Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 75 of 501 · 20 per page

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  I walked behind the motel to look for him. I found his shoes under a tree. Beyond them were his socks, like two dark salamanders. A little farther beyond his socks was his belt, and then I followed a trail of pants, shirt, and underwear until I was standing in the courtyard of the motel. My stomach turned and twisted as I considered all the scenarios a naked, drunk Indian man might get into in a motel on the main street of the city. … At that moment, his disappearance would be a sudden relief. It was then that I first felt our daughter moving within me. She awakened me with a flutter, a kick.

• From Trash (1988)

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

• From Trash (1988)

  I smile determinedly and take another drag. About five years ago Paula won an award for her presentation to the therapists’ collective on how fingernail biting was a form of subliminal alcoholic behavior. Since then she’s become the world’s expert on addictive behavior, talking on the radio and writing a pithy little column for the local women’s paper. Margaret jokes that Paula can spot addiction indicators faster than most people can locate a taxi. It gets tiresome for her old friends, but most of us pretend to ignore it. Occasionally Margaret and I even talk about how tolerant we all seem to have become of each other. “It’s getting older,” Margaret thinks. I tell her that all that has happened is that we’ve worn each other down. It’s a conversation we have often, every time Paula or Jackie does something that gets us mad, and Margaret and I have a tacit agreement to head off arguments when we can. This time Margaret fails me. “Paula’s right,” she says, pausing to lick salt off the rim of her glass. “You really ought to take a close look at yourself, girl.” “Don’t want to get too introspective.” I pull smoke deep into my lungs and try to look amused rather than brooding. Margaret’s eyebrows go up quizzically, and I know it’s time to get to the point of this little gathering. “I thought we were here to talk about Jackie.” That sets Margaret to nodding. “Oh Lord, don’t tell me.” Paula leans forward in her seat and grips her wineglass more tightly. “What’s she done now?” “It’s the worst. You won’t believe it.” Margaret’s voice is a little loud and excited. Twin spots of flush pink appear high on her cheekbones. She signals the waiter for another margarita and puts her right hand on Paula’s free wrist. “She’s paying the whole bill for the arbitrator. She’s decided it’s her own fault after all.” “Oh, that’s ridiculous!”

• From Trash (1988)

  “Meet me for lunch on Monday,” she insisted, while her eyes behind her glasses kept glancing at me, turning away and turning back. My palms were sweaty, but I nodded yes. At the door she stopped me, and put her hand out to touch my face. “Your family is very poor, aren’t they?” My face froze and burned at the same time. “Not really,” I told her, “not anymore.” She nodded and smiled, and the heat in my face went down my body in waves. I didn’t want to go on Monday but made myself. Her secretary was confused when I asked about lunch. “I don’t have anything written down about it,” she said, without looking up from her calendar. After class that afternoon the sociology professor explained her absence with a story about one of her children who had been bitten by a dog, “but not seriously. Come on Thursday,” she insisted, but on Thursday neither she nor her secretary were there. I stood in the doorway to her office and tilted my head back to take in her shelves of books. I wanted to pocket them all, but at the same time I didn’t want anything of hers. Trembling, I reached and pulled out the fattest book on the closest shelf. It was a hardbound edition of Sadism in the Movies, with a third of the pages underlined in red. It fit easily in my backpack, and I stopped in the Student Union bookstore on the way back to the dorm to buy a Hershey bar and steal a bright blue pen. On the next Monday, she apologized again, and again invited me to go to lunch the next day. I skipped lunch but slipped in that afternoon to return her book, now full of my bright blue comments. In its spot on the shelf there was now a collection of the essays of Georges Bataille, still unmarked. By the time I returned it on Friday, heavy blue ink stains showed on the binding itself. Eventually we did have lunch. She talked to me about how hard it was to be a woman alone in a college town, about how all the male professors treated her like a fool, and yet how hard she worked. I nodded. “You read so much,” I whispered. “I keep up,” she agreed with me. “So do I,” I smiled.

