Contentment

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 36 of 189 · 20 per page

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Oh, it’s hot everywhere.” Granny never agreed with Aunt Alma, and particularly not that summer when she was being paid a lot less than she wanted to watch Alma’s kids. And the little Mama threw in to pay her for keeping Reese and me didn’t sweeten her attitude. Granny loved all her grandchildren, but she was always announcing that she didn’t have much use for her daughters. “My three boys worship me,” she’d tell everybody, “but my girls, Lord! I’ve got five girls and they never seem to appreciate me. It’s how girls are, though, selfish and full of themselves. I shouldn’t expect any better.” “Your granny means well,” Mama told me before dropping us off to stay the day over at Aunt Alma’s, “but don’t pay too much attention to the things she says. She’s always loved her boy children more. It’s just the way some women are.” I nodded. I believed anything that Mama said was so. Almost the first thing I remember is Aunt Alma’s house and yard, back behind the tiny roadside store she and Uncle Wade were trying to manage. It was the summer after Reese was born, which means I must have been about five years old, only slightly bigger than Little Earle, Alma’s youngest. But Little Earle was a fat toddler still chafing in rubber pants and grabbing at everything with his unfailingly sticky hands, while I was a solemn watchful child with long thin bones and a cloud of wild black hair. I looked down on Little Earle as a lesser creature and stayed well out of reach of his grubby fingers and pushed-out baby lips. That was the summer it was so hot the katydids failed to sing and everyone spent their evenings out on the porch with large glasses of ice tea and damp hand towels to cool the back of the neck. Alma wouldn’t even start cooking until after the sun had gone down. Twilight came on early, though, a long-drawn-out dimming of the heat and glare that made everything soft and magical, brought out the first fireflies, and added a cool enchantment to the metallic echoes of the slide guitar playing on Alma’s kitchen radio. Granny would plant herself in the porch rocker, leaving Alma’s girls to pick through snap beans, hope for a rainstorm, and tease her into telling stories.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Oh, hell,” Earle laughed when I repeated some of Granny’s stories. “Every third family in Greenville County swears it’s part of Cherokee Nation. Whether our great-granddaddy was or wasn’t, it don’t really make a titty’s worth of difference. You’re a Boatwright, Bone, even if you are the strangest girl-child we got.” I looked at him carefully, keeping my Cherokee eyes level and my face blank. I could not have said a word if Great-Great-Granddaddy had been standing there looking back at me with my own black eyes. [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] Mama wore her hair cut short, curled, and bleached. Every other month she and Aunt Alma would get together and do each other’s hair, rinsing Aunt Alma’s in beer or lemon juice to lighten it just a little, trimming Mama’s back and bleaching it that dark blond she liked. Then they’d set pin curls for each other, and while those dried they would coax Reese into sitting still long enough that her baby-fine red locks could be tied up in rags. I would tear up the rags, rinse pins, strain the juice through a cloth happily enough, but I refused the perm Mama was always insisting she wanted to give me. “Stinks and hurts,” I complained. “Do it to Reese.” “Oh, Reese don’t need it. Look at this.” And Aunt Alma tugged a few of Reese’s springy long curls free from the rags. Like soft corkscrews, the curls bounced and swung as if they were magical. “This child has the best hair in the world, just like yours, Anney, when you were a baby. Yours had a little red to it too, seems to me.” “No.” Mama shook her head while she pulled more rags out of Reese’s curls. “You know my hair was just blond. You had the red touch, you and Ruth. Remember how you used to fight over whose was darker?” “Oh, but you had the prettiest hair!” Aunt Alma turned to me. “Your mama had the prettiest hair you ever saw. Soft? Why, it would make Reese’s feel like steel wire. It was the softest hair in Greenville County, and gold as sunlight on sheets. It didn’t go dark till she had you girls, a little bit with you and all dark with Reese. Hair will do that, you know, darken in pregnancy. An’t nothing that will stop it once it starts.” Mama laughed. “Remember when Carr first got pregnant and swore she’d shave her head if it looked like it was gonna go dark?” Aunt Alma nodded, her dark brown pin curls bobbing. “Rinsed it in piss, she did, every Sunday evening, Tommy Lee’s baby piss that she begged off Ruth. All ‘cause Granny swore baby-piss rinses would keep her blond.” “Didn’t she stink?” I bit at the rubber tip of a hairpin, peeling the coating off the metal so I could taste the sweet iron tang underneath.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I nodded solemnly, hanging on to Granny. The radio sounded louder, the boys started to fight. Everybody was busy, everybody was talking, but I was perfectly happy at Granny’s side, waiting for Mama to come home late from the diner, take Reese and me back to the tiny duplex she had rented downtown. If the heat continued into the night Mama would put us out on the screened porch on a makeshift mattress of couch cushions and sheets. She would sit up by us out there, humming and smoking in the quiet dark, while the radio played so soft we couldn’t make it out. The world that came in over the radio was wide and far away and didn’t touch us at all. We lived on one porch or another all summer long, laughing at Little Earle, teasing the boys and picking over beans, listening to stories, or to the crickets beating out their own soft songs. When I think of that summer—sleeping over at one of my aunts’ houses as easily as at home, the smell of Mama’s neck as she bent over to hug us in the dark, the sound of Little Earle’s giggle or Granny’s spit thudding onto the dry ground, and that country music playing low everywhere, as much a part of the evening as crickets and moonlight—I always feel safe again. No place has ever seemed