to play a game or watch a movie, and felt a rush of pleasure. But when I pictured Charles visiting Buck’s Peak, I felt something else, something like panic. What if he found the root cellar? What if he discovered the fuel tank? Then I understood, finally, what the rifle was for.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  All is too strange. She bounces off the glove, cutting it merely, and starts circling again. She ends up deeper in the wood, perched again – but, happily, facing my way. Through the gloom and the flocked leaves I can see her yellow nose, and something of her accipitrine crouch. I know her eyes are on me. So out goes the fist. I pile one chick, two chicks, three chicks on it. Whistle. Call. ‘Come on, Mabel!’, slapping my gloved hand in animate will. At this point, space-time is folded and scrunched into direct relations. Trigonometry. Goshawk glide-path to my fist, and Goshawk intentionality, which I am sure is also derivable in mathematical terms. My beating, horrified heart, and my soul feeling like water at four degrees; heavier than ice, falling to the bottom of the ocean. And suddenly, she is back on the glove, I feel soaked in iced water , and I cannot believe she’s not lost. I feel like White: a tyro, a fool, a beginner . An idiot. ‘Never mind , ’ says Stuart. He knows I am in pieces. I catch the flash of his grin in the darkness . ‘She’s too high, and it’s getting dark. But you got her back, right? That’s always a good end to the day.’ I can barely speak. I croak a reply. The adrenalin fits and fizzes in my veins as I walk back to the car, and I’m still not sure how I managed to drive home. The air is dark and full of water. He is soaked to the skin. Gos is nowhere to be seen. He is tying pieces of rabbit to all the places where the hawk had been. They are like prayers, like the tattered ribbons pagans tie to winter twigs. His hands are very white against the coruscating green of the wind-blown bark of empty oaks. He has run out of rabbit. He has no lure. He has no meat but liver . He’ll ask Mrs Wheeler to buy some steak for him in Buckingham. Standing by the farmhouse door he listens. ‘ Rooks observed to be mobbing, or a solitary crow sitting on the dead branch of some tree, cawing or jerking about uneasily, are an almost certain sign that the lost hawk is not far away,’ he’d read in Blaine. Nothing. Then a single caw, loudly repeated. There . A couple of hundred yards away is a crow, circling the top of a tree, cursing at the bird beneath it. On the topmost branch sits Gos, tiny at that distance, his familiar blunt-shouldered form hunched against the gale. White runs to the tree and stands under it waving a piece of liver and a handkerchief as a lure while flashes of water spread on the further fields.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It is not a day to try to trap the hawks. It is a day for comfort. He will make it up to Gos. He will pace up and down the kitchen with him, feed him tidbits, make him love him again. Gos likes music: he will play him songs on the wireless. But he finds the wireless has died. He bicycles to Tom’s, borrows his telephone to order a new battery. Then he pedals back. Rain and rooks. A man on a bicycle in a high wind who decides he must concentrate on small things today. Big things are too difficult. What he will do is repaint the woodwork in the passageway, and then perhaps the kitchen door. When the passageway is done he examines his handiwork with a critical eye. It looks well. Now for the kitchen door. Blue paint, he thinks. His father used to like painting things in bright and clashing colours. He knows he has inherited the vice. So he goes into the barn to fetch it. Gos bates from him, first upwards to the rafters, then straight out of the open door. When White leaves the barn, the paintpot in his hand, he looks for Gos sitting on his perch. But the perch is empty. Gos is not there. His hawk is gone. Gos has gone and the frayed end of the twine lies snapped upon the ground. PART II 18 Flying free Tonight. The weather is perfect, the hawk’s weight too. I race about the house, fizzing with anticipation, filling my morning with small and mundane tasks. I scrub mutes from the vinyl cloth on the floor, whistle happily, wash and dry my hair. But some invisible needle is picking away inside me: as the afternoon wears on, things begin to unravel. First I fight with my mother on the phone for no good reason, then when Christina arrives to see the hawk fly I snap at her for no reason whatsoever. Picking up my hawking waistcoat in the kitchen I hear her say gridlock but the word doesn’t register at all. I should have listened. There’d been a horrendous crash on the A14 outside Cambridge. Stuart had been stranded in its aftermath, stuck in his Land Rover under a flyover stanchion, air ambulances roaring overhead through roiling clouds of smoke. He’d called me. Told me he was running late because of a crash, but that was all. ‘I’m going up the hill now,’ he said. ‘Coming?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘See you in twenty minutes.’ But the accident had been so appalling it had closed not only the main road but the roads around it too. All the rush-hour traffic crossing Cambridgeshire had to come through the centre of the city. Forty minutes later we’re no more than a quarter of a mile from the house and I am shaking with monstrous frustration. Poor Christina sits silently in the back. Mabel bates. I cannot bear it. She bates again.