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

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

• From Trash (1988)

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

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Anna hurried upstairs to her daughter. She, herself, had not been a turbulent child, and Stephen’s outbursts always made her feel helpless; however she was fully prepared for the worst. But she found Stephen sitting with her chin on her hand, and calmly staring out of the window; her eyes were still swollen and her face very pale, otherwise she showed no great signs of emotion; indeed she actually smiled up at Anna—it was rather a stiff little smile. Anna talked kindly and Stephen listened, nodding her head from time to time in acquiescence. But Anna felt awkward, and as though for some reason the child was anxious to reassure her; that smile had been meant to be reassuring—it had been such a very unchildish smile. The mother was doing all the talking she found. Stephen would not discuss her affection for Collins; on this point she was firmly, obdurately silent. She neither excused nor upheld her action in throwing a broken flower-pot at the footman. ‘She’s trying to keep something back,’ thought Anna, feeling more nonplussed every moment. In the end Stephen took her mother’s hand gravely and proceeded to stroke it, as though she were consoling. She said: ‘Don’t feel worried, ’cause that worries Father—I promise I’ll try not to get into tempers, but you promise that you won’t go on feeling worried.’ And absurd though it seemed, Anna heard herself saying: ‘Very well then—I do promise, Stephen.’ CHAPTER 31S tephen never went to her father’s study in order to talk of her grief over Collins. A reticence strange in so young a child, together with a new, stubborn pride, held her tongue-tied, so that she fought out her battle alone, and Sir Philip allowed her to do so. Collins disappeared and with her the footman, and in Collins’ stead came a new second housemaid, a niece of Mrs. Bingham’s, who was even more timid than her predecessor, and who talked not at all. She was ugly, having small, round black eyes like currants—not inquisitive blue eyes like Collins. With set lips and tight throat Stephen watched this intruder as she scuttled to and fro doing Collins’ duties. She would sit and scowl at poor Winefred darkly, devising small torments to add to her labours—such as stepping on dustpans and upsetting their contents, or hiding away brooms and brushes and slop-cloths—until Winefred, distracted, would finally unearth them from the most inappropriate places. ‘ ’Owever did them slop-cloths get in ’ere!’ she would mutter, discovering them under a nursery cushion. And her face would grow blotched with anxiety and fear as she glanced towards Mrs. Bingham.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  I’d somehow even balance a stretched canvas. I didn’t have to think about it. It was a natural dance. But this time I was alone; the children were already home. I thought about what I was going to cook for dinner. Was the hamburger meat thawed, and did we have enough potatoes? And what about salad? It would be dark soon. Was my mother doing all right? Then, without warning, I was gutted by panic. It coiled around me and opened uncountable hungry mouths. I would die if I continued to stand in the middle of the avenue. I would die if I continued my way through traffic. As I press the pulse of memory, I tell myself that if I knew exactly the direction the darkness came from and the shape of the clouds forming in the sky when the panic found me, then I might be able to stop it, even now. If I am going to die, will I explode into millions of pieces? Will I evaporate? Or will I rabbit out into traffic and be run over? When there was an opening in the traffic, I sprinted across the street. My lungs were panicked butterflies in gale-force winds. I made it to the telephone booth outside Jack’s Bar. I hugged myself. I was alive, but, to my dismay, so was the panic. I’d only succeeded in running from one island of panic to the next. I dug through my pockets for change to call home, to tell my daughter’s father that I couldn’t make it. I shook as I deposited the coin and dialed. “Please come and get me,” I told him. “I can’t make it home.” How could I tell him that to make even one step was incomprehensible? That to make it the several thousand steps to go a mile up the road was beyond incomprehensible? I would die. “Of course you can make it home.” “Please,” I pleaded. “I don’t know how.” He told me they were all waiting for me. I was late; he’d already started the potatoes. And then he hung up. I can hear my voice now as I spoke into the telephone. It was flat, a dry plain. In the distance was the muscle of a whirling black tornado. How could he or anyone know? No one watching this slim young woman with her jacket hugged close would have any idea she was dying. I had no choice but to try to make it home. I didn’t have money for a taxi, or even to call a taxi. I was terrified. I had to reach with my mind to imagine each step. I walked a tightrope over an abyss that whirred with the sound of a thousand bullroarers. All around me students walked by to classes, to study, to dinner or home. Cars went up and down Central. The sun continued to fall toward the sea, into the west of endings.