so sweet and quiet, no place ever felt so much like home. [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] I worshiped my uncles—Earle, Beau, and Nevil. They were all big men with wide shoulders, broken teeth, and sunken features. They kept dogs trained for hunting and drove old trucks with metal toolboxes bolted to the reinforced wood sides. They worked in the mills or at the furnace repair business, or sometimes did roofing or construction work depending on how the industry was going. They tinkered with cars together on the weekends, standing around in the yard sipping whiskey and talking dirty, kicking at the greasy remains of engines they never finished rebuilding. Their eyes were narrow under sun-bleached eyebrows, and their hands were forever working a blade or a piece of wood, or oiling some little machine part or other. “You hold a knife like this,” they told me. “You work a screwdriver from your shoulder, swing a hammer from your hip, and spread your fingers when you want to hold something safe.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Catch me that hen,” Aunt Alma would tell me. “Then pick over these beans and wash those tomatoes.” Reese would help, we would sit out on the porch together, blending in with the cousins and their friends so completely that sometimes Aunt Alma or Aunt Ruth would forget we were there until Mama called looking for us. It didn’t matter where we were living so long as we could go stay with one of our aunts. Over at Aunt Alma’s we could listen to Garvey and Grey fight, to Little Earle giggle and squeak, to Uncle Wade drink and cuss, to the radio playing and the chickens clucking outside the windows. Over there we got to slide around on a big tarp with the sprinkler shooting cold water up in a shower. At Aunt Ruth’s we could watch Uncle Travis cut up potatoes for her, a beer at his side and a cigarette dangling from one side of his mouth, ashes occasionally dropping into the peels. Aunt Ruth even let us play in just our panties, though after Reese got ringworm Mama insisted we keep our clothes on, and after we got chiggers she made us scrub down as soon as we came home. Reese and I didn’t mind. We still wanted to go visiting at every chance. It was alive over at the aunts’ houses, warm, always humming with voices and laughter and children running around. The quiet in our own house was cold, no matter that we had a better furnace and didn’t leave our doors open for the wind to blow through. There was something icy in Daddy Glen’s houses that melted out of us when we were over at our aunts’. [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] Daddy Glen’s brothers lived in big houses they owned, with fenced-in yards and flowering bushes. “This is how people ought to live,” he told us when he drove us over to visit his brothers. More than anything Daddy Glen wanted a house like Daryl and James had—a new house with a nice lawn and picture windows framed in lined curtains. The houses he chose for us were always shabby imitations. Mama sewed curtains, washed windows, and polished floors. Daddy Glen mowed the grass and sent us out with scissors to dig up the weeds along the driveway. He yelled at Earle and Beau if they drove up on the grass, and he chased the dogs that came and knocked over our garbage cans in the night. “Nobody wants me to have nothing nice,” he’d complain, and then get in one of his dangerously quiet moods and refuse to talk to anybody. He brooded so much Reese and I patrolled the yard, picking up windblown trash and dog turds—anything that would make him mad. Every new house made him happy for a little while, and we tried to extend that period of relative calm as much as possible, keeping everything sparkling clean and neat.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Raylene offered me a glass of lemon tea when I showed up, and then quickly put me to work. She had me pick the fresh vegetables out of her side garden so she wouldn’t have to do all that bending over. “I just about ruined my back at that damn mill,” she said with a grin and a sigh. “Always leaning forward and reaching. Now I’d rather run than bend. You be careful of your back, Bone, or it’ll be damn stiff when you get old.” She told me to go down to the river to pull in whatever trash had accumulated in the tree roots. I came home with fresh tomatoes, okra, two jars of chow-chow, and the head off a Betsy Wetsy doll, the one with the silly rubber curl on her forehead. Raylene told Mama I was the kind of girl she liked, quiet and hardworking, and said she’d pay in kind for my help a couple of days a week. So I started spending all my time with Raylene while Reese went off to afternoon Bible classes at the Jesus Love Academy. Every day I dragged stuff up from the river—baby-carriage covers, tricycle wheels, shoes, plastic dishes, jump-rope handles, ragged clothes, and once the headlight off a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. “This is good stuff,” Aunt Raylene usually said. “You got an eye for things, girl. I can clean and patch those clothes up. We’ll just soak the dishes in bleach and give the rest of it a scrubbing. Saturday morning we’ll put out blankets and sell it off the side of the road. You get your mama to send you over on the weekend and I’ll give you a tenth of everything we earn.” I loved her praise more than the money, loved being good at something, loved hearing Aunt Raylene tell Uncle Beau what a worker I was. Sometimes she’d come down to the river and watch me climb around the tree roots. “You’re pretty sure on your feet,” she told me. “Looks like you an’t scared of falling in.” “Why should I be?” I watched her light a cigarette the same way Uncle Earle did, striking the match against her thumbnail. “A little river water an’t gonna hurt me.” “No, it won’t. It won’t. But you’d be surprised how silly some people get about the notion of falling in, or getting their pants wet, or bumping themselves on an old river rock. I had Alma’s girl Temple out here once after she quit school, and it turned out she was scared of snapping turtles. Girl was convinced they were waiting for her just under the surface of the water, waiting to snap her little toes off and eat them up! Can you imagine?” She took a drag on her cigarette, cupping it in her hand away from the river breeze.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  She laughed loud, with great enthusiasm, and spit to the side in a way I had never seen a grown woman do before. On summer nights Raylene kept old truck tires from the county dump smoldering in the yard to drive the mosquitoes away. The smoke rose in a thick stinking brown fog, drifting toward the river, where the men came to fish in the cool of the evening, and where Aunt Raylene kept the weeds cut back to discourage bugs and give her a clear view of the banks. “I like to watch things pass,” she told me in her lazy whiskery drawl. “Time and men and trash out on the river. I just like to watch it all go around the bend.” She spoke softly, smelling a little of alcohol and pepper, chow-chow and home brew, and the woodsmoke tang that clung to her skin all the time. I watched her shift her hips in her overalls. She was as big around as Aunt Alma but moved as easily and gracefully as a young boy, squatting on her heels to pull weeds and swinging her arms as she walked around her yard. Uncle Earle had said she’d loved to dance when she was young, and she looked as if she still could. Aunt Raylene’s house was scrubbed clean, but her walls were lined with shelves full of oddities, old tools and bird nests, rare dishes and peculiarly shaped rocks. An amazing collection of things accumulated on the river bank below her house. People from Greenville tossed their garbage off the highway a few miles up the river. There it would sink out of sight in the mud and eventually work its way down to Aunt Raylene’s, where the river turned, then rise to get caught in the roots of the big trees along the bank. Aunt Raylene said the garbage drew the fish in, and it was true that the fishing at her place was the best in the county. The uncles went to Aunt Raylene’s to catch carp and catfish and big brown unnamed fish with rotting eyes and gilded fins that people were afraid to eat. Uncle Earle and Uncle Beau would put out their poles with little bells on the lines and stand in the tire smoke to drink whiskey and tell dirty stories. The bells would tinkle now and then, but they didn’t always stop to go get their catch. Sometimes the whiskey and the stories were too good. Raylene offered me a glass of lemon tea when I showed up, and then quickly put me to work. She had me pick the fresh vegetables out of her side garden so she wouldn’t have to do all that bending over. “I just about ruined my back at that damn mill,” she said with a grin and a sigh. “Always leaning forward and reaching. Now I’d rather run than bend.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  After that there was no choice but to find work in a diner. The tips made all the difference, though she knew she could make more money at the honky-tonks or managing a slot as a cocktail waitress. There was always more money serving people beer and wine, more still in hard liquor, but she’d have had to go outside Greenville County to do that, and she couldn’t imagine moving away from her family. She needed her sisters’ help with her two girls. The White Horse Cafe was a good choice anyway, one of the few decent diners downtown. The work left her tired but not sick to death like the mill, and she liked the people she met there, the tips and the conversation. “You got a way with a smile,” the manager told her. “Oh, my smile gets me a long way,” she laughed, and no one would have known she didn’t mean it. Truckers or judges, they all liked Mama. Aunt Ruth was right, her face had settled into itself. Her color had come back after a while, and the lines at the corners of her eyes just made her look ready to smile. When the men at the counter weren’t slipping quarters in her pocket they were bringing her things, souvenirs or friendship cards, once or twice a ring. Mama smiled, joked, slapped ass, and firmly passed back anything that looked like a down payment on something she didn’t want to sell. Reese was two years old the next time Mama stopped in at the courthouse. The clerk looked pleased to see her again. She didn’t talk to him this time, just picked up the paperwork and took it over to the new business offices near the Sears, Roebuck Auto Outlet. Uncle Earle had given her a share of his settlement from another car accident, and she wanted to use a piece of it to hire his lawyer for a few hours. The man took her money and then smiled at her much like the clerk when she told him what she wanted. Her face went hard, and he swallowed quick to keep from laughing. No sense making an enemy of Earle Boatwright’s sister. “I’m sorry,” he told her, handing half her money back. “The way the law stands there’s nothing I could do for you. If I was to put it through, it would come back just like the one you got now. You just wait a few years. Sooner or later they’ll get rid of that damn ordinance. Mostly it’s not enforced anymore anyway.” “Then why,” she asked him, “do they insist on enforcing it on me?” “Now, honey,” he sighed, clearly embarrassed. He wiggled in his seat and passed her the rest of her money across the desk. “You don’t need me to tell you the answer to that. You’ve lived in this county all your life, and you know how things are.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I could not have said a word if Great-Great-Granddaddy had been standing there looking back at me with my own black eyes. Mama wore her hair cut short, curled, and bleached. Every other month she and Aunt Alma would get together and do each other’s hair, rinsing Aunt Alma’s in beer or lemon juice to lighten it just a little, trimming Mama’s back and bleaching it that dark blond she liked. Then they’d set pin curls for each other, and while those dried they would coax Reese into sitting still long enough that her baby-fine red locks could be tied up in rags. I would tear up the rags, rinse pins, strain the juice through a cloth happily enough, but I refused the perm Mama was always insisting she wanted to give me. “Stinks and hurts,” I complained. “Do it to Reese.” “Oh, Reese don’t need it. Look at this.” And Aunt Alma tugged a few of Reese’s springy long curls free from the rags. Like soft corkscrews, the curls bounced and swung as if they were magical. “This child has the best hair in the world, just like yours, Anney, when you were a baby. Yours had a little red to it too, seems to me.” “No.” Mama shook her head while she pulled more rags out of Reese’s curls. “You know my hair was just blond. You had the red touch, you and Ruth. Remember how you used to fight over whose was darker?” “Oh, but you had the prettiest hair!” Aunt Alma turned to me. “Your mama had the prettiest hair you ever saw. Soft? Why, it would make Reese’s feel like steel wire. It was the softest hair in Greenville County, and gold as sunlight on sheets. It didn’t go dark till she had you girls, a little bit with you and all dark with Reese. Hair will do that, you know, darken in pregnancy. An’t nothing that will stop it once it starts.” Mama laughed. “Remember when Carr first got pregnant and swore she’d shave her head if it looked like it was gonna go dark?” Aunt Alma nodded, her dark brown pin curls bobbing. “Rinsed it in piss, she did, every Sunday evening, Tommy Lee’s baby piss that she begged off Ruth. All ‘cause Granny swore baby-piss rinses would keep her blond.” “Didn’t she stink?” I bit at the rubber tip of a hairpin, peeling the coating off the metal so I could taste the sweet iron tang underneath. “Baby piss don’t stink,” Aunt Alma told me, “unless the baby’s sick, and Tommy Lee wasn’t never sick a day in his life. Carr didn’t smell no different than she ever did, but her hair went dark anyway.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I tore one half free and dumped it back in the bucket and then just as roughly started breaking out four equal sections of roots and top growth. As I worked I kept my face down, my eyes on the plant. “I was telling your aunt Ruth that Daddy Glen’s started a new job over at the Sunshine Dairy. He’s real pleased about going to work for his daddy, and it looks like this job is going to work out pretty good.” “That’s good.” I shook dried dirt free from one clump of roots and then set the mass down in the damp mix in the earthenware pot. “You want me to use that braided cord to hang these up, Aunt Ruth?” “Yeah, the brown cord Travis brought home from the dime store. It should hold up pretty good.” I nodded without looking at her. “You get that done, Bone, and we can talk about when you’re gonna come home. Reese’s been missing you pretty bad.” “I thought I was gonna stay till school started again.” I kept my voice neutral, my head still down. “Aunt Ruth can’t possibly get along without me. She needs me.” There was a long silence, and then Aunt Ruth cleared her throat. “Bone’s right, Anney. I don’t know how I’d drag my sorry butt out of bed without Bone to wake me up. She gets up in the morning singing along to the radio. Sounds just like Kitty Wells sometimes.” She might have been starting to laugh, but coughed instead. I looked up then, carefully, trying to keep my face in the shade. Mama was leaning forward into the sun, her fingers laced together on her knees, her eyes squinted against the light but intent on me. Aunt Ruth was leaning back in her rocker, her hand up, almost covering her mouth. Mama pulled her fingers free and dropped her hands down so that her palms cupped her knees. “Well, I can see how you might not be able to stand the loss of that. But maybe I’ll just bring Reese out on Saturday. Wouldn’t want her to forget what her big sister looks like.” I spooned loose dirt into the little pot, sprinkled water on the dusty leaves. The cutting drooped already, getting ready to lose half its growth. But the stem was moist and flexible under my fingers. Strong. It would come back strong. In August the revival tent went up about half a mile from Aunt Ruth’s house on the other side of White Horse Road. Some evenings while Travis and Ruth sat and talked quietly, I would walk up there on my own to sit outside and listen. The preacher was a shouter.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I saw her do that a lot, sit out there and stare into the distance. She always seemed completely comfortable with herself, elbows locked around her knees and one hand drawn up to smoke. Sometimes she’d hum softly, no music I’d ever heard. Aunt Raylene hated most everything that played on the radio, saved her greatest contempt for the kind of country ballads that bemoaned the faithless lover and always included a little spoken part during the chorus. “Terrible maudlin shit,” she’d declare. “You don’t like that, do you, Bone?” I’d promised her that no, I didn’t, ‘course I didn’t, not mentioning that I had liked it before. I would have hated for her to think I didn’t have good sense. For my own protection, I never talked to her about gospel music. I couldn’t bear it if Raylene laughed at the music I dreamed of singing. Aunt Alma’s girl Patsy Ruth came out to Aunt Raylene’s to get out of caring for Tadpole. The baby had finally been diagnosed with a heart condition, though she didn’t look sick, just very small and slightly blue. At four she still fit in Alma’s laundry basket and had to be watched all the time. “Tadpole falls asleep and it looks like she an’t breathing. Mama gets all crazy, thinks she’s died or something, and goes shaking her till she cries. Gets on my nerves,” Patsy Ruth complained. “I’d rather pull weeds for Aunt Raylene any day.” Patsy Ruth wanted to help me pull stuff out of the river but hated getting mud on herself. She stayed up on the exposed roots of the trees and rarely retrieved anything worth the trouble. Still, she was the one who saw the hooks—two of them, linked together with a rusted chain, big four-pronged things still dragging little shreds of rope. “Lookit the shine!” she yelled, almost sliding down in the mud. “Lookit there. It’s something, I bet you. Something.” I climbed out on one of the roots until I could reach down to the curved metal edge that was showing through the brown water. It was hard to untangle the hooks from the muddy trash. By the time I worked them free, I’d slid down and had one leg thigh-deep in the mud. “You get your ass down here and help me,” I yelled at Patsy Ruth, but she had no intention of risking the river. Instead she ran back to find Grey and Garvey. “My sweet Jesus, look at the size of them.” Grey pulled the hooks out of my hands even before I got them up the bank. “That sucker’s longer than my arm.” “What is it?” “It’s a hook, a set of hooks.” “Any fool can see that. What’s it for?”

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The paths along the edges of the garden were almost entirely hemmed in by white and red roses and jasmine, so that not only in the morning but even when the sun was at its apex one could walk in pleasant, sweet-smelling shade, without ever being touched by the sun’s rays. It would take a long time to describe how numerous and varied were the shrubs growing there, or how neatly they were set out: but all the ones that have aught to commend them and flourish in our climate were represented in full measure. In the central part of the garden (not the least, but by far the most admirable of its features), there was a lawn of exceedingly fine grass, of so deep a green as to almost seem black, dotted all over with possibly a thousand different kinds of gaily-coloured flowers, and surrounded by a line of flourishing, bright green orange- and lemon-trees, which, with their mature and unripe fruit and lingering shreds of blossom, offered agreeable shade to the eyes and a delightful aroma to the nostrils. In the middle of this lawn there stood a fountain of pure white marble, covered with marvellous bas-reliefs. From a figure standing on a column in the centre of the fountain, a jet of water, whether natural or artificial I know not, but sufficiently powerful to drive a mill with ease, gushed high into the sky before cascading downwards and falling with a delectable plash into the crystal-clear pool below. And from this pool, which was lapping the rim of the fountain, the water passed through a hidden culvert and then emerged into finely constructed artificial channels surrounding the lawn on all sides. Thence it flowed along similar channels through almost the whole of the beautiful garden, eventually gathering at a single place from which it issued forth from the garden and descended towards the plain as a pure clear stream, furnishing ample power to two separate mills on its downward course, to the no small advantage of the owner of the palace. The sight of this garden, and the perfection of its arrangement, with its shrubs, its streamlets, and the fountain from which they originated, gave so much pleasure to each of the ladies and the three young men that they all began to maintain that if Paradise were constructed on earth, it was inconceivable that it could take any other form, nor could they imagine any way in which the garden’s beauty could possibly be enhanced. And as they wandered contentedly through it, making magnificent garlands for themselves from the leaves of the various trees, their ears constantly filled with the sound of some twenty different kinds of birds, all singing as though they were vying with one another, they became aware of yet another delightful feature, which, being so overwhelmed by the others, they had so far failed to notice.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —Soy Teresa —dice, rodando la lengua en la r y mirándome por encima del hombro con una sonrisa. Gesticula con mis bandejas—. ¿Esto es queso crema? —Oh, sí. —Sííí —canturrea, guiándonos a las mesas de comida. Todo está dispuesto como un buffet, tres largas mesas alineadas y llenas de comida. Hay varias neveras al final, y el olor a hamburguesa rostizada golpea el fondo de mi garganta, y mi boca se hace agua. Grupos de personas se relajan sentados en sus patios o en la calle bloqueada, y los niños corren por todas partes, juegan a la pelota o ruedan por las colinas de algunos prados. Unos cuantos adolescentes, no mucho más jóvenes que yo, están sentados alrededor jugando con sus teléfonos, mientras los adultos se ríen y conversan, de vez en cuando se detienen a gritar órdenes a uno de sus hijos. Puede que aún no sea técnicamente el verano, pero el calor nos golpea y solo se ve atenuado por la capa de nubes esporádicas. Es un hermoso día. —Vamos —dice Dutch, dándole un codazo a Pike. Pike me mira, probablemente para asegurarse que estoy bien, y finalmente deja la ensalada antes de irse. Se detiene, estrechando la mano de algunos amigos y quitándole la tapa a una cerveza que alguien le da. Me acerco a Teresa mientras coloca todo sobre la mesa. —¿Hace cuánto tiempo que tú y Dutch están casados? —pregunto. Suspira. —Catorce años. —Me mira—. Y tres niños más tarde, todavía quiero matarlo todos los días, pero prepara buenos espaguetis, así que… Resoplo. Estoy segura que solo está tratando de ser graciosa, porque dudo que pueda explicarlo. Ella se ve bastante elegante, mientras que él usa una franela y unas botas de trabajo pesado. —Esto se ve tan bien —dice, quitando el papel de envoltura—. Gracias por traer tanto. No durará mucho. Justo en ese momento, un brazo se interpone entre nosotras, toma cuatro rollitos por los palillos de dientes y se los roba. Reconozco la tinta en el brazo de inmediato. —Oye —regaño a Pike, pero no puedo dejar de sonreír. Me mira con los párpados pesados y se ve completamente sexy. —Discúlpame —susurra y se voltea alejándose, caminando de regreso hacia sus amigos. Me devuelve la mirada, sonriéndome con satisfacción, y levanto una ceja. Debí haber sabido que iba a estar asustado porque los rollitos fueran comidos antes de tener la oportunidad de probarlos. —Escuche que tú y Cole se están quedando con Pike por un tiempo —dice Teresa. —Sí. —Muevo nuestra nevera con las otras y saco una botella de agua—. Parece que pagar nuestro propio apartamento fue demasiado adulto para nosotros —bromeo. Asiente intencionalmente.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —Ahora lo entiendo —me susurra mi hermana con burla al oído—. Y aquí estaba yo, preocupada porque sufrieras avances indeseados de un viejo sudoroso y gordo. —Cállate. —Cierro los ojos con exasperación. Escucho que se abre la puerta trasera y el humor se adueña de su voz mientras bromea: —Ahora cuídate de tus hombres. Me giro para cerrarle la puerta de golpe en el rostro, pero grita, cerrándola antes que tenga oportunidad. —Oh, no me gustan las cebollas. Me detengo ante las palabras de Pike y miro la salsa de barbacoa rociada sobre mis obras maestras de aros de cebolla. Son una publicación de Instagram esperando a suceder. Si quito las hermosas cebollas doradas, será solo un fail para Pinterest. —¿Y si pruebas un poco? —Me arriesgo, con una sonrisa tímida—. Te gustará. Lo prometo. En mi experiencia, los hombres comerán lo que tienen enfrente. Parece pensarlo un momento y luego cierra el refrigerador y se encuentra con mi mirada. Su expresión se suaviza. —Bien. Probablemente siente que me lo debe, ya que hice la cena, así que lo acepto. Cubriendo la hamburguesa, le doy el plato, y él lo lleva hasta un taburete, tomando un bocado antes de sentarse. Echo un vistazo por encima de mi hombro. Su mandíbula deja de moverse, y parpadea un par de veces, los músculos de sus mejillas se flexionan. Y luego escucho un gemido. Me vuelvo hacia la estufa para que no pueda ver mi sonrisa. —En realidad, está bueno —asegura—. Realmente bueno. Solo asiento, pero noto una pequeña pizca de orgullo. —Cuando comes barato al crecer —indico—, encuentras tus propias maneras de agregarle un toque gourmet. No dice nada durante unos segundos, pero después de un momento concuerda: —Sí. No estoy segura si eso significa que solo está escuchando atentamente o está de acuerdo conmigo. Si ha descubierto mi apellido, debe saber quién es mi padre. Todos en la ciudad conocen a Chip Hadley, así que tendría una idea de cómo vivíamos. No sé mucho sobre la familia de Cole, o si siempre han vivido en esta ciudad. Pike Lawson no es rico, pero ciertamente no es pobre por el aspecto de su casa. —Es muy bueno. Lo digo en serio —dice nuevamente. —Gracias. —Me doy vuelta y coloco un plato en la isla perpendicular a su asiento para Cole, y el mío junto a ese. Nos quedamos en silencio, y me pregunto si también se siente raro. Hablamos tan fácilmente la otra noche cuando no sabíamos quién era el otro, pero eso ha cambiado ahora. Escucho movimiento desde la sala de estar y miro alrededor para ver a Cole entrando a la cocina. Sonrío. Tiene grasa en toda la camisa y una mancha bajo su labio. Puede comportarse mal como si fuera su trabajo, pero también puede presumir de un encanto infantil como si nada.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  de él cuando lo hace, porque parece avergonzado. Después de un rato, noto que mi cabeza se inclina hacia él, y él tiene su pie sobre la silla vacía delante de nosotros con su cabeza inclinada, también, y estamos completamente cómodos. Ni siquiera se me ha ocurrido mantener una cierta distancia. No veo muchas películas con otras personas. No estoy acostumbrada a simplemente sentarme en silencio con alguien más. Los horarios de Cole y los míos no siempre se combinan, mi hermana Cam ya no tiene tiempo libre, y la mayoría de mis amistades de la escuela secundaria no duraron más allá de la graduación hace un año. Es agradable pasar el rato. En el momento en que se publican los créditos, no estoy segura de recordar gran parte de la película. Pero no he estado tan relajada en mucho tiempo. Me reí, sonreí, bromeé y olvidé todo lo que estaba sucediendo allí afuera, y lo necesitaba. Realmente no quiero volver a casa todavía. Las luces comienzan a encenderse y lentamente me siento, llevando mis pies al suelo mientras trago el nudo en mi garganta y lo miro. Él también se sienta, pero apenas se encuentra con mis ojos. De pie, paso la correa del bolso sobre mi cabeza y recojo mi basura. —Bueno, van a dar Poltergeist en unas pocas semanas —dice detrás de mí, levantándose y llevándose la basura consigo—. Si te veo, me aseguraré de sentarme en un terreno más alto. Me río en voz baja, pensando en el vino. Ambos salimos de la fila y caminamos hacia las puertas, y noto que Jay y su cita ya no están en sus asientos. Deben haberse ido ya, pero, a decir verdad, olvidé que estaban aquí hace mucho tiempo. Poltergeist. ¿Eso significa que él estará aquí entonces? ¿Es esta su manera de avisarme despreocupadamente en caso de que también quiera venir? Pero no, sabe que tengo novio. Sin embargo, no puedo dejar de pensar que, si por alguna razón Cole y yo no pasamos otro mes, ¿vendría al cine entonces, sabiendo que él estaría aquí? Parpadeo larga y duramente, sintiéndome culpable mientras camino por el pasillo. Probablemente estaría aquí. No hay muchos “partidos” en esta ciudad, y me divertí esta noche. Este tipo es interesante. Y apuesto. Y con trabajo. Debería juntarlo con mi hermana mayor. Cómo ha pasado desapercibido bajo su radar todo este tiempo es un misterio para mí.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —Nos quedaremos aquí, en este fabuloso vecindario, imagínate, libre de alquiler. Lo menos que puedo hacer es asegurarme de mantener nuestro acuerdo. Limpiamos y compartimos algunos de los deberes de la cocina. Eso es todo. Arquea con severidad la ceja derecha y se cruza de brazos, sin creérselo. Oh, por todos los santos. De hecho, creo que estamos obteniendo la mejor parte de este trato que Pike Lawson, después de todo. Aire acondicionado, televisión por cable y Wi-Fi, un armario-vestidor... Extiendo la mano por encima del mostrador y tiro de las persianas, espetando para que deje de molestarme. —¡Tiene una piscina, Cam! Quiero decir, por favor. Abre los ojos de par en par. —¿De verdad? Se levanta de la silla y se acerca, mirando hacia el patio trasero. La piscina es perfecta. Con forma de reloj de arena, las baldosas multicolores en la cubierta son de estilo mediterráneo, y tiene una entrada con un piso de mosaico. El padre de Cole todavía debe estar trabajando en eso porque hay una pantalla en el otro extremo de la piscina con macizos para flores sin flores y picos para mini cascadas que todavía no están instalados. Hay una mesa y sillas colocadas al azar alrededor del perímetro, y el resto del patio trasero cubierto de hierba tiene varios muebles de jardín que aún no están acomodados de manera discernible. Una sombrilla de mesa se encuentra a la derecha, al lado de la manguera, y una parrilla de barbacoa está cubierta con una lona a la izquierda. Mi hermana asiente con aprobación. —Esto es bonito. Siempre quisiste vivir en una casa como esta. —¿Quién no? —respondo. Todos deberían ser tan afortunados. Aunque todavía se siente mal estar aquí. Sin embargo, me preocupo mucho por Cole, y prefiero estar con él que en casa de mi padre. Termino las hamburguesas, mientras ella se da la vuelta, agarrando ambos costados del mostrador y mirándome. —¿Estás segura que lo único que quiere es que limpies y cocines un poco? — insiste—. Los hombres, sin importar la edad, son todos iguales. Yo debería saberlo. Sí, puedes callarte ahora. Puedo cuidar de mí misma. Si los novios de la escuela secundaria y trabajar en un bar no me han enseñado eso hasta ahora... Pero vuelve a hablar, entrando en mi espacio y deteniéndome.