Embarrassment

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 Untrue (2018)

  “It’s pretty incredible that people commit for life, that they get married, without even discussing the issue of sexual exclusivity,” I offered by way of chitchat, realizing as I said it that my husband and I had committed for life, that we got married, without even discussing the issue of sexual exclusivity. Monogamy and marriage, for straight people in much of the US, go together like a horse and carriage. Or they used to. Or maybe not. After many months of research and interviews, seeing headlines like “Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?” on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, attending Skirt Club parties where avowedly straight, frequently married-to-men women had one-off sexual encounters with other women, and chatting at Open Love cocktail parties and other mixers for those in the polyamory community, I was no longer sure. Things were changing, but it was hard to gauge how much and how fast and how comprehensively. After all, the signs can seem bewilderingly contradictory. For example, a single niche, TV, has seen a quick uptick in series on non-monogamy. These include Showtime’s Polyamory: Married and Dating; TLC’s Sister Wives, about a polygynous patriarch and his four wives; HBO’s You Me Her; and the web series Unicornland, about a young female divorcee in New York City exploring her relationship options with different couples. Then there’s a counterpoint, the seventeen-season success Cheaters. The latter show’s premise is irresistibly simple, like Candid Camera for the not so candid: “dispatch a surveillance team to follow the partner suspected of cheating and gather incriminating video evidence. After reviewing the evidence, the offended party has the option of confronting the unfaithful partner.” This roster of shows dramatizes a contradiction: our country’s enduring emphasis on policing and enforcing “fidelity” precisely as it comes up against an impetus to redefine it.

• From The Songs of Bilitis (1894)

  Let Boreos be now thy guide and push thee softly toward the port, black ship, escorted by dolphins, at the will of the kindly sea. XLVI PSAPPHA I rub my eyes.... Is it already day, I wonder. Ah! who is this near me?... a woman?... By Paphia, I had forgotten.... O Charites; how I am shamed. To what country am I come, and what is this island where one learns thus of love? If I were not all wearied, I would believe it a dream.... Is it possible that this is the Psappha? She sleeps.... She is certainly beautiful, although her hair is cut like that of an athlete. But this astonishing countenance, this virile breast, and these narrow hips.... I would like to go before she awakens. Alas! I am against the wall. I must step over her. I am afraid lest I touch her hip and that she will take me as I pass. XLVII THE DANCE OF GLOTTIS AND KYSE Two little girls carried me away to their house and, with the door firmly closed, they lighted the wick of a lamp and wished to dance for me. Their cheeks were not painted and were brown as their little bellies. They pulled each other by the arms and talked at the same time in an agony of gaiety. Seated on a mattress raised upon two trestles, Glottis sang in a sharp voice and struck the measures with her sonorous little palms. Kyse danced shakily, then stopped, suffocated with laughter, took her sister by the breasts, bit her on the shoulder and threw her down like a goat that wishes to play. XLVIII COUNSELS Then Syllikmas entered and, seeing us so familiar, seated herself upon the bench. She took Glottis upon one knee, Kyse on the other, and said: “Come here, little one.” But I remained away. She resumed: “Art thou afraid of us? Approach, thou: these children love thee. They will teach thee something thou knowest not: the honey of the caresses of a woman. “Man is violent and lazy. Doubtless thou knowest this. Avoid him. He has a flat chest, a rough skin, short hair, shaggy arms. But women are altogether beautiful. “Women alone know how to love; stay with us, Bilitis, stay. And if thou hast an ardent soul, thou wilt see thy beauty, as in a mirror, upon the bodies of women, thy lovers.” XLIX UNCERTAINTY I know not whether I should espouse Glottis or Kyse. As they are not like each other, one would not console me for the other, and I fear lest I choose badly. They each hold one of my hands and one of my breasts also. But to which shall I give my mouth? to which shall I give my heart and all that one cannot divide? It is shameful to remain thus, all three in one house. They talk of it in Mytilene. Yesterday, before the temple of Ares, a woman who passed did not greet me.