• From Trash (1988)

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

• From Trash (1988)

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

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  in half an hour, and after the bare escape I had every reason to be concerned. I had to make a plan about what I would do, where I would run if I got kicked out. “Hey, I need that!” Georgette gestured to me with her nail polish applicator as I turned down the volume, almost muting it. “I had a rough day.” “Peace,” I said, and made the peace sign with my fingers. I turned up the music a notch, then opened the windows to let in some air. I took a deep breath to relieve my panic. I had to get my thoughts straight before going into the meeting with the dorm matron. I had to have a plan. I couldn’t go back to my family, I would tell her. I would kill myself first. I thought about killing myself. Once when the pressure was too much, when the stepfather was bearing down on me, I sneaked a kitchen knife into my bed. I cut myself on the wrist. The cut was superficial. None of our knives were sharp. But the cut temporarily relieved the pressure. I felt calm. Then my mother came into the room, brought there by mother instinct. She lifted my blanket and saw the knife and my cut. Pain broke her face. I never tried it again. When I thought about it, I’d see her face guarding me. Across the way, in the boys’ dorm, I could hear Herbie practicing his guitar. We shared a love for jazz, Jimi Hendrix, and esoteric philosophies. “Our dark sides are compatible,” I told him one night as we flew with Jimi’s guitar, far from the dancers we could hear in the distance practicing in the gym, far from the school, from pain, high on smoke, sitting on the floor of his dorm room. “Hmmmmmm,” he answered. “True as horses running across mesas, breathing clouds.” “Perfect,” I answered. And then we laughed. Though he was born in a hogan and didn’t speak English until he was sent to a Catholic boarding school, and I was born in a city speaking English, we fit. My father’s tribal language was a secret used by his relatives, who didn’t like my mother because she came from a poor family. My father’s relatives and ancestors were tribal leaders, beauty queens, and artists. My mother’s relatives were musicians and storytellers and didn’t like to hold nine-to-five jobs. My parents were from enemy tribes, which set up a

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  step. I walked a tightrope over an abyss that whirred with the sound of a thousand bullroarers. All around me students walked by to classes, to study, to dinner or home. Cars went up and down Central. The sun continued to fall toward the sea, into the west of endings. No one could see the force that wanted to kill me. Nor did anyone know how I had to coax each breath, each swallow. I had to count, so I could live. I had to make it home. For months I continued to will myself to walk and swallow. Vast holes of panic appeared to open in the atmosphere. Crossing streets was particularly difficult. As I came to a corner, I’d hold on to signs, lampposts, or grip the handle of the baby stroller. Then I’d cross in a blur of fear. One night I was driving back late from Acomita from visiting friends. Just as I started over the Laguna Pueblo overpass, the panic yanked the steering wheel toward the edge of the bridge. I fought to gain control of the car. Just before I was close to going over, I prayed for help. The panic let go and I was able to pull the car into the driving lane. I was introduced to a native woman who was a psychic. She helped police find the dead. Two of my concerned friends asked her to read me while she was having coffee in the student union. She agreed. She asked me to open my hands. She looked at my palms. I saw what she was seeing. I saw the wreckage of my life, what no one else could see when they looked at me. I appeared normal, as I took care of my children and went to school. She warned me, “Be careful. You are in great danger.” Then she gently closed my palms. One night when the baby’s father was away in California teaching poetry, I felt a small island of peace. The children slept. I painted, listening to the song of the cricket who lived in the corner of the living room, near the front door. The cricket sang about the coming rain. It would be a light, misty rain. It was a day away. I turned on the television, the story box that changed the story field of the world. The commercial aspect of stories threatens the diversity of the world’s stories and manners of telling. The television stands in the altar space of most of

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  My stepfather began needling my mother to get rid of me. I was trouble, he said. I remember hugging myself under the blankets in the bedroom I shared with my sister as I overheard his plan to send me to a fundamentalist Christian school. I had quit religion. He knew that to send me there would be the worst punishment. Though I began attending the local Bible church after being lured to vacation Bible school in kindergarten, I stayed because I liked the treats. I grew to love Bible stories, and I hungered for God knowledge and loved the music. Church became an uneasy refuge from the chaos at home. Most of the children wouldn’t sit with me in church, because I was Indian and my parents were divorced. There were kind people in the church community, like the family who for years drove my sister and me to church twice a week or more, without compensation for gas or time. Another parishioner, Mr. Hughes, carried bubblegum in the huge pockets of his big blue jacket. After church he passed out gum to all the children. He had a heart as huge as his pockets. We would have followed him anywhere, even without the bubblegum. By the time I was thirteen I had grown tired of the misuse of the Bible to prove the superiority of white people, to enforce the domination of women by men, and I didn’t agree with the prohibition on dancing and the warnings against prophecy and visions. I decided to read the Bible through, searching to make my own sense of it. I read it through two or three times. The Old Testament was basically tribal law for certain desert peoples in the Middle East. I found wisdom, poetry, and a great respect for dreams and visions. I also found no prohibition on dancing, which was proscribed by my church. King David danced before the altar. Women were as oppressed then as they were in Oklahoma. Like the old-time powerful medicine people who spoke in metaphor, in poetry, Jesus Christ in the New Testament was an inspiration. He produced miracles and healed the people with words and deeds. I delighted in scouring out shocking stories, like the one about Lot’s daughters

• From Trash (1988)

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

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Ser Ciappelletto, as you know, I am about to go away from here altogether, but I have some business to settle, amongst others with the Burgundians. These people are full of tricks, and I know of no one better fitted than yourself to recover what they owe me. And so, since you are not otherwise engaged at present, if you will attend to this matter I propose to obtain favours for you at court, and allow you a reasonable portion of the money you recover.’ Ser Ciappelletto, who was out of a job at the time and illsupplied with worldly goods, seeing that the man who had long been his prop and stay was about to depart, made up his mind without delay and said (for he really had no alternative) that he would do it willingly. So that when they had agreed on terms, Ser Ciappelletto received powers of attorney from Musciatto and letters of introduction from the King, and after Musciatto’s departure he went to Burgundy, where scarcely anybody knew him. And there, in a gentle and amiable fashion that ran contrary to his nature, as though he were holding his anger in reserve as a last resort, he issued his first demands and began to do what he had gone there to do. Before long, however, while lodging in the house of two Florentine brothers who ran a money-lending business there and did him great honour out of their respect for Musciatto, he happened to fall ill; whereupon the two brothers promptly summoned doctors and servants to attend him, and provided him with everything he needed to recover his health. But all their assistance was unavailing, because the good man, who was already advanced in years and had lived a disordered existence, was reported by his doctors to be going each day from bad to worse, like one who was suffering from a fatal illness. The two brothers were filled with alarm, and one day, alongside the room in which Ser Ciappelletto was lying, they began talking together.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  We got up, ate cold pizza for breakfast, left over from my husband’s shift at the restaurant the night before. I washed the children, cleaned the house, and he went to work. I worried about money and what we would do when he lost his job. He would eventually lose it, as he had lost all the others. The only question was when. The last time he had walked out on a job we had had only an industrial-sized box of pancake mix, a gift from my mother, for meals, to supplement beans and commodity cheese. My mother was disappointed with my life and did everything she could to keep from coming to the side of town I was living in. She had grown up in worse and had cleaned and cooked her way to decency. My life was now a mockery of her struggle. Every night my husband came in from work in a furious cloud of anger. He told yet another story of how someone had tried to put one over on him. He had barely managed to keep from punching out his “skinny white boss,” who was riding him even though the new waitress was the one screwing up the orders. We had nearly starved before he got this job. The baby was nearing eight weeks old, and as I watched my husband open another beer and pace the room, I decided I had better start looking for work. I would wash dishes, dance on tables if I had to, rather than starve the children or myself again. Some days his mother would come over and we would pool our resources for food. We were bound together for survival. Her mood shifted according to the nature of our predicament. On the good days we would hit the yard sales together. I was her ally as we searched through junk for dishes and clothes. If she was feeling especially hospitable, she would buy me something to wear for under a dollar. One morning as I was toweling off the children from their bath, my mother-in-law pushed her way roughly into the house, puffing on a cigarette, then blowing smoke into my face. My husband surprised me with the swiftness of his leap between us. He had never taken up for me before when she slid into her enemy mode. “Mom, get out of here, now!” he warned her. She stepped back, surprised at the vehemence of his reaction as he slapped the cigarette from her hand, determinedly pushed her out the door, and slammed it behind her. The smoke followed her. “That cigarette was doctored with curses,” he told me. “She’s witching you.” One morning as we struggled to put a bag of stuff from a yard sale into the trunk of her car, she showed me a book of spells written in Cherokee that she had acquired during her last trip home. The book was so old the pages were turning to powder. I didn’t touch it.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  I was still angry at my stepfather, and at my mother for supporting him. Whatever happened, she took his side. She didn’t want to see what was really going on. What good was it to know anything anyway? I argued at the knowing. The more you knew, the more you endured. My classmate pulled out beers hidden under her jacket. We drank. Her older, slick-haired boyfriend drove us farther and farther out from the city, beyond my circle of familiarity. The beer calmed my anxiety. Soon we were at the lake, at a huge party. The music pounded. Drunken strangers, mostly guys, surrounded me. I wanted to go home, but I didn’t want to go home at all. Hell, I reminded myself, I had no home. So I drank. The prickling anxiety that constantly haunted me in my waking moments slid to my feet. The more I drank, the more I didn’t care that I couldn’t sing in the house anymore or try out for the play. I drank more to fly above the rude story. I drank to obliterate my life. My classmate and her boyfriend disappeared. They left me alone without a ride home. I panicked. I had to find a way back by my stepfather’s curfew. If I were to show up late and drunk, I feared I could be beaten to death. I found a ride and paid for it without money. I had nothing else, and I was desperate and out-of-my-mind drunk. I left part of myself behind. After that, I drank intermittently, usually on weekends. I discovered that each kind of alcohol has its own spirit. Drinking the sticky-sweet Southern Comfort associated with the singer Janis Joplin evoked violence. The whiskey was born in a New Orleans bar in 1874, in the wake of my people’s removal. After I pulled down the front door of my apartment in my very early twenties, in a frustrated anger born of drinking Southern Comfort, I never drank it again. Tequila was closer to its plant origins. I could see the agave plant at the edge of my consciousness. It was a medicine. I sensed the plant as a mothering being. It would bend over me to take care of me even as it would punish me, like a fierce, protective mother. All of these plant medicines, like whiskey, tequila, and tobacco, are potent healers. There’s a reason they’re called spirits. You must use them very carefully. They open you up. If you abuse them, they can tear holes in your protective, spiritual covering.

• From The Decameron (1353)

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

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

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

• From Trash (1988)

  “I don’t remember. That was a long time ago.” “Only a moment in the mind, girl. Think about it. All those details you produce on prompting, the feel of the mesh, and the stink of the fish, all that story stuff that rolls out of you so easily when you got an audience around. Bet you got that monkey in your mind all the time.” “You jealous?” “More like you’re guilty? Guilty ’bout how you play up to any and everybody, but got so little time for the folks who really care about you?” “You, huh? You want me to believe you just live for me, huh?” “Hell, me and the monkeys, girl. Me and the monkeys.” She was teasing and she wasn’t. It was the end of the semester, and for weeks she’d been trying to talk me into moving out of the dorm and into an apartment with her for the beginning of the next term. “Think about it. We’d have a door we could lock against the world.” I thought about it. I thought about never being alone when I wanted to be, about Toni keeping track of where I went and what I did, of her sudden angers and drunken tirades. But I also thought about all those Sunday mornings lying against Toni’s thigh out in front of the dormitory, reading the paper and swapping nasty stories until we were both squirming in our jeans with nowhere to go to have sex. Then I thought about making love anytime I wanted until I would get to needing it, having to have it, and only Toni to provide it. I thought about getting to where I trusted her and what she might do then. A kind of terror came up from my belly and strangled me. I’d never trusted anybody in my life. How could I trust Toni? “No,” I told her. “I don’t want to move in with you.” Toni’s black eyes narrowed, and her left hand slapped the monkey cage, sending its captive into shrieking hysterics. “Shit, bitch. You just want your stuff taken care of and never having to trade nothing for it. You tell yourself it’s just sex, and sex an’t nothing but itch-scratching. You tell yourself lies, girl. You live your life on lies.” She grabbed my wrists and pulled me close to her. I pulled back, and we both almost fell. For a moment we stood close, trembling, then she threw my hands down. “Even monkeys take mating seriously.” Her anger and hurt and outrage seemed to vibrate right through me. My own anger came rolling back. “What do you know about monkeys? What do you know about anything?” “More than your stories, girl. More than your stories tell anyone. I know who I am. I know what I want. And I know what an’t worth my trouble, what an’t worth another minute of my time.”