Disappointment

Passages

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

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• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  “As soon as Madeleine lay down she was taken with languor, which may have been due to her conception of aristocratic behavior, or to the kisses which now fell like necklaces around her throat and further down where the breasts began. She was no virgin, but the brutality of the attacks she had known, pushed against a wall in dark streets, thrown to the floor of a truck, or tumbled behind the ragpickers’ shacks where people coupled without even troubling to see each other’s faces, had never stirred her as much as this gradual and ceremonious courtship of her senses. He made love to her legs for three or four days. Made her wear furry bedroom slippers, slipped off her stockings and kissed her feet and held them as if he were possessing her whole body. By the time he was ready to lift her skirt he had inflamed the rest of her body so completely that she was ripe for the final possession. “As the time was short and they were always expected to leave the shop with the others, he had to forego the caresses when it came to taking her. And now she did not know which she liked best. If his caresses were too lingering he did not have time to take her. If he proceeded directly, she felt less enjoyment. Behind the screen now took place scenes enacted in the most lavish bedrooms, only more hurried, and each time the mannequin had to be dressed again, the bed straightened. Yet they never met outside of this moment. This was their dream for the day. He had contempt for the shabby adventures of his comrades in five-franc hotels. He acted as if he had visited the most courted prostitute in Paris, and was the amant de coeur of a woman kept by the richest men.” “Was the dream ever destroyed?” Pierre asked. “Yes. Do you remember the sit-down strike of the big department stores? The employees stayed in them for two weeks. During that time other couples discovered the softness of the best-quality beds, of the divans and couches and chaise longues, and they discovered the variations that can be added to love positions when the beds are wide and low and rich materials tickle the skin. Madeleine’s dream became public property and a vulgar caricature of the pleasures she had known. The uniqueness of her meeting with her lover came to an end. He called her Mademoiselle again, and she called him Monsieur. He even began to find fault with her salesmanship and she finally left the store.” ELENA TOOK an old house in the country for the summer months, a house which needed painting. Miguel had promised to help her. They began in the attic, which was picturesque and complex, a series of small irregular rooms, rooms within rooms at times, added as afterthoughts.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Our annual mother-daughter ski trek. Want to come?” “I have other plans.” “I knew you’d say that.” Abby invited Vix for Thanksgiving dinner but she opted for the Vineyard instead. When she got there she was miffed Bru wasn’t as affected by the outcome of the election as she was. He didn’t get her anger. He’d voted the straight Democratic ticket. What more did she want? It wasn’t worth getting all steamed up over. Besides, Reagan was good for business. And business was what mattered. They began to argue about everything. What did you mean by that? she’d ask. Nothing, just forget it , he’d answer. For the first time it occurred to her that he had no books in the cabin, that she’d never seen him with a book. He probably never read more than the Gazette , if that. He was still listening to Van Halen. He hadn’t even heard of Joan Armatrading. When she complained about the Porta Potti, he asked what was wrong with it? What was wrong with her? Was she taking her vitamins? “You think everything can be magically cured with vitamins?” “Everything but us,” he said. She was tempted by Abby’s invitation to join them in Barbados over Christmas, but angry at herself for behaving badly over Thanksgiving, finding fault with everything. It was probably hormonal, she decided, since she’d been premenstrual. So she went back to the Vineyard, to Bru. And it went well over Christmas. The two of them bundled up and walked on the beach, shopped for gifts in Vineyard Haven, made love in the late afternoon in front of the woodstove. They shared Christmas goose with Bru’s extended family—the three uncles and aunts, the twelve cousins, their significant others, their babies. All of them welcomed her into their homes, into their family. She should have felt at home. They were blue-collar, hardworking, a rowdy, beer-drinking crowd. They knew how to have a good time. They weren’t all in therapy, they weren’t all trying to find the meaning of life. They didn’t sit around comparing their dysfunctional families, blaming their parents for all their problems like her friends at Harvard. True, a few of them were already in twelve-step programs, but that meant they were trying to help themselves. Let Caitlin call their lives ordinary, even boring. This was where she belonged, wasn’t it? If she belonged anywhere. PhoebeSHE HASN’T SEEN Caity in ages, not since she caught up with her last July in Perugia. She’s glad Caity’s finally settled in Paris and that she’s going to school. She doesn’t usually admit this but she’s always wished she were better educated. One year at Stephens College didn’t do much for her. She’s been looking forward to their ski week together so she’s slightly miffed when, on their first night, Caity picks up a handsome young man in the bar at their inn and stays out till all hours.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  To go with her job on Wall Street as a trainee at Drexel Burnham. She was testing the waters before committing to an MBA. When the stock market crashed on October 19, the worst crash in history, with the Dow Jones average tumbling five hundred points in a single day, Maia became one of the first casualties. That night she sat glued to the tube, watching every financial show, looking for clues to the day’s events. But they offered none. Her Wall Street friends from Harvard were totally freaked. Even seasoned pros were in a daze. Surprisingly, no bodies flew out of tall buildings. Instead, most of them picked themselves up and went back to work. Except for Maia. Axed on the very day she wore her pinstripe suit for the first time. Vix and Paisley took her to see Fatal Attraction to distract her, maybe not the best choice, considering, but boiled rabbit jokes were making the rounds. By the end of the week Maia developed an assortment of symptoms, convincing herself she had ovarian cancer, like Gilda Radner. When the tests proved negative she called for applications to law school and signed up for an LSAT review course. “A pinstripe suit will never go out of style,” she told Paisley and Vix. “I just don’t know about big shoulders.” A week later she found a part-time job filling in as an assistant to a real estate entrepreneur. In early November Caitlin came to town, stopping in New York on her way back from Buenos Aires. She came directly from the airport to the apartment. She’d never met Maia and Paisley, who referred to her as Vix’s childhood friend, but she dismissed them as quickly as she did the furnishings. “Cute … very post-college-working-girl.” She wore jeans and a big sweater, no makeup. She’d let her hair grow long. She looked fabulous. Flamenco dancing must have agreed with her. She asked Vix to spend the weekend at Lamb’s pied-a-terre at the Carlyle and while Vix threw her things together Paisley, the gracious southern hostess, offered Caitlin wine and cheese, but Caitlin declined. “Maybe some other time?” “So, you didn’t like Buenos Aires?” Maia said. “I liked it fine. But it’s time to move on.” “Where will you go next?” Paisley asked. “To Madrid, I think.” “What will you do there?” “What I always do … study, gather experience, fuck interesting people.” “How lucky you are,” Maia said, with a hint of sarcasm. “You think so?” “You’re living out everyone’s fantasy.” “Not everyone’s.” In the taxi, on their way to the Carlyle, Caitlin gave Vix a flat package wrapped in red tissue paper. Vix opened it carefully and pulled out a gorgeous antique silk piano shawl, printed with poppies and edged in black fringe. “For your graduation,” Caitlin said, kissing Vix first on one cheek, then the other. “I always forget how much I miss you when we’re apart. You look tired.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  7 THE SECOND WEEK in July, when the hydrangeas turned a deep blue and ran rampant around the porch, Lamb threw a party to celebrate Abby’s MBA. “She just loves showing off her new husband and her renovated summer house,” Caitlin snickered. “What about her lovely stepchildren?” Vix asked. “Oh, definitely.” They both looked across Abby’s newly planted flower garden to Sharkey, who had turned into a stranger, growing seven inches without gaining a pound, which left him looking like Lurch, his arms hanging like fishing poles from his shoulders, his hands dangling at his sides as if he couldn’t figure out what to do with them. “Almost as perfect as her own son,” Caitlin said. Daniel and Gus had arrived the day before, for a three-week visit, which meant she and Caitlin had to share the bathroom not just with Sharkey but with three teenage boys. Three disgusting fifteen-year-old boys who left the toilet seat up, peed on the rim, farted wherever and whenever. And one of them regularly forgot to flush or else was so proud of what he’d made, he wanted to share it with the rest of them. There was always toothpaste stuck to the sides of the sink from where they’d spit, wet towels tossed on the floor, and the tub was strewn with hair from God knows what parts of their bodies. They overheard a guest at the party telling Abby how attractive the children were, then asking if she’d found a job yet. Abby answered, “No, I really haven’t starting looking. I’m giving myself some time off to just enjoy.” “Now that she has her meal ticket she’ll probably never get a job,” Caitlin whispered to Vix. Meal ticket?