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  “Grab your trousers!” shouted the sergeant. “These are trousers,” he shouted. “Not pants! Pants are for little girls! Trousers are for marines! Put your trousers on!” he commanded. “Yessir!” they screamed and they grabbed their trousers and then their belts and then their skivvy shirts and jackets and utility caps, until they all stood dressed together inside that hangar. Many of the uniforms didn’t fit. He could feel his cap covering his face, he was almost swimming in it, and his enormous pants hung down below his boots that didn’t fit either. He felt like a ragamuffin doll. He thought he must look like some kind of painter, with his painting cap turned all sideways on his head. He felt so silly.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It so evidently was not a Poussin that I wondered whether to take him up, whether he knew or cared what it was; if he were testing me or merely producing the philistine on-dit of the Club. ‘I think it could do with cleaning,’ I suggested. ‘It appears to be happening in the middle of the night, whatever it is.’ ‘Ooh, you don’t want to go cleaning everything,’ Nantwich assured me. ‘Most pictures would be better if they were a damned sight dirtier.’ Mildly dismayed, I treated it as a joke. ‘Bah!’ he went on. ‘You get these fellows—women mostly—doing all the old pictures up. No knowing what they’ll find. And then they look like fakes afterwards.’ I saw he was dribbling gin from his glass onto the carpet. He touched my outstretched hand. ‘Whoopsy!’ he said, as if I were being a nuisance. His gaze drifted into the middle distance and I too looked about, a little at a loss for talk. ‘Actually, I love art,’ he announced. ‘One day, if we get on quite well, I’ll show you my house. You’re keen on art, I should say?’ ‘I do have quite a lot of time for it,’ I conceded; then, fearing he might think my tone was rude, I enlarged a figure of speech into an observation. ‘I mean, I don’t have a job, and I have plenty of time to go to galleries and look at pictures.’ ‘You’re not married or anything are you?’ ‘No, nothing,’ I assured him. ‘Too young, I know. You’ve been up to university, of course?’ ‘I was at Oxford, yes—at Corpus—reading History.’ He drank this in with some more gin. ‘Do you like girls at all?’ he asked. ‘Yes, I like them quite a lot really,’ I insisted. ‘There are chaps who don’t care for them, you know. Simply can’t abide them. Can’t stand the sight of them, their titties and their big sit-upons, even the smell of them.’ He looked down the room authoritatively to where Percy was dispensing Sanatogen to a striking likeness of the older Gladstone. ‘Andrews, for instance, cannot tolerate them.’ It took me a moment to work this out. ‘In the gym?’ I said. ‘Yes, I’m not surprised—he seems very much a man’s man. You must know Andrews then,’ I lamely concluded. But I had lost my host already; I saw that he attacked questions with excitement but abandoned them within seconds. Or perhaps they abandoned him. ‘If you’ll give me a hand I do think we might go through now, so that we can get a good seat. They’re like hyenas here. They eat everything up if you’re not in there quick.’

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  In gym I saw him once taking a shower, and his face and neck, all over his arms and back, his whole body was covered with blackheads and whiteheads and thousands of pimples. And now I was catching them, I was getting them just like Stevie Jacket and my sister. There it was, right in front of me in the mirror, a big goddamn blackhead, and after staring at it for almost an hour, I still didn’t know what to do. I remembered this girl in the sixth grade who used to have them all over her face and it looked like somebody hit her with a rake. It was awful and she used to put this disgusting filmy cream on, to try and hide them, but it looked worse. I looked in the medicine cabinet for the little metal thing that my sister used, with tiny openings on each end that you were supposed to press against the pimples and pop them out of your skin forever. So I pressed it up against the blackhead real hard like I was going to take my head off, until it finally oozed out of the pore like a tiny white dot. I kept popping those things all year, and I finally broke down and bought that filmy crap, and started to put it on my face too. It was about the same time I started to get these ugly hairs under my lip and up in my armpits. I was getting these things all happening at once, and I couldn’t stop them, no matter how hard I tried, they all kept coming. I put some Nair under my lip one night because one of the guys in boy scout camp had said that if you shaved with a razor it would grow back twice as fast. So I put on this underarm stuff I found in the closet, it was the stuff that was supposed to take the hair off your legs. Well, I put it under my nose and waited about an hour and then I wiped it off, leaving a big red rash. It looked like a huge gigantic red mustache and I went to school the next week using a handkerchief, trying to hide it and making believe I had a real bad cold. Most of the year was like that, with the pimples all over my face, and by the time the spring came all sorts of other difficult things began to happen. I felt strange feelings in places I had never discovered before. The part of me that had just been there like everything else now began to get hard and excited every time I looked at a pretty girl. I had never felt anything like it before in my life. That thing, my penis, was getting hard, every time I watched the girls on “American Bandstand” or saw them walking down the streets. They’d even be in my dreams at night.