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  And the radiotracking receiver is in the car. After a minute or so, she slips away, out the back of the wood and away into land I know nothing about. It turns out there’s a lovely, soft field of burnt-butter coloured grasses here, and a thick grey wood about three hundred yards distant. And no goshawk anywhere. Back to the car I go, unpack the radio telemetry and spend ages tracking her down. The signal is all over the place. Beep. Beep. Beep. In this direction, the signal strength is 5. Here, 7.5. But then – 2? What? Triangulate! Triangulate! I angle the antenna and spin in circles. Is she moving? She must be. And over the distant wood I see her on the soar. She’s letting the rising air carry her, spilling over the wood in rich circles of sun-warmed flight. Another hawk comes up, and the two slip and rival each other for a while. I run, of course. By the time I reach the wood, there’s no sign of either of them, though I hear a buzzard mewing some way off. Then, suddenly, bells. Somewhere in there. I dive into the wood. The signs aren’t good. It’s not a thick wood. It’s not a wild wood. It’s a habited wood. It’s a pheasant release wood, to be sure. Oh lord, this goshawk is making me a criminal again. I spot her. She’s poised on a low branch of an ivy-covered oak, staring fascinated into a tangle of old feed sacks and bins in an inch of water . I walk closer . She’s making those snaky-necked prospecting parallax movements of her head that mean she’s locked onto something. She’s going to ignore me until she’s established to her satisfaction that it’s gone. Perhaps it has. I edge my way to where she’s looking, and before I know what is happening, a wet cock pheasant breaks from my feet, showering me with water . In slow motion, I see the sun through his primaries, splintering into bars and abrupt shadows, and watch Mabel do a smart wingover and her left foot flash out, but its two-and-a-half-inch back talons and crayon-yellow hand just miss him. He rises over – oh horror , I hadn’t seen it – a ten-foot chicken-wire fence – and buries himself in a huge stand of laurel and yew on the other side. She dives in after him. I can’t get to them. They’re in a bloody pheasant release pen! Shit! This is like taking a ferret into a fancy rabbit show. Not good. Not good. I can hear wings beating, bells ringing, the sounds of a struggle. I run like a rat around the perimeter of the pen, trying to find a way in. This is not what I had wanted to happen. Oh God. Oh God . There’s a door. It’s open. I dump the receiver on a blue feeder bin and run in.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  But it was hard, now, to distinguish between my heart and the hawk at all. When she sat twenty yards across the pitch part of me sat there too, as if someone had taken my heart and moved it that little distance. It reminded me of Philip Pullman’s children’s fantasy series His Dark Materials , in which each person has a daemon , an animal that is a visible manifestation of their soul and accompanies them everywhere. When people are separated from their daemons they feel pain. This was a universe very close to mine. I felt incomplete unless the hawk was sitting on my hand: we were parts of each other. Grief and the hawk had conspired to this strangeness. I trusted she would fly to me as simply and completely as I trusted gravity would make things fall. And so entrenched was this sense that the hawk flying to me was part of the workings of the world that when things went wrong, the world went wrong with it. She’d left Christina’s fist with all the joy and certainty in the world. I watched her approach and waited with happy anticipation for the solid thwack of her landing on my glove. But it did not come. Instead, she snatched at the food in my fist with one down-dropped taloned foot, and kept flying, fast, out and away from me. I could feel the failure in her, the sense that she hadn’t got what she wanted, and I could feel, too, that what had just happened had spooked her, and that now she was flying away from it, and me, as fast as possible. I grabbed hold of the creance and ran with her, putting resistance on the line until she was brought to earth, crest raised, wings spread wide, feet planted in the turf, beak open, panting in fury. I held out my fist and she flew straight up onto it as if nothing had happened at all. ‘She must have been scared by something,’ I said. ‘Let’s try it again.’ And again the hawk came, low and fast, and again she snatched at the glove and kept flying. Again I brought her to earth. ‘Why is she doing it?’ ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ This had never happened before. Over the years I’d had hawks that ignored me. Hawks that turned their back on me. Hawks that flew reluctantly, flew badly, or didn’t fly at all. It never worried me. These hawks weren’t at their flying weight, that was all, and this was easily fixed. But this was different. This was a hawk desperately eager to fly to me, but with a last-second terror of landing on my glove. It was incomprehensible. I telephoned Stuart. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. Does she need more manning? Is she too high in weight?’ I was as bewildered as a child. ‘What should I do?’