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  But Lori loved seeing the world clearly. She started compulsively drawing and painting all the wondrous things she was discovering, like the way each curved tile on Emerson’s roof cast its own curved shadow on the tile below, and the way the setting sun painted the underbellies of the clouds pink but left the piled-up tops purple. Not long after Lori got her glasses, she decided she wanted to be an artist, like Mom. • • • As soon as we’d settled into the house, Mom threw herself into her art career. She erected a big white sign in the front yard on which she had carefully painted, in black letters with gold outlines, R. M. WALLS ART STUDIO. She turned the two front rooms of the house into a studio and gallery, and she used two bedrooms in the back to warehouse her collected works. An art supplies store was three blocks away, on North First Street, and thanks to Mom’s inheritance, we were able to make regular shopping expeditions to the store, bringing home rolls of canvas that Dad stretched and stapled onto wooden frames. We also brought back oil paints, watercolors, acrylics, gesso, a silk-screening frame, india ink, paintbrushes and pen nibs, charcoal pencils, pastels, fancy rag paper for pastel drawings, and even a wooden mannequin with movable joints whom we named Edward and who, Mom said, would pose for her when we kids were off at school. Mom decided that before she could get down to any serious painting, she needed to compile a thorough art reference library. She bought dozens of big loose-leaf binders and lots of packs of lined paper. Every subject was given its own binder: dogs, cats, horses, farm animals, woodland animals, flowers, fruits and vegetables, rural landscapes, urban landscapes, men’s faces, women’s faces, men’s bodies, women’s bodies, and hands-feet-bottoms-and-other-miscellaneous body parts. We spent hours and hours going through old magazines, looking for interesting pictures, and when we spotted one we thought might be a worthy subject of a painting, we held it up to Mom for approval. She studied it for a second and okayed or nixed it. If the photo made the grade, we cut it out, glued it on a piece of lined paper, and reinforced the holes in the paper with adhesive Os so the page wouldn’t tear out. Then we got out the appropriate three-ringed binder, added the new photograph, and snapped the rings shut. In exchange for our help on her reference library, Mom gave us all art lessons.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  22 THE HOMEPORT had a big, noisy dining room, where food was served family style. It was popular with tourists and locals alike, more for its location overlooking the harbor, the best place to view spectacular Menemsha sunsets, than for its food. It was impossible to get a reservation this time of year unless you called at least a week in advance. The menu was simple and never changed. Swordfish and lobster were the two most popular dinners. They came with baked potatoes, corn on the cob, and cole slaw. For dessert it was pie and ice cream. The blueberries in the pie were canned, not fresh. If anyone asked, Vix was supposed to tell them the truth. But no one ever asked. Because all the up island towns were dry, there was no bar. You could BYOB if you wanted beer or wine with your meal, but Vix wasn’t permitted to open it because she was under age. Tips ran the gamut from generous to pathetic. She always tried to guess at the beginning of a meal how much her table would leave, but more than half the time she was wrong. One night she was sure she saw Barbra Streisand, another, Mary Steen burgen. But neither sat at Vix’s tables. She did get to wait on a group from Saturday Night Live. They were loud and messy, dropping lobster shells on the floor, but they left her two twenties to make up for it. The staff got to eat free. At first it seemed like a great deal but after the first week she couldn’t look at another piece of swordfish, let alone eat it. She lived on corn, baked potatoes, cole slaw, and Trisha’s muffins. The manager considered her a hard worker but encouraged her to become more of a team player. She was always polite, always efficient, but she didn’t hang out with the other servers and they resented her. When one of the girls finally asked where Vix headed every night after

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  Haven’t I? I certainly meant to mention that good hours at the desk are as wonderful as any I can imagine. But joy for me is Sam and my church and my buddies and family, and more often it is felt outdoors than at my desk. There is a part of me that resists saying that I love being a published writer, that it has been a dream come true, first of all because it is so much more complicated than that. And second, I don’t want unpublished writers to throw up their hands and say, “See? Okay? I rest my case: publishing is the great reward.” But the truth is that there can be a great deal of satisfaction in being a writer, in being a person who gets some work done most days, and who has been published and acknowledged. I carry this around in my pocket, touch it a number of times a day to make sure it is still there. Even though so much of my writing time is stressful and disheartening, I carry a secret sense of accomplishment around with me, like a radium pack implanted near my heart that now leaches a quiet sense of relief through my system. But you pay through the nose for this. No one has expressed it better than a great novelist I heard once on a talk show who said something like “You want to know the price I pay for being a writer? Okay, I’ll tell you. I travel by plane a great deal. And I’m usually seated next to some huge businessman who works on files or his laptop computer for a while, and then notices me and asks me what I do. And I say I’m a writer. Then there’s always a terrible silence. Then he says eagerly, ‘Have you written anything I might have heard of?’ “And that’s the price I pay for being a writer.” My own version of this is that the other day, Sam and I were at the mall. I had a big event coming up onstage at the Herbst Theater, because I had just had a book published that was getting a lot of attention. I had decided to buy a new dress for the evening. So the two of us were just innocently walking around the store when the owner came up to me. She said, “Are you looking for anything in particular?” I said, “Well, I have a special occasion coming up, and I need a new dress.” She said, “Is it for a dinner party?” I said, “No, actually, I’m doing something onstage.” She said, “Are you a singer?” and I felt the jungle drums start to beat, warning me to keep my mouth shut, warning me to send my ego to its room. But I had gotten used to the attention.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  “Looks like you hit the jackpot and got something extra,” she’d say with a wink. We always left the Owl Club so stuffed we could hardly walk. “Let’s waddle home, kids,” Dad would say. The barite mine where Dad worked had a commissary, and the mine owner deducted our bill and the rent for the depot out of Dad’s paycheck every month. At the beginning of each week, we went to the commissary and brought home bags and bags of food. Mom said only people brainwashed by advertising bought prepared foods such as SpaghettiOs and TV dinners. She bought the basics: sacks of flour or cornmeal, powdered milk, onions, potatoes, twenty-pound bags of rice or pinto beans, salt, sugar, yeast for making bread, cans of jack mackerel, a canned ham or a fat slab of bologna, and for dessert, cans of sliced peaches. Mom didn’t like cooking much—“Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour,” she’d ask us, “when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?”—so once a week or so, she’d fix a big cast-iron vat of something like fish and rice or, usually, beans. We’d all sort through the beans together, picking out the rocks, then Mom would soak them overnight, boil them the next day with an old ham bone to give them flavor, and for that entire week, we’d have beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If the beans started going bad, we’d just put extra spice in them, like the Mexicans at the LBJ Apartments always did. We bought so much food that we never had much money come payday. One payday Dad owed the mine company eleven cents. He thought it was funny and told them to put it on his tab. Dad almost never went out drinking at night like he used to. He stayed home with us. After dinner, the whole family stretched out on the benches and the floor of the depot and read, with the dictionary in the middle of the room so we kids could look up words we didn’t know. Sometimes I discussed the definitions with Dad, and if we didn’t agree with what the dictionary writers said, we sat down and wrote a letter to the publishers. They’d write back defending their position, which would prompt an even longer letter from Dad, and if they replied again, so would he, until we stopped hearing from the dictionary people. Mom read everything: Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Henry Miller, Pearl Buck. She even read James Michener—apologetically—saying she knew it wasn’t great literature, but she couldn’t help herself. Dad preferred science and math books, biographies and history. We kids read whatever Mom brought home from her weekly trips to the library. Brian read thick adventure books, ones written by guys like Zane Grey. Lori especially loved Freddy the Pig and all the Oz books.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Mom and Lori admired the wideplanked floorboards, the big fireplaces, and the ceiling beams made from locust posts, with gouge marks from the ax that had felled them. Mom’s eye settled on an Egyptian couch we’d bought at a flea market. It had carved legs and a wooden backrest inlaid with mother-of-pearl triangles. She nodded in approval. “Every household,” she said, “needs one piece of furniture in really bad taste.” The kitchen was filled with the smell of the roasting turkey John had prepared, with a stuffing of sausage, mushrooms, walnuts, apples, and spiced bread crumbs. He’d also made creamed onions, wild rice, cranberry sauce, and squash casserole. I’d baked three pies with apples from a nearby orchard. “Bonanza!” Brian shouted. “Feast time!” I said to him. He looked at the dishes. I knew what he was thinking, what he thought every time he saw a spread like this one. He shook his head and said, “You know, it’s really not that hard to put food on the table if that’s what you decide to do.” “Now, no recriminations,” Lori told him. After we sat down for dinner, Mom told us her good news. She had been a squatter for almost fifteen years, and the city had finally decided to sell the apartments to her and the other squatters for one dollar apiece. She couldn’t accept our invitation to stay awhile, she said, because she had to get back for a board meeting of the squatters. Mom also said she’d been in touch with Maureen, who was still living in California, and that our kid sister, whom I hadn’t spoken to since she left New York, was thinking of coming back for a visit. We started talking about some of Dad’s great escapades: letting me pet the cheetah, taking us Demon Hunting, giving us stars for Christmas. “We should drink a toast to Rex,” John said. Mom stared at the ceiling, miming perplexed thought. “I’ve got it.” She held up her glass. “Life with your father was never boring.” We raised our glasses. I could almost hear Dad chuckling at Mom’s comment in the way he always did when he was truly enjoying something. It had grown dark outside. A wind picked up, rattling the windows, and the candle flames suddenly shifted, dancing along the border between turbulence and order. Acknowledgments I’d like to thank my brother, Brian, for standing by me when we were growing up and while I wrote this. I’m also grateful to my mother for believing in art and truth and for supporting the idea of the book; to my brilliant and talented older sister, Lori, for coming around to it; and to my younger sister, Maureen, whom I will always love. And to my father, Rex S. Walls, for dreaming all those big dreams.