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  When the judge saw me sitting at the defense table, he said to me harshly, “Hey, you shouldn’t be in here without counsel. Go back outside and wait in the hallway until your lawyer arrives.” I stood up and smiled broadly. I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Your Honor, we haven’t met. My name is Bryan Stevenson, I am the lawyer on the case set for hearing this morning.” The judge laughed at his mistake, and the prosecutor joined in. I forced myself to laugh because I didn’t want my young client, a white child who had been prosecuted as an adult, to be disadvantaged by a conflict I had created with the judge before the hearing. But I was disheartened by the experience. Of course innocent mistakes occur, but the accumulated insults and indignations caused by racial presumptions are destructive in ways that are hard to measure. Constantly being suspected, accused, watched, doubted, distrusted, presumed guilty, and even feared is a burden borne by people of color that can’t be understood or confronted without a deeper conversation about our history of racial injustice. The fourth institution is mass incarceration. Going into any prison is deeply confusing if you know anything about the racial demographics of America. The extreme overrepresentation of people of color, the disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, the targeted prosecution of drug crimes in poor communities, the criminalization of new immigrants and undocumented people, the collateral consequences of voter disenfranchisement, and the barriers to re-entry can only be fully understood through the lens of our racial history. It was gratifying to be able, finally, to address some of these issues through our new project and to articulate the challenges created by racial history and structural poverty. The materials we developed were generating positive feedback, and I became hopeful that we might be able to push back against the suppression of this difficult history of racial injustice. — I was also encouraged by our new staff. We were now attracting young, gifted lawyers from all over the country who are extremely skilled. We started a program for college graduates to work at EJI as Justice Fellows. Having a bigger staff with very talented people made meeting the new challenges created by our much broader docket seem possible. A bigger staff, bigger cases, and a bigger docket also sometimes meant bigger problems. While exciting and very gratifying, the Supreme Court rulings on juveniles created all sorts of new challenges for us.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Virginia was married once, for more than six decades, and had six children. This alone made me think she would be a marvelous interview subject. But of course there was more: her life had spanned the Great Depression, World War II, the moon landing, the sexual revolution, the election of our nation’s first black president, the campaign of a female candidate for president, the backlash against her, and the tech revolution. Virginia had seen a lot. Raised Catholic, she was taught that kissing was wrong, that birth control other than the rhythm method was a sin, and that premarital sex was a mortal sin. Her parents, she told me, were strict, particularly her mother. When Virginia sat down for a two-hour-long interview at Indiana University Bloomington in 1944, she was a sheltered freshman who wanted to improve her grade in her psychology course. Her professor had intimated to the class, she recalled, that participation in a study by someone named Dr. Kinsey would be looked upon favorably. Virginia and her family told me they believed she had likely been interviewed not by Kinsey himself but by one of his colleagues—perhaps Clyde Martin or Wardell Pomeroy? Virginia wasn’t sure. The questions started off reasonably enough, she thought: things like how often she smoked, danced, and played cards. Then came a question about whether she had ever played strip poker (she certainly hadn’t!), and things just got stranger after that. She was asked, among other things, “How old were you when / When was the first time you ever had sex with an animal?” and “How old were you when / When was the first time you had sex with a dead body?” (Kinsey researchers framed their questions this way in order to make it more likely that interviewees would feel comfortable disclosing stigmatized practices.) Virginia, who had learned about the birds and bees from her girlfriends in high school, told me she nearly fainted. “I said—I didn’t use the word s-e-x, that wasn’t polite—so I said ‘affair.’ I asked him, ‘Do people really have affairs with a dead body?!’” At this point in our interview, Virginia’s two daughters in attendance and I burst into gales of laughter. So did Virginia. “Mom,” one of them managed to get out, “when we were young you and Dad told us you never even kissed before you got married. You said you shook hands!” We laughed even harder. Virginia told me that she had felt very important, like a celebrity, after the interview with the Kinsey researcher. The other girls in her dorm wanted to know all about the questions. The few who had also been interviewed wanted to compare. “Did you get the animal question? Oh, I nearly died!” said one. “Oh, I did die!” another exclaimed.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  By this time my prick was out of my fly and quivering with delight. I closed in on her and I reached up under her dress to get at that hand-woven rug I had seen through the keyhole. Suddenly I got a sound box on the ears, and then another and then she took me by the ear and leading me to a corner of the room she turned my face to the wall and said, “Now button up your fly, you silly boy!” We went back to the piano in a few moments—back to Czerny and the velocity exercises. I couldn’t see a sharp from a flat any more, but I continued to play because I was afraid she might tell my mother of the incident. Fortunately it was not an easy thing to tell one’s mother. The incident, embarrassing as it was, marked a decided change in our relations. I thought that the next time she came she would be severe with me, but on the contrary, she seemed to have dolled herself up, to have sprinkled more perfume over herself, and she was even a bit gay, which was unusual for Lola because she was a morose, withdrawn type. I didn’t dare to open my fly again, but I would get an erection and hold it throughout the lesson, which she must have enjoyed because she was always stealing sidelong glances in that direction.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  If you want to do something for me lend me ten bucks now, right away . . . slip it to me right here while I look at Luke. You know, I really liked Luke. I didn’t mean all that over the telephone. You got me at a bad moment. The wife was tearing her hair out. We’re in a mess, Maxie, and I’m counting on you to do something. Come out with me if you can and I’ll tell you more about it. . . .” Maxie, as I had expected, couldn’t come out with me. He wouldn’t think of deserting them at such a moment. . . . “Well, give it to me now,” I said, almost savagely. “I’ll explain the whole thing to you tomorrow. I’ll have lunch with you downtown.” “Listen, Henry,” says Maxie, fishing around in his pocket, embarrassed at the idea of being caught with a wad in his hand at that moment, “listen,” he said, “I don’t mind giving you the money, but couldn’t you have found another way of reaching me? It isn’t because of Luke . . . it’s. . . .” He began to hem and haw, not knowing really what he wanted to say. “For Christ’s sake,” I muttered, bending over Luke more closely so that if any one walked in on us they would never suspect what I was up to . . . “for Christ’s sake, don’t argue about it now . . . hand it over and be done with it. . . . I’m desperate, do you hear me?” Maxie was so confused and flustered that he couldn’t disengage a bill without pulling the wad out of his pocket. Leaning over the coffin reverently I peeled off the topmost bill from the wad which was peeping out of his pocket. I couldn’t tell whether it was a single or a ten spot. I didn’t stop to examine it but tucked it away as rapidly as possible and straightened myself up. Then I took Maxie by the arm and returned to the kitchen where the family were eating solemnly but heartily. They wanted me to stay for a bite, and it was awkward to refuse, but I refused as best I could and beat it, my face twitching now with hysterical laughter. At the corner, by the lamppost, Curley was waiting for me. By this time I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. I grabbed Curley by the arm and rushing him down the street I began to laugh, to laugh as I have seldom laughed in my life. I thought it would never stop. Every time I opened my mouth to start explaining the incident I had an attack. Finally I got frightened. I thought maybe I might laugh myself to death. After I had managed to quiet down a bit, in the midst of a long silence, Curley suddenly says: “Did you get it?” That precipitated another attack, even more violent than before.