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Would it be all right, do you think?’ And on and on, a desperate, crazy barrage of incoherent appeals. I’m sure nothing I said persuaded him more than the look on my face as I said it. A tall, white-faced woman with wind-wrecked hair and exhausted eyes was pleading with him on a quayside, hands held out as if she were in a seaside production of Medea. Looking at me he must have sensed that my stuttered request wasn’t a simple one. That there was something behind it that was very important. There was a moment of total silence. ‘All right,’ he said. And then, because he didn’t see me believe him, ‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure that’ll be OK.’ 6 The box of stars ‘Hiding to nothing!’ my old friend Martin Jones had said, and he’d raised both hands in the air in a gesture half of supplication, half exasperation. ‘It’s like banging your head against a wall. Don’t do it. It’ll drive you mad.’ I kept thinking of what he’d said as I drove. Clutch, into fourth gear. Roundabout. Change down. Fierce acceleration. Slight resentment. I didn’t want to think of all the things the men had told me. ‘It’ll drive you mad. Leave goshawks to the goshawk boys. Get something more sensible.’ I knew training this hawk would be hard. Goshawks are famously difficult to tame. To man, in falconry parlance. You can man a merlin in a few days. I once flew a Harris Hawk free after four. But gosses are nervous, highly-strung birds and it takes a long time to convince them you’re not the enemy. Nervousness, of course, isn’t quite the right word: it’s simply that they have jacked-up nervous systems in which nerve pathways from the eyes and ears to the motor neurons that control their muscles have only minor links with associated neurons in the brain. Goshawks are nervous because they live life ten times faster than we do, and they react to stimuli literally without thinking. ‘Of all Hawks,’ wrote seventeenth-century falconer Richard Blome, ‘she is doubtless the most Shie and Coy both towards the Men and Dogs, requiring more the Courtship of a Mistress than the Authority of a Master, being apt to remember any unkind and rough usage; but being gently handled, will become very tractable, and kind to her keeper.’ Well, kindness it would be, and kindness we shall hope for. Kindness and love. I remember thinking idly as I drove about that fierce burst of love I’d felt on the quayside for a man who held a bird terrified by a world it couldn’t comprehend.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  ‘Not if you know the secret,’ he countered, leaning closer. There was a slight Jack Nicholson vibe to all this. I drew back, faintly alarmed. ‘It’s simple. If you want a well-behaved goshawk, you just have to do one thing. Give ’em the opportunity to kill things. Kill as much as possible. Murder sorts them out.’ And he grinned. ‘Right,’ I said. There was a pause, as if it wasn’t quite the right response. I tried again. ‘Thanks.’ And I was all, Bloody hell! I’m sticking with falcons, thank you very much. I’d never thought I’d train a goshawk. Ever. I’d never seen anything of myself reflected in their solitudinous, murderous eyes. Not for me, I’d thought, many times. Nothing like me. But the world had changed, and so had I. It was the end of July and I’d convinced myself that I was pretty much back to normal. But the world around me was growing very strange indeed. The light that filled my house was deep and livid, half magnolia, half rainwater. Things sat in it, dark and very still. Sometimes I felt I was living in a house at the bottom of the sea. There were imperceptible pressures. Tapping water-pipes. I’d hear myself breathing and jump at the sound. Something else was there, something standing next to me that I couldn’t touch or see, a thing a fraction of a millimetre from my skin, something vastly wrong, making infinite the distance between me and all the familiar objects in my house. I ignored it. I’m fine, I told myself. Fine. And I walked and worked and made tea and cleaned the house and cooked and ate and wrote. But at night, as rain pricked points of orange light against the windows, I dreamed of the hawk slipping through wet air to somewhere else. I wanted to follow it. I sat at my computer in my rain-lit study. I telephoned friends. I wrote emails. I found a hawk-breeder in Northern Ireland with one young goshawk left from that year’s brood. She was ten weeks old, half Czech, one-quarter Finnish, one-quarter German, and she was, for a goshawk, small. We arranged that I should drive to Scotland to pick her up. I thought that I would like to have a small goshawk. ‘Small’ was the only decision I made. I didn’t think for a second there was any choice in the matter of the hawk itself. The hawk had caught me. It was never the other way around.

• From Educated (2018)

  going.” I heard Dad’s step on the stairwell. Mother sighed and her eyes fluttered, as if she were coming out of a trance. Dad took his seat at the kitchen table and Mother stood to fix his breakfast. He began a lecture about liberal professors, and Mother mixed batter for pancakes, periodically murmuring in agreement. — WITHOUT SHAWN AS FOREMAN, Dad’s construction business dwindled. I’d quit my job at Randy’s to look after Shawn. Now I needed money, so when Dad went back to scrapping that winter, so did I. It was an icy morning, much like the first, when I returned to the junkyard. It had changed. There were still pillars of mangled cars but they no longer dominated the landscape. A few years before, Dad had been hired by Utah Power to dismantle hundreds of utility towers. He had been allowed to keep the angle iron, and it was now stacked—four hundred thousand pounds of it—in tangled mountains all over the yard. I woke up every morning at six to study—because it was easier to focus in the mornings, before I was worn out from scrapping. Although I was still fearful of God’s wrath, I reasoned with myself that my passing the ACT was so unlikely, it would take an act of God. And if God acted, then surely my going to school was His will. The ACT was composed of four sections: math, English, science and reading. My math skills were improving but they were not strong. While I could answer most of the questions on the practice exam, I was slow, needing double or triple the allotted time. I lacked even a basic knowledge of grammar, though I was learning, beginning with nouns and moving on to prepositions and gerunds. Science was a mystery, perhaps because the only science book I’d ever read had had detachable pages for coloring. Of the four sections, reading was the only one about which I felt confident. BYU was a competitive school. I’d need a high score—a twenty-seven at least, which meant the top fifteen percent of my cohort. I was sixteen, had never taken an exam, and had only recently undertaken anything like a systematic education; still I registered for the test. It felt like throwing

• From Educated (2018)

  “Do you have calendula?” the midwife said. “I also need lobelia and witch hazel.” She was sitting at the kitchen counter, watching Mother rummage through our birchwood cabinets. An electric scale sat on the counter between them, and occasionally Mother would use it to weigh dried leaves. It was spring. There was a morning chill despite the bright sunlight. “I made a fresh batch of calendula last week,” Mother said. “Tara, run and fetch it.” I retrieved the tincture, and my mother packed it in a plastic grocery bag with the dried herbs. “Anything else?” Mother laughed. The pitch was high, nervous. The midwife intimidated her, and when intimidated my mother took on a weightless quality, whisking about every time the midwife made one of her slow, solid movements. The midwife surveyed her list. “That will do.” She was a short, plump woman in her late forties, with eleven children and a russet-colored wart on her chin. She had the longest hair I’d ever seen, a cascade the color of field mice that fell to her knees when she took it out of its tight bun. Her features were heavy, her voice thick with

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  When I was an undergraduate we were told that history had ended, and we all believed it. When the Berlin Wall fell, what history was made of was over. No more Cold War. No more wars. And yet here it was, and is, and all of it falling apart. Endings. Worlds dissolving. Weather systems, banking systems, the careful plans of municipal gardeners. Families, hearts, lives. Distant wars and small trees wrenched in two. I look at the line of people and all their fierce possessiveness and all their hidden terror at the thought that their bulwarks against death might be lost. Money. Security. Knots and lines. The ends of things. And it is sitting there with a cooling coffee that I think seriously for the first time about what I am doing. What I am going to do with the hawk. Kill things. Make death. I had hunted with hawks for years before death meant anything to me at all. Perhaps I was then to all intents a child. I’d never considered what I was doing was cruel. I was a spectator, not a killer. Wild hawks hunted; so did mine. There seemed no useful moral difference. And falconry for me was about revelling in the flight of the hawk, never in the death it brought. But when my hawk caught things I was pleased – partly for the hawk, and partly because I had, as a child, bought into that imagined world of tweed-clad Victorian falconers, where death was visceral and ever-present and hedged with ceremonial formalities. When I watched those men with goshawks put the dead pheasant in the bag all those years ago I saw a kind of ease that bespoke centuries of social privilege and sporting confidence. And the vocabulary I’d learned from the books distanced me from death. Trained hawks didn’t catch animals. They caught quarry. They caught game. What an extraordinary term. Game. I sat quietly watching the line and wondered. I would hunt with this hawk. Of course I would. Training a goshawk and not letting it hunt seemed to me like raising a child and not letting it play. But that was not why I needed her. To me she was bright, vital, secure in her place in the world. Every tiny part of her was boiling with life, as if from a distance you could see a plume of steam around her, coiling and ascending and making everything around her slightly blurred, so she stood out in fierce, corporeal detail. The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away. There could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Here, self-conscious and awkward, I waited while Kitty spoke with the conductor and ran through her songs with the band. Once a man approached me, with a broom on his shoulder, and asked me rather roughly who I was and what I did there. ‘I’m waiting for Miss Butler,’ I said, my voice as thin as a whistle. ‘Are you, then,’ he said. ‘Well, sweetheart, you’ll have to wait somewhere else, for I’ve to sweep this spot, and you are in my way. Go on, now.’ And I moved away, blushing horribly, and had to stand in a corridor while boys with baskets and ladders and pails of sand lumbered by me, looking me over, or cursing when I blocked their path. Our return visit, however, in the evening, was an easier one, for then we went straight to the dressing-room, where I knew my part a little better. Even so, when we entered the room I felt my spirits tumble rather, for it was nothing like the cosy little chamber at the Canterbury Palace, which Kitty had had all to herself, and which I was used to keeping so neat and nice. Instead it was dim and dusty, with benches and hooks for a dozen artistes, and one greasy sink that must be shared by all, and a door that must be propped shut or left to sag and let in every glance of every stage-hand and visitor that might be idling in the passageway beyond. We arrived late, and found most of the hooks already taken, and several of the benches occupied by girls and women in varying stages of undress. They looked up when we arrived, and smiled, most of them; and when Kitty took out her packet of Weights and a match, someone cried, ‘Thank God, a woman with a cigarette! Give us one, ducks, would you? I’m quite broke till pay-day.’ Kitty was booked to appear, that night, a little way into the first half of the show. While I helped her with her collar and her neck-tie and her rose, I felt quite steady; but when we walked to the wing to wait for her number to go up, to gaze from the shadows at the unfamiliar theatre and its vast and careless crowd, I felt myself begin to tremble. I looked at Kitty. Her face was white beneath its layer of paint - though whether with fear, or with fierce ambition, I could not tell. With no other motive, I swear, than to comfort her - so mindful was I of that new resolve, to play her sister and nothing more - I took her hand, and pressed it.

• From Educated (2018)

  Mother hugged me. Dad tried to be cheerful. “It proves one thing at least,” he said. “Our home school is as good as any public education.” — THREE DAYS BEFORE I turned seventeen, Mother drove me to Utah to find an apartment. The search took all day, and we arrived home late to find Dad eating a frozen supper. He hadn’t cooked it well and it was mush. The mood around him was charged, combustible. It felt like he might detonate at any moment. Mother didn’t even kick off her shoes, just rushed to the kitchen and began shuffling pans to fix a real dinner. Dad moved to the living room and started cursing at the VCR. I could see from the hallway that the cables weren’t connected. When I pointed this out, he exploded. He cussed and waved his arms, shouting that in a man’s house the cables should always be hooked up, that a man should never have to come into a room and find the cables to his VCR unhooked. Why the hell had I unhooked them anyway? Mother rushed in from the kitchen. “I disconnected the cables,” she said. Dad rounded on her, sputtering. “Why do you always take her side! A man should be able to expect support from his wife!” I fumbled with the cables while Dad stood over me, shouting. I kept dropping them. My mind pulsed with panic, which overpowered every thought, so that I could not even remember how to connect red to red, white to white. Then it was gone. I looked up at my father, at his purple face, at the vein pulsing in his neck. I still hadn’t managed to attach the cables. I stood, and once on my feet, didn’t care whether the cables were attached. I walked out of the room. Dad was still shouting when I reached the kitchen. As I moved down the hall I looked back. Mother had taken my place, crouching over the VCR, groping for the wires, as Dad towered over her. — WAITING FOR CHRISTMAS THAT year felt like waiting to walk off the edge of a cliff. Not since Y2K had I felt so certain that something terrible was

• From Educated (2018)

  I knocked and Nick opened the door. He seemed surprised to see me. “How’s your dad?” he asked after I’d joined him on the sofa. In retrospect, this was probably the most important moment of our friendship, the moment I could have done one thing, the better thing, and I did something else. It was the first time I’d seen Nick since the explosion. I might have told him everything right then: that my family didn’t believe in modern medicine; that we were treating the burn at home with salves and homeopathy; that it had been terrifying, worse than terrifying; that for as long as I lived I would never forget the smell of charred flesh. I could have told him all that, could have surrendered the weight, let the bond between us carry it and grow stronger. Instead I kept the burden for myself, and my friendship with Nick, already anemic, underfed and underused, dwindled in obsolescence. I believed I could repair the damage—that now I was back, this would be my life, and it wouldn’t matter that Nick understood nothing of Buck’s Peak. But the peak refused to give me up. It clung to me. The black craters in my father’s chest often materialized on chalkboards, and I saw the sagging cavity of his mouth on the pages of my textbooks. This remembered world was somehow more vivid than the physical world I inhabited, and I phased between them. Nick would take my hand, and for a moment I would be there with him, feeling the surprise of his skin on mine. But when I looked at our joined fingers, something would shift so that the hand was not Nick’s. It was bloody and clawed, not a hand at all. When I slept, I gave myself wholly to the peak. I dreamed of Luke, of his eyes rolling back in his head. I dreamed of Dad, of the slow rattle in his lungs. I dreamed of Shawn, of the moment my wrist had cracked in the parking lot. I dreamed of myself, limping beside him, laughing that high, horrible cackle. But in my dreams I had long, silvery hair. — THE WEDDING WAS IN SEPTEMBER. I arrived at the church full of anxious energy, as though I’d been sent through time from some disastrous future to this moment, when my actions still had weight and my thoughts, consequences. I didn’t know what I’d been sent to do, so I wrung my hands and chewed my cheeks,

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  She couldn’t care less about her surroundings. She is hunched busily over the rabbit leg in my glove. It is a tiring – a piece of sinewy, bony meat to keep her occupied as we walk, drawing her attention from the things around her. She pulls and picks scraps from it with the rapt concentration of a diner disassembling a lobster . Watching her I begin to relax. And straight away the emptied world is full of people. But they are not people. They are things to shun, to fear, to turn from, shielding my hawk. They come towards us like tumbling rocks in a video game, threatening destruction with the merest glancing blow. My heart beats fast. Escape and evasion. I am here to show the hawk people, but from a safe distance merely, and those three men in pastel shirts are heading right towards us. I dodge behind a tree trunk and let them pass. As their backs enter Mabel’s line of sight she sucks her feathers in so tightly she seems vacuum-packed in plastic. When they are gone she shakes her head nervously, cheeps once through her nose and starts eating again. A minute later a woman swinging supermarket bags is upon us. There’s nowhere to go. Where did all these bloody people come from? I look about in desperation. Mabel is now a pair of huge and haunted eyes, a ghost of bones and sinews, seconds from a bate. I hold her close to my chest and turn in a slow circle to block the woman from view. The woman doesn’t see the hawk. What she sees is a weirdo in a tattered jacket and baggy corduroy trousers revolving on the spot for no good reason. She hurries past, fast. There’s a sense of dreadful escalation. It’s fine , I tell myself. This is going well , but blood sings loud in my ears. A bicycle hisses by. The hawk bates. I curse. Another bicycle. She bates again. My nerve breaks. I start back to the house. We are nearly at the door when a runner passes – he’s come up silently behind us on his expensive trainers – and the hawk bates once again. I hate him for upsetting my hawk – actually hate him, am outraged by his existence. All the anger within me, the anger I didn’t know was there, the anger the books call One of the Five Stages of Grief rears up in a towering instant of white-hot fury. I look at his retreating back and wish him death . But then he breaks stride, turns back, and stops ten feet from us. ‘Sorry,’ I say, smiling and biting back ire. ‘It’s her first time out of the house, and she’s still scared of people.’ ‘God, no. I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t see her.’

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Rising nausea. There’s a sensation of ground being lost, of wet sand washing from under my feet. I don’t want to think of the photographs of the tortured man with the hood on his head and the wires to his hands and the invisible enemy who holds the camera, but it is all I can see and the word hood like a hot stone in my mouth. Burqa, the word in Arabic. Hood. I start speaking to the hawk – I think to the hawk – in a voice as low and reassuring as I can make it. ‘When you travel in the car, Mabel,’ I say, ‘there’ll be lots of frightening things out there and we can’t have you crashing about while I drive. It is just to keep you feeling safe.’ And then, ‘It is necessary.’ I hear myself say it. It is necessary. That is what I am telling myself. But I don’t like it. Nor does she. Patiently I offer it again. ‘Look,’ I say carefully. ‘Just a hood.’ I move it slowly up to her feathered chin. She bates. I wait until she settles and move it up to her chin again. Bate. And again. Bate. Bate. Bate. I want to be gentle. I am being gentle, but my gentleness is a veneer on raging despair. I don’t want to hood her. She knows it. On the radio the cricket commentator explains in gleeful detail why a batsman’s defensive stroke has failed. ‘Shut up, Aggers,’ I snap, and try once again. ‘Come on, Mabel,’ I say beseechingly, and in another minute the hood is on, she is back on her perch, and I am slumped on the sofa. The world is burning and I don’t want to touch it. This is a disaster. A disaster. I can’t do this. Not any of it. I am a terrible falconer. I burst into tears. The hawk dissolves. I curl up, bury my face in a cushion and cry myself to sleep. Forty minutes later Stuart is assessing the hawk with narrowed, practised eyes. ‘Small, isn’t she?’ he says, dragging four fingers thoughtfully down one stubbled cheek. ‘But she’s a good-looking gos. Long body. Long tail. Bird hawk.’ By this he means my goshawk might be better suited to fly at pheasants and partridges than rabbits or hares. ‘Yes.’ ‘How’re you doing with her?’ asks Mandy. She’s sitting on my sofa rolling a cigarette, looking amazing, like a rural punk princess from an unlikely Thomas Hardy novel. I tell her that the hawk is surprisingly tame and everything’s going well. But it is a dreadful lie.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  This room is not a dungeon and I am not a torturer . I am a beneficent figure, one who crouches and stoops in anxious genuflection, bearing delicious treats of steak in my hand. It is hubris. Less than an hour later I am certain that my hawk hates me and I am the worst falconer in the history of the world. No matter that Mabel is far tamer than any of the boys or books had told me she would be. I’ve comprehensively failed her. The hawk is ruined . I know this is true because she doesn’t want to be hooded. Until now she has accepted the hood with equanimity. Earlier today I sensed a little thrum of disquiet in her heart and now it has exploded into outright rebellion. I bring the hood up to her head and she dodges it. Snakes her head. Contracts it into her neck. Ducks and runs. I know why this is happening. To begin with the hood was a welcome refuge, but now she’s decided I’m harmless it is merely something that stops her seeing, and she wants to see. Now , unhappy , unsettled, lifting one foot then the other , the hawk looks about the room for somewhere to go. Her mood is contagious; my heart flutters tightly, heavily in my chest. I have lost the ability to disappear . I try to remove myself by listening to the cricket on the radio but can’t understand what the commentator is saying. I can only turn my attention from my unhappy hawk by thinking about the hood I’m holding. It is all she is thinking of too. I remember hauling this hood out of my bag while looking for a pen before a university seminar a few months ago. ‘What’s that?’ asked a colleague. ‘A falcon hood,’ I said, not looking up . ‘Have you brought it in to show it to people?’ ‘No. It was just in my bag.’ ‘But can I look at it?’ ‘Absolutely, go ahead.’ She picked it up, fascinated. ‘What an amazing thing,’ she said, frowning under her straight-cut fringe. ‘It goes over the hawk’s head to keep it quiet, right?’ And she looked inside, where the moulded leather was stitched with lines of hair-fine thread, and then turned it over in her hands, examining the bevelled opening for the hawk’s beak and the plaited Turk’s-head knot you hold it by, and the two long braces at the back that pull the hood open and closed. She set it back on the table reverently. ‘It’s so beautifully made,’ she said. ‘It’s like a Prada shoe.’ Indeed. This hood is among the best of its kind. It was made by an American falconer called Doug Pineo and it weighs almost nothing. A few grams. That is all.