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Maia SHE CAN’T BELIEVE she’s stuck with this creature for a whole year! Disappointed doesn’t begin to describe her feelings. They have absolutely nothing in common. She assumes the creature is at least smart. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be here. But try to have a conversation and all you get is yes, no, maybe, like when she asks about the photos, not just the hunky boyfriend but the kid in a wheelchair. My brother. That’s it, that’s all she says. There must be a story there but the creature’s lips are sealed. And then there’s the beautiful girl looking right into the camera. There’s something about that face that keeps drawing her back. And the tantalizing signature—NBO, Your Summer Sister. When she asks what it means, the creature says, Nothing, really. When she complains about the creature to her mother she tells her to keep trying. She could be shy, Maia. No, that’s not it, Mom. It’s something else. Snobby, maybe. Aloof. Paisley, their suitemate, thinks Victoria is deep, even mysterious, that she’s had experiences she isn’t able to share. Look into her eyes, Paisley says, and you’ll see what I mean. But when she looks all she sees is disapproval. THERE WAS A TIME when Vix thought she’d choose a career in social work or physical therapy, maybe teaching, something, anything, to give back to Nathan. At UNM she might have gone that route. But now that she was at Harvard, now that she saw all her options ... She thought at first she’d choose English for her concentration, because students at Harvard didn’t have majors the way they did at other schools. They had concentrations. But should it be just plain Literature or English in

• From City of Night (1963)

  Still, I sought her out. And when she wasnt at the bar—which was rare—I would feel acutely disappointed, personally cheated—almost angry at her as if she had stood me up. Today shes talking to Sonny—the blond youngman who had been wounded in the fight that afternoon before the Bourbon House. Only minutes earlier, he had walked in Proudly, Cockily—like a big-game hunter with a lion’s head—with two impressively suited scores. “Be cool,” I heard Sylvia warning him. “Those two are here every year. I see them pick up a green kid like you, each Mardi Gras—” Sonny winced noticeably at her designation of him. “—and they tell him theyre going to take him to Europe, and after Mardi Gras, they split—alone. Youll never see them again.” Sonny nodded impatiently. It is difficult for him to believe that he can be taken. Sylvia watched him with an ambiguous look as he returned to the two well-dressed scores, who have been staring resentfully at Sylvia as if aware that shes been warning Sonny about them. As usual, Sylvia is drinking Seven-Up. It was all I had ever seen her drink. Occasionally, though, I had noticed her stare longingly at the varicolored bottles of liquor behind the bar, then turn from them as if they threatened her in some powerful way. The quavering, sensual voice of Elvis Presley is coming from the juke-box in lonesome, sad, sustained, orgasmic moans: The bell-hop’s tears keep flowing, The desk clerk’s dressed in black. ... Sylvia studied two youngmen who had just walked into the bar. “Two more new ones,” she sighed. “Each year—new hustlers, new queens, new—...” she hesitated, “—new gay boys just out for kicks—and the ones that keep coming back.” And the juke-box sang lugubriously: Just take a walk down lonely street To Heartbreak Hotel.... “Kathy just passed out on the steps of the Maison Blanche!” a queen blurted at Sylvia. “Whos with her?” Sylvia asked urgently, shocked out of the revery the two entering youngmen had smothered her in. “Whorina is—and, well, I was—but I got so rattled, I didnt know what to do! So I thought I’d better run and tell you.” “You dizzy queen,” said Sylvia, “didnt you think to call a doctor?”

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  The Countess rolled her eyes skyward and muttered, “Thank gawd I don’t have a husband.” 13Summer 1980 SOMETIMES CAITLIN acted like the one who didn’t get it. When Vix broached the subject of finding jobs Caitlin was incredulous. “A job … but why … are you bored?” “No, I’m not bored.” “Then, what?” “I need the money.” “Oh, the money.” Caitlin had trouble remembering not everyone had an unlimited amount to spend. Not that she was a big spender. Like Lamb, she played down the money thing. She had no idea the scholarship had caused an uproar at Vix’s house. “The world has changed since we were young,” Ed had told Tawny. “This will give Vix an—” He’d dropped the last word. “A what?” Tawny asked. “An edge,” her father repeated, this time so Tawny could hear the word. “An edge to topple over,” Tawny scoffed. “She deserves the chance,” Ed argued. “After that, it’s …” He’d mumbled the rest but Vix, listening intently, was sure he’d said, After that, it’s up to her . Yes, she thought, it would be up to her! She was beginning to see her father as her champion within the family. She just wished he’d be more demonstrative, more open in his love, if love was what it was about. Another thing Caitlin didn’t get was that friendship carried certain obligations. Otherwise she’d never have said, “Even though we’re summer sisters and always will be, I have another life at Mountain Day, a life apart from the two of us.” Vix felt like she’d slammed into a concrete wall. Her head throbbed with the titles of every insipid self-help article she’d ever read. “When Your Best Friend Betrays You!” “Are You a Victim of Your Circumstances?” “How to Handle Your Hurt.” “I’m doing you a real favor,” Caitlin said. “You understand, don’t you?” Understand? She’d willed herself not to cry, not to allow Caitlin to see her pain or disappointment. If Caitlin was afraid she’d cling to her at school, she didn’t have to worry. “I have another life, too,” she said, sounding as if she couldn’t have cared less. “I know you do,” Caitlin said. “And I’m not offended … really.” After that Vix had to remind herself that Caitlin could have asked any of her Mountain Day friends to spend the summer, but she didn’t, did she? Sometimes, at school, Caitlin’s behavior annoyed Vix. She’d act as if she were some other person, some person Vix didn’t even know. Then Caitlin would look at her as if to say, You and I understand this is just a game but the others think it’s for real so don’t give me away … okay? After a month at Mountain Day Vix got sick. A kidney infection. It burned when she peed. She had a high fever and a pain in her back. She needed antibiotics. She felt terrible, as bad as she’d felt in her entire life.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  bringing a friend. “A friend?” Caitlin said. “Probably Abby,” Sharkey told her, grabbing a handful of Cheerios from the box, dribbling them into his mouth. “Abby?” Caitlin said. “Who’s Abby?” “Some woman,” Sharkey told her. “Woman?” Caitlin said. “You mean woman as in girlfriend?” Sharkey shrugged. “Lamb has a girlfriend and he didn’t tell me?” Caitlin asked. He shrugged again. “I’m his daughter. I should be told these things.” “He’s not a monk, you know,” Sharkey told her, “any more than Phoebe’s a nun.” “But he’s never brought anyone here! The Vineyard’s always been just for us.” They arrived in time for lunch—Lamb, the woman named Abby and her son, Daniel Baum, who was Sharkey’s age. Abby greeted Sharkey as if they’d met before but it was clear the two boys hadn’t and neither one was thrilled. Daniel was two heads taller than Sharkey, preppy, with Top-Siders and an alligator shirt. He acted bored. Abby was almost as tall as Lamb, rail thin, pale, with baby-fine brown hair hanging to her shoulders and bangs drifting toward her eyes. She wore jeans, a terrific T-shirt, and wavy-soled shoes that made her seem even taller. Abby smiled at Caitlin, told her how happy she was to meet her, how much she’d heard about her. Daniel yawned, really loud, without covering his mouth. Caitlin looked like she was going to throw up. They came into the house through the kitchen door and were hit by last night’s mess—the macaroni and cheese pot on the floor, licked clean by Sweetie, their gooey plates still on the table, together with boxes of breakfast cereals, banana skins, and a half-eaten piece of toast smeared with grape jelly. Abby’s face registered surprise, then disgust. Vix spied the milk carton on the counter and tried sneaking it into the fridge, but

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  “No, it’s not. He does ‘Say You Say Me’ next.” “I’m not talking about Lionel Ritchie, I’m talking about us.” “What about us?” “It’s over ... we’re over. Fini, finis, finito.” “But we’re just getting started,” Will argued. “That should make it easier.” “Give me one good reason to end it now.” “We have nothing in common.” He took her hand and pressed it to the front of his pants. “We have this.” She shook her head. “Oh, come on, Victoria ... just one more time ... so you’ll have something to remember me by.” She hadn’t expected him to let go so easily and was angry at herself for feeling disappointed. “Feel how hot he is for you. He’s been such a good boy, waiting patiently all day.” “Sorry, Will. Send him my regards ... I mean, my regrets.” She opened the door at the next red light, grabbed her bag, and jumped out of his car. “Really Victoria ... you’re hopeless,” Paisley said. “Not that I’m pushing marriage. I’m all for making a life on your own first, but if it falls out of a tree and hits you on the head, you can’t just walk away from it, especially when it comes with that kind of financial security. I mean, do you know how few straight, stable, single guys there are in this city ... not to mention husband material? You could count them on one hand. One hand.” “Your southern roots are showing, Pais,” Maia said. “Maybe,” Paisley said. “Or maybe it’s that a person never gets over her first love.” “Not that old song again,” Vix said. Her life was full. It was interesting. A person didn’t necessarily have to be in love. She signed up for a yoga course, took on another student

• From City of Night (1963)

  The cowboy first. A Prussian officer. A pirate. He poses each scene at the point of arrested violence. A whip in my hand as if about to unfurl at him behind the camera. Boots always prominently displayed. Fists clenched. Body lunging. Now he brings in one of the manikins—heterogeneously “dressed up”—studs, straps, chains.... Neil executes—crouched, contorted, sweating—“to get the feel of it,” he explained—the cringing positions that the dummy will ultimately assume, menaced, for the pictures. The camera keeps clicking as Neil vacillates from acolyte to High Priest. “Now I’ll improvise!” he exclaimed joyously. When he was ready to take the picture, he announced triumphantly: “An Executioner!” And Im standing before the camera in black tights, boots to the hips, a leather vest, a black braided whip in a swirl about the boots. Im surrounded by the shield, the lance, the metal sun, and a long medieval axe propped against the wall. The shutter closes.... Neil rushed toward me, his eyes begging, and in a terrifying, shaken voice he pleaded with me to execute with the whip the movement which the camera had just frozen. But I didnt. He was disappointed and nervous. Sulkingly, he went about preparing lunch. Then something strange happened: As he stood over the stove, dressed as he was in the Western clothes—and an apron over all of that—he turned to me (dressed now in my own clothes—although he had insisted I leave the “Executioner’s” costume on), and he asked me this: “Tell me truthfully: Do you find me effeminate?” I studied him as he stood by the stove. That apron over the costume—... He was holding the spoon limply in the air. Realizing that, he grasped it tightly. Seeing the look he was throwing at me, exhorting me to say what he wanted to hear, I said: “Of course not, Neil.” “Thank you very much,” he said almost humbly. Shrugging his shoulders, dipping vigorously into whatever he was cooking, he laughed goodhumoredly, looking very much like that ebullient, beer-drinking Bavarian. “One time,” he said, “I was walking along Market Street—oh, I was really Dressed Up—a cowboy! And a carload of teenage boys drove by and shouted: ‘Hi Tex!’” I realized the telling of this story amounted to presenting his credentials for “realness.” Yes, having seen him in the extreme clothes, I cant help thinking that what hes just presented as proof of his Realness had been, instead, more of a derisively hurled insult.... He was waiting for me to comment on the story. When I want, he said: “I know I look very Real”—but theres a questioning tone in his voice, as there had been, I remember, in Miss Destiny’s when she too had proclaimed her “realness.” We were hardly through lunch when I heard the obstreperous roar of a motorcycle outside, then an insistent knock at the door.

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

  Let someone do this with your manuscripts, help you get rid of the twists in the plot that are never going to work no matter how hard you try or how many passes you make at it. If I tell thirty students to write me a story about two married people who are considering divorce until something unforeseen happens, they’ll give me thirty wildly different stories, because they will have thirty different personal histories and sensibilities. One person is going to write an epiphany story, where the wife sees some wild geese pass in the night, lit by the moon, and suddenly decides to give her husband another chance. Another person is going to write about the moment when the husband, on his morning run, first comes to believe his marriage is worth saving and then is jogging home to share the good news with his wife when he gets hit by a student driver. Another will set the story in Hollywood, because he’s been reading Nathanael West recently, and it will be jewellike in its weirdness. Each writer will come up with his or her own description of what love and life are all about. Some of these descriptions will be cynical, some rueful, some full of hope. Some will be slow and interior, some will crackle with drama. Drama is the way of holding the reader’s attention. The basic formula for drama is setup, buildup, payoff—just like a joke. The setup tells us what the game is. The buildup is where you put in all the moves, the forward motion, where you get all the meat off the turkey. The payoff answers the question, Why are we here anyway? What is it that you’ve been trying to give? Drama must move forward and upward, or the seats on which the audience is sitting will become very hard and uncomfortable. So, in fact, will the audience. And eventually the audience will become impatient, disappointed, and unhappy. There must be movement. You need to be moving your characters forward, even if they only go slowly. Imagine moving them across a lily pond. If each lily pad is beautifully, carefully written, the reader will stay with you as you move toward the other side of the pond, needing only the barest of connections—such as rhythm, tone, or mood. Now, you may have to use effects and tricks to move things along and to help us remember who each character is—give him a cigar, give her piggy little alcoholic eyes—but if you’re faking it, it will show. If you knowingly fake something to get the plot to move forward—if, for instance, you have taken a character you don’t understand and given her feelings you don’t really feel because you want the plot to work—you probably won’t get away with it. The reader will stop trusting you and will possibly even become bitter and resentful.

• From St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  Questions to Consider: 1. What is the significance of Augustine’s move from Carthage to Italy, both literally and metaphorically? 2. How does Augustine’s disappointment with Faustus’s response to his questions further his quest for wisdom? 3. How good a speaker is Ambrose, and what does Augustine learn about rhetoric from listening to Ambrose’s sermons? ©2004 The Teaching Company. 35 Lecture Twelve Book VI—A New Look at Christianity Scope: As Augustine continues to bemoan people’s inability to find those things that last forever, he also takes a fresh look at the Bible and Christianity. While doing this, he considers the idea of faith, something he had previously regarded as an insufficient basis for accepting anything. He wanted the certitude he found in mathematics as the basis for anything he would commit himself to. However, he realized that everyone has faith in something because no one has sufficient knowledge. It is not a question of “Do you have faith?” but of “What do you put your faith in?” As he is moving toward Christianity, Augustine “interrupts” the narrative to tell the readers about a new friend, Alypius, and how he had gone astray with a love of gladiatorial violence while in Rome. This seeming digression is vitally important, because Alypius will convert to Christianity just minutes after Augustine, and they will be baptized together. Again, Augustine asks readers to consider the nature and value of friendship. Outline I. Augustine’s movement toward Christianity in Book VI is intertwined with three important people in his life: Monica, his mother; Ambrose, bishop of Milan; and a friend named Alypius. II. In this book, Augustine takes a fresh look at Christianity by reading the Bible in a new way and by examining carefully, for the first time, the rationality of believing on faith. III. At the beginning of the book, Monica is more confident about the conversion of Augustine than Augustine himself is. A. Augustine is, thus, able to narrate his own doubts, yet give readers clues to the ultimate outcome of the story he is telling. B. He also tells us some interesting details of his mother’s life, preparing us for the longer account that he will give us in Book IX. ©2004 The Teaching Company. 36

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  the oil that had risen to the surface until the paint, which was the color of buttercups, had turned creamy. I dipped in a fat brush and spread the paint along the old clapboard siding in long, smooth strokes. It went on bright and glossy and looked even better than I had hoped. I started on the far side of the porch, around the door that went into the kitchen. In a few hours, I had covered everything that could be reached from the porch. Parts of the front were still unpainted, and so were the sides, but I had used less than a quarter of the paint. If everyone else helped, we could paint all the areas I couldn’t reach, and in no time we would have a cheerful yellow house. But neither Mom nor Dad nor Brian nor Lori nor Maureen was impressed. “So part of the front of the house is yellow now,” Lori said. “That’s really going to turn things around for us.” I was going to have to finish the job myself. I tried to make a ladder from bits of scrap wood, but it kept collapsing whenever I put my weight on it. I was still trying to build a sturdy ladder when, during a cold snap a few days later, my can of paint froze solid. When it got warm enough for the paint to thaw, I opened the can. During the freeze, the chemicals had separated and the once-smooth liquid was as lumpy and runny as curdled milk. I stirred it as hard as I could and kept stirring even after I knew the paint was ruined, because I also knew that we’d never get more, and instead of a freshly painted yellow house, or even a dingy gray one, we now had a weird-looking half-finished patch job—one that announced to the world that the people inside the house wanted to fix it up but lacked the gumption to get the work done.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  THE NEXT EVENING Dad disappeared. After a couple of days, he wanted me to go out with him again to some bar, but I said no. Dad got ticked off and said that if I wasn’t going to team up with him, the least I could do was stake him some pool- shooting money. I found myself forking over a twenty, and then another in a few days. Mom had told me to expect a check in early July for the lease on her Texas land. She also warned me that Dad would try to get his hands on it. Dad actually waited at the foot of the hill for the mailman and took it from him on the day it arrived, but when the mailman told me what had happened, I ran down Little Hobart Street and caught Dad before he got into town. I told him Mom had wanted me to hide the check until she returned. “Let’s hide it together,” Dad said and suggested we stash it in the 1933 World Book Encyclopedia Mom got free from the library—under “currency.” The next day when I went to rehide the check, it was gone. Dad swore he had no idea what happened to it. I knew he was lying, but I also knew if I accused him, he’d deny it and there’d be a loud yelling match that wouldn’t do me any good. For the first time, I had a clear idea of what Mom was up against. Being a strong woman was harder than I had thought. Mom still had more than a month in Charleston; we were about to run out of grocery money; and my babysitting income wasn’t making up the difference. I had seen a help-wanted sign in the window of a jewelry store on McDowell Street called Becker’s Jewel Box. I put on a lot of makeup, my best dress—it was purple, with tiny white dots and a sash that tied in the back—and a pair of Mom’s high heels, since we wore the same size. Then I walked around the mountain to apply for the job. I pushed open the door, jangling the bells hanging overhead. Becker’s Jewel Box was a fancy store, the kind of place I never had occasion to go into, with a humming air conditioner and buzzing fluorescent lights. Locked glass display cases held rings and necklaces and brooches, and a few guitars and banjos hung on the pine-board- paneled walls to diversify the merchandise. Mr. Becker was leaning on the counter

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Lori was the most obsessive reader. Fantasy and science fiction dazzled her, especially The Lord of the Rings . When she wasn’t reading, she was drawing orcs or hobbits. She tried to get everyone in the family to read the books. “They transport you to a different world,” she’d say. I didn’t want to be transported to another world. My favorite books all involved people dealing with hardships. I loved The Grapes of Wrath, Lord of the Flies, and especially A Tree Grows in Brooklyn . I thought Francie Nolan and I were practically identical, except that she had lived fifty years earlier in Brooklyn and her mother always kept the house clean. Francie Nolan’s father sure reminded me of Dad. If Francie saw the good in her father, even though most people considered him a shiftless drunk, maybe I wasn’t a complete fool for believing in mine. Or trying to believe in him. It was getting harder. • • • One night that summer, when I was lying in bed and everyone else was asleep, I heard the front door open and the sound of someone muttering and stumbling around in the darkness. Dad had come home. I went into the living room, where he was sitting at the drafting table. I could see by the moonlight coming through the window that his face and hair were matted with blood. I asked him what had happened. “I got in a fight with a mountain,” he said, “and the mountain won.” I looked at Mom asleep on the sofa bed, her head buried under a pillow. She was a deep sleeper and hadn’t stirred. When I lit the kerosene lamp, I saw that Dad also had a big gash in his right forearm and a cut on his head so deep that I could see the white of his skull. I got a toothpick and tweezers and picked the rocky grit out of the gash. Dad didn’t wince when I poured rubbing alcohol on the wound. Because of all his hair, I had no way to put on a bandage, and I told Dad I should shave the area around the cut. “Hell, honey, that would ruin my image,” he said. “A fellow in my position’s got to look presentable.” Dad studied the gash on his forearm. He tightened a tourniquet around his upper arm and told me to fetch Mom’s sewing box. He fumbled around in it for silk thread but, unable to find any, decided that cotton would be fine. He threaded a needle with black thread, handed it to me, and pointed at the gash. “Sew it up,” he said. “Dad! I can’t do that.” “Oh, go ahead, honey,” he said. “I’d do it myself, except I can’t do diddly with my left hand.” He smiled. “Don’t worry about me. I’m so thoroughly pickled, I won’t feel a thing.” Dad lit a cigarette and placed his arm on the table. “Go ahead,” he said.

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

  Their self-esteem would flourish; all self-doubt would be erased like a typo. Entire paragraphs and manuscripts of disappointment and rejection and lack of faith would be wiped out by one push of a psychic delete button and replaced by a quiet, tender sense of worth and belonging. Then they could wrap the world in flame. But this is not exactly what happens. Or at any rate, this is not what it has been like for me. For me, it has been more like a cross between the last few weeks of pregnancy, when you look and feel like Orson Welles and you are hormonally challenged up the yang, your ankles are swollen and you feel revulsion at the smell of vegetables cooking; and the first day of seventh-grade PE class, when they make you line up by size before they hand out your gym uniform. And you’re either four feet tall, like E.T., or made to feel like Diane Arbus’s Jewish giant. Oh, the process starts off well enough. One day several months before your pub date, you get a set of bound galleys, which is to say, a paperbound book with your manuscript set in type. I always feel a desperate sense of relief at this point, because it seems like the publisher is too far in now to cancel publication. These bound galleys have also gone out to hundreds of papers and reviewers, and this makes you believe that the publisher has already shelled out so much money in production and postage costs that they will have to go ahead and actually publish the damn thing. The first time you read through your galleys is heaven. The second time through, all you see are the typos no one caught. It looks like the typesetter typed it with frostbitten feet, drunk. And the typos are important ones. They make you look ignorant; they make you look like an ignorant racist. By the third or fourth time through, you can see that there is not one fresh or insightful or even salvageable line in the whole thing. By the fifth reading, you are no longer sure that publishing this would be in your best interests. Not long after, you get your early reviews, in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews , and sometimes they sound like your mother wrote them. Other times they suggest that you are a show-offy vacuous loser, and they hope you die so that they won’t have to read your work anymore. I have gotten prepub reviews that said I was a treadmark on the underpants of life. Perhaps this is not exactly what they said, but by reading between the lines, I could see that this is what they were implying. You survive that. Possibly you’re still drinking, so you have a pitcher of martinis just to take the edge off, or you’ve quit drinking, so you eat your body weight in pastries and Mexican food.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  But she said she could never forgive us kids and didn’t want us in her house any longer, even if we stayed in the basement and kept as quiet as church mice. We were banished. That was the word Dad used. “You did wrong,” he said, “and now we’ve all been banished.” “This isn’t exactly the Garden of Eden,” Lori said. I was more upset about the bike than I was about Erma banishing us. “Why don’t we just move back to Phoenix?” I asked Mom. “We’ve already been there,” she said. “And there are all sorts of opportunities here that we don’t even know about.” She and Dad set out to find us a new place to live. The cheapest rental in Welch was an apartment over a diner on McDowell Street that cost seventy-five dollars a month, which was out of our price range. Also, Mom and Dad wanted outdoor space we could call our own, so they decided to buy. Since we had no money for a down payment and no steady income, our options were pretty limited, but within a couple of days, Mom and Dad told us they had found a house we could afford. “It’s not exactly palatial, so there’s going to be a lot of togetherness,” Mom said. “And it’s on the rustic side.” “How rustic?” Lori asked. Mom paused. I could see her debating how to phrase her answer. “It doesn’t have indoor plumbing,” she said. • • • Dad was still looking for a car to replace the Olds—our budget was in the high two figures—so that weekend we all hiked over for our first look at the new place. We walked down the valley through the center of town and around a mountainside, past the small, tidy brick houses put up after the mines were unionized. We crossed a creek that fed into the Tug River and started up a barely paved one-lane road called Little Hobart Street. It climbed through several switchbacks and, for a stretch, rose at an angle so steep you had to walk on your toes; if you tried walking flatfooted, you stretched your calves till they hurt. The houses up here were shabbier than the brick houses lower down in the valley. They were made of wood, with lopsided porches, sagging roofs, rusted-out gutters, and balding tar paper or asphalt shingles slowly but surely parting from the underwall. In almost every yard, a mutt or two was chained to a tree or to a clothesline post, and they barked furiously as we walked by. Like most houses in Welch, these were heated by coal. The more prosperous families had coal sheds; the poorer ones left their coal in a pile out front.

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

  When someone reliable gives you this kind of feedback, you now have some true sense of your work’s effect on people, and you may now know how to approach your final draft. If you are getting ready to send your work to a potential agent for the first time, you don’t want to risk burning that bridge by sending something that’s just not ready. You really must get your piece or book just right, as right as you can. Sometimes it is just a matter of fine-tuning, or maybe one whole character needs to be rethought. Sometimes the friend will love the feel of the writing, the raw material, and yet feel that it is a million miles from being done. This can be deeply disappointing, but again, better that your spouse or friend tell you this than an agent or an editor. I heard Marianne Williamson say once that when you ask God into your life, you think he or she is going to come into your psychic house, look around, and see that you just need a new floor or better furniture and that everything needs just a little cleaning—and so you go along for the first six months thinking how nice life is now that God is there. Then you look out the window one day and see that there’s a wrecking ball outside. It turns out that God actually thinks your whole foundation is shot and you’re going to have to start over from scratch. This is exactly what it can be like to give, say, a novel to someone else to read. This person can love it and still find it a total mess, in need of a great deal of work, of even a new foundation. So how do I find one of these partners? my students ask. The same way you find a number of people for a writing group. The only difference is that in this case, you’re looking for one partner instead of several. So if you are in a class, look around, see if there’s someone whose work you’ve admired, who seems to be at about the same level as you. Then you can ask him or her if he or she wants to meet for a cup of coffee and see if you can work with each other. It’s like asking for a date, so while you are doing this, you will probably be rolfed by all your most heinous memories of seventh and eighth grade. If the person says no, it’s good to wait until you get inside your car before you fall apart completely. Then you can rend your clothes and keen and do a primal scream. Of course, you probably want to be sure that the person hasn’t followed you out to your car.

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

  You may want to tape this to the wall near your desk. The banana peel has appeared almost every time I’ve scored a triumph, or what the world would regard as a triumph. It’s God as coyote prankster. Just last week, for instance, I was participating in this illustrious literary event in San Francisco for a national charity. I had waited for years to be included in this event, each year watching six other writers be selected. I had tried to be a good sport about it, God knows I had. I understood that the organizers needed to invite big-time, nationally known writers so as to draw the biggest possible crowd; this made perfect sense. But year after year I felt dejected each time I was not included. Finally this year I was asked, and my joy was boundless. Now, I’m not stupid: I knew it was a nice big plate of cocaine for my ego. I knew it was another golden calf. But still my baby heart soared like an eagle. However. There was this one tiny little problem. I was the last author to be asked and to commit, so I wasn’t on the initial press release that went out three months ago. The publicity chairwoman sent out a second release after I came on board. But when the first big prominent mention was made in the paper a few weeks ago, my name wasn’t included. I was miffed, since it was the most important column in the paper, but I am old and tough and can handle this sort of disappointment. Next there was a paragraph about the event in the book section, and once again I was not included. This time the publicity chairwoman called, upset and so full of apologies that she managed to mollify me. Then there was a big mention in the society pages, and guess what? It felt like seventh grade all over again. The publicity chairwoman called again and was so upset that I thought she might actually drink a big glass of Drano right there on the phone. I felt suddenly so teary and premenstrual and left out that I couldn’t even talk about it. Hours later, I remembered that if I wasn’t enough before being asked to participate in this prestigious event, then participating wasn’t going to make me enough. Being enough was going to have to be an inside job. Also, about an hour after I had slogged through to this conclusion, my mouth dropped open. I had somehow forgotten that it was a charity event!

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

  Somehow you get the time to pass, and then your pub date arrives. There is something mythic about the date of publication, and you actually come to believe that on this one particular morning you will wake up to a phone ringing off the hook and your publisher will be so excited that they will have hired the Blue Angels precision flying team to buzz your squalid little hovel, which you will be moving out of as soon as sales of the book really take off. Or at least they will remember to send flowers. I remember one year my friend Carpenter and I had books out on the same day. We talked about it all summer. We each pretended to have modest expectations. I had modest expectations for his book; he had modest expectations for mine. The week before, we talked almost every morning about how excited we were and what a long time we had waited, and how it was just like being a little kid waiting for Christmas Eve. Finally the big day arrived and I woke up happy, embarrassed in advance by all the praise and attention that would be forthcoming. I made coffee and practiced digging my toe in the dirt, and called Pammy and a few friends to let them congratulate me. Then I waited for the phone to ring. The phone did not know its part. It sat there silent as death with a head cold. By noon the noise of it not ringing began to wear badly on my nerves. Luckily, though, by noon it was time for the first beer of the day. I sat by the phone like a loyal dog, waiting for it to ring. Finally, finally it rang at four. I picked up the phone and heard Carpenter laughing hysterically, like some serial killer, and then I became hysterical, and eventually we both had to be sedated. He sent me flowers, and before I knew he had done so, I sent him flowers, too. The ones he sent me were so beautiful, roses and irises mostly. That is often pretty much what it is like, except for the part about the roses and irises. I tell you, if what you have in mind is fame and fortune, publication is going to drive you crazy. If you are lucky, you will get a few reviews, some good, some bad, some indifferent. Don’t even get me started on the places where one is neglected.