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Talking about my work could up the awkwardness quotient at cocktail parties. Plenty of people were eager to ask me about and discuss female infidelity. About as often, it brought the conversation to a halt. After a few uncomfortable exchanges, I decided it was easier to tell people that I was writing a book about “female autonomy.” It seemed considerate to deploy a half-truth about an uncomfortable reality in order to spare those who might not really want to discuss it. And to sidestep any ire or judgment directed at me by association when I said the “I” word. “Some of us have been on the receiving end of that,” more than one man told me dourly, as if it were reason enough for me to write about square dancing instead. A colleague with whom I could be frank about my work and whose opinions I trusted looked at me across his desk and offered, “A shrink I know told me all women who cheat are crazy.” At a dinner party, I asked an until-that-moment perfectly charming couples therapist for his informed view on non-monogamy. “Those people are…unwell!” he sputtered. Those around him—well read, well thought, considered and considerate—agreed, citing “disease” and “instability.” “He studies healthy people, and your topic is unhealthy people,” a woman said amiably, as if this were a given. And this was a friendly crowd. When I spoke about my work with female friends and acquaintances, I often floated the notions that compulsory monogamy was a feminist issue, and that where there is no female sexual autonomy, there can be no true female autonomy. This was met with everything from enthusiastic agreement to complete confusion—what did monogamy and infidelity have to do with feminism?—to denunciations of women who stepped out as “damaged,” “selfish,” “whorish,” and, my favorite, “bad mothers.” By self-described feminists. But the most common responses by far when I spoke about my topic were “Why are you interested in that?” and “What does your husband think about your work?” The tone ranged from pointedly curious to accusing, and the implication was clear: researching female infidelity made me, at the very least, a slut by proxy. But I suspected that these people today, the ones at the workshop, would be different.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  The talent show was in this little community hall attached to nothing in the middle of nowhere. When we got there, Tom was going around, shaking hands, chatting with everybody. There was singing, dancing, some poetry. Then the host got up onstage and said, “Re na le modiragatsi yo o kgethegileng. Ka kopo amogelang…Spliff Star!” “We’ve got a special performer, a rapper all the way from America. Please welcome…Spliff Star!” Spliff Star was Busta Rhymes’s hype man at the time. I sat there, confused. What? Spliff Star? In Hammanskraal? Then everyone in the room turned and looked at me. Tom walked over and whispered in my ear. “Dude, come up onstage.” “What?” “Come onstage.” “Dude, what are you talking about?” “Dude, please, you’re gonna get me in so much shit. They’ve already paid me the money.” “Money? What money?” Of course, what Tom had failed to tell me was that he’d told these people he was bringing a famous rapper from America to come and rap in their talent show. He had demanded to be paid up front for doing so, and I, in my Timberlands, was that famous American rapper. “Screw you,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.” “Please, dude, I’m begging you. Please do me this favor. Please. There’s this girl here, and I wanna get with her, and I told her I know all these rappers…Please. I’m begging you.” “Dude, I’m not Spliff Star. What am I gonna do?!” “Just rap Busta Rhymes songs.” “But I don’t know any of the lyrics.” “It doesn’t matter. These people don’t speak English.” “Aw, fuck.” I got up onstage and Tom did some terrible beat-boxing—“Bff ba-dff, bff bff ba-dff”—while I stumbled through some Busta Rhymes lyrics that I made up as I went along. The audience erupted with cheers and applause. An American rapper had come to Hammanskraal, and it was the most epic thing they had ever seen. So that’s Tom. One afternoon Tom came by my house and we started talking about the dance. I told him I didn’t have a date, couldn’t get a date, and wasn’t going to get a date. “I can get you a girl to go with you to the dance,” he said. “No, you can’t.” “Yes, I can. Let’s make a deal.” “I don’t want one of your deals, Tom.” “No, listen, here’s the deal. If you give me a better cut on the CDs I’m selling, plus a bunch of free music for myself, I’ll come back with the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen in your life, and she’ll be your date for the dance.” “Okay, I’ll take that deal because it’s never going to happen.” “Do we have a deal?” “We have a deal, but it’s not going to happen.” “But do we have a deal?” “It’s a deal.”

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  After all the speeches, they carried him back down the steps of the platform and the crowd started clapping and now he felt more embarrassed than ever. He didn’t deserve this, he didn’t want this shit. All he could think of was getting out of there and going back home. He just wanted to get out of this place and go back right away. But now someone in the crowd was calling his name. “Ronnie! Ronnie!” Over and over again he heard someone shouting. And finally he saw who it was. It was little Tommy Law, who had grown up on Hamilton Avenue with all the rest of the guys. He used to hit home runs over Tommy’s hedge. Tommy had been one of his best friends like Richie and Bobby Zimmer. He hadn’t seen him for years, not since high school. Tommy had joined the marines too, and he’d heard something about him being wounded in a rocket attack in the DMZ. No one had told him he was back from the war. And now Tommy was hugging him and they were crying, both of them at the bottom of the stage, hugging each other and crying in front of all of them that day. He wanted to pull away in embarrassment and hold back his feelings that seemed to be pouring out of him, but he could not and he cried even harder now, hugging his friend until he felt his arms go numb. It was so wonderful, so good, to see Tommy again. He seemed to bring back something wonderfully happy in his past and he didn’t want to let go. They held on to each other for a long time. And when Tommy finally pulled away, his face was bright red and covered with tears and pain. Tommy held his head with his hands still shaking, looking at him sitting there in disbelief. He looked up at Tommy’s face and he could see that he was very sad. The crowd had gathered now watching the two friends almost with curiosity. He tried wiping the tears from his eyes, still trying to laugh and make Tommy and himself and all the others feel more at ease, but Tommy would not smile and he kept holding his head. Still crying, he shook his head back and forth. And now, looking up at Tommy’s face, he could see the thin scar that ran along his hairline, the same kind of scar he’d seen on the heads of the vegetables who had had their brains blown out, where plates had been put in to replace part of the skull. But Tommy didn’t want to talk about what had happened to him. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. He grabbed the back handles of the chair and began pushing him through the crowd. He pushed him through the town past the Long Island Railroad station to the American Legion hall.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  The smallest thing could prompt her. I’d walk through the house on the way to my room and say, “Hey, Mom” without glancing up. She’d say, “No, Trevor! You look at me. You acknowledge me. Show me that I exist to you, because the way you treat me is the way you will treat your woman. Women like to be noticed. Come and acknowledge me and let me know that you see me. Don’t just see me when you need something.” These little lessons were always about grown-up relationships, funnily enough. She was so preoccupied with teaching me how to be a man that she never taught me how to be a boy. […] She would even lecture me about sex. As I was a kid, that would get very awkward. “Trevor, don’t forget: You’re having sex with a woman in her mind before you’re having sex with her in her vagina.” “Trevor, foreplay begins during the day. It doesn’t begin in the bedroom.” I’d be like, “What? What is foreplay? What does that even mean?”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Everything went beautifully until it came to the fried bananas. Somehow nobody wanted to touch the bananas, as this was a dish known only to Polacks like Stanley’s parents. It was considered disgusting to eat fried bananas. In the midst of the embarrassment some bright youngster suggested that crazy Willie Maine should be given the fried bananas. Willie Maine was older than any of us but unable to talk. He said nothing but Bjork! Bjork! He said this to everything. So when the bananas were passed to him he said Bjork! and he reached for them with two hands. But his brother George was there and George felt insulted that they should have palmed off the rotten bananas on his crazy brother. So George started a fight and Willie, seeing his brother attacked, began to fight also, screaming Bjork! Bjork! Not only did he strike out at the other boys but at the girls too, which created a pandemonium. Finally Stanley’s old man, hearing the noise, came up from the barber shop with a strop in his hand. He took crazy Willie Maine by the scruff of the neck and began to lambast him. Meanwhile his brother George had sneaked off to call Mr. Maine senior. The latter, who was also a bit of a drunkard, arrived in his shirt sleeves and seeing poor Willie being beaten by the drunken barber, he went for him with two stout fists and beat him up unmercifully. Willie, who had gotten free meanwhile, was on his hands and knees, gobbling up the fried bananas which had fallen on the floor. He was stuffing them away like a billy goat, fast as he could find them. When the old man saw him there chewing away like a goat he became furious and picking up the strop he went after Willie with a vengeance. Now Willie began to howl—Bjork! Bjork! —and suddenly everybody began to laugh. That took the steam out of Mr. Maine and he relented. Finally he sat down and Stanley’s aunt brought him a glass of wine. Hearing the racket some of the other neighbors came in and there was more wine and then beer and then schnapps and soon everybody was happy and singing and whistling and even the kids got drunk and then crazy Willie got drunk and again he got down on the floor like a billy goat and he yelled Bjork! Bjork! and Alfie Betcha, who was very drunk though only eight years old, bit crazy Willie Maine in the backside and then Willie bit him and then we all started biting each other and the parents stood by laughing and screaming with glee and it was very very merry and there were more fried bananas and everybody ate them this time and then there were speeches and more bumpers downed and crazy Willie Maine tried to sing for us but could only sing Bjork! Bjork!

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Suddenly I got a sound box on the ears, and then another and then she took me by the ear and leading me to a corner of the room she turned my face to the wall and said, “Now button up your fly, you silly boy!” We went back to the piano in a few moments—back to Czerny and the velocity exercises. I couldn’t see a sharp from a flat any more, but I continued to play because I was afraid she might tell my mother of the incident. Fortunately it was not an easy thing to tell one’s mother. The incident, embarrassing as it was, marked a decided change in our relations. I thought that the next time she came she would be severe with me, but on the contrary, she seemed to have dolled herself up, to have sprinkled more perfume over herself, and she was even a bit gay, which was unusual for Lola because she was a morose, withdrawn type. I didn’t dare to open my fly again, but I would get an erection and hold it throughout the lesson, which she must have enjoyed because she was always stealing sidelong glances in that direction. I was only fifteen at the time, and she was easily twenty-five or twenty-eight. It was difficult for me to know what to do, unless it was to deliberately knock her down one day while my mother was out. For a time I actually shadowed her at night, when she went out alone. She had a habit of going out for long walks alone in the evening. I used to dog her steps; hoping she would get to some deserted spot near the cemetery where I might try some rough tactics. I had a feeling sometimes that she knew I was following her and that she enjoyed it. I think she was waiting for me to waylay her—I think that was what she wanted. Anyway, one night I was lying in the grass near the railroad tracks; it was a sweltering summer’s night and people were lying about anywhere and everywhere, like panting dogs. I wasn’t thinking of Lola at all—I was just mooning there, too hot to think about anything. Suddenly I see a woman coming along the narrow cinder-path. I’m lying sprawled out on the embankment and nobody around that I can notice. The woman is coming along slowly, head down, as though she were dreaming. As she gets close I recognize her. “Lola!” I call. “Lola!” She seems to be really astonished to see me there. “Why, what are you doing here?” she says, and with that she sits down beside me on the embankment. I didn’t bother to answer her, I didn’t say a word—I just crawled over her and flattened her. “Not here, please,” she begged, but I paid no attention. I got my hand between her legs, all tangled up in that thick sporran of hers, and she was sopping wet, like a horse slavering.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Being poor didn’t help. Not only could I not afford a decent haircut, leaving me with a huge, unruly Afro, but my mother also used to get angry at the fact that I grew out of my school uniforms too fast, so to save money she started buying my clothes three sizes too big. My blazer was too long and my pants were too baggy and my shoes flopped around. I was a clown. And of course, Murphy’s Law, the year my mom started buying my clothes too big was the year that I stopped growing. So now I was never going to grow into my clown clothes and I was stuck being a clown. The only thing I had going for me was the fact that I was tall, but even there I was gangly and awkward-looking. Duck feet. High ass. Nothing worked. After suffering my Valentine’s Day heartbreak at the hands of Maylene and the handsome, charming Lorenzo, I learned a valuable lesson about dating. What I learned was that cool guys get girls, and funny guys get to hang out with the cool guys with their girls. I was not a cool guy; therefore I did not have girls. I understood that formula very quickly and I knew my place. I didn’t ask girls out. I didn’t have a girlfriend. I didn’t even try. For me to try to get a girl would have upset the natural order of things. Part of my success as the tuck-shop guy was that I was welcome everywhere, and I was welcome everywhere because I was nobody. I was the acne-ridden clown with duck feet in floppy shoes. I wasn’t a threat to the guys. I wasn’t a threat to the girls. The minute I became somebody, I risked no longer being welcomed as nobody. The pretty girls were already spoken for. The popular guys had staked their claim. They would say, “I like Zuleika,” and you knew that meant if you tried anything with Zuleika there’d be a fight. In the interest of survival, the smart move was to stay on the fringe, stay out of trouble. At Sandringham, the only time girls in class looked at me was when they wanted me to pass a letter to the hot guy in class. But there was one girl I knew named Johanna. Johanna and I had been at the same school intermittently our whole lives. We were in preschool at Maryvale together. Then she left and went to another school. Then we were in primary school at H. A. Jack together. Then she left and went to another school. Then finally we were at Sandringham together. Because of that we became friends.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  We all took turns introducing ourselves while seated cross-legged on the floor of the handsome wooden structure, all part of a large estate with an enormous mansion, which I later learned had been purchased from the Seagram family for millions. We were led in singing folk songs. I was embarrassed by the childishness of it all, but no one else seemed to mind. I loved to sing and grew up listening to Peter, Paul and Mary and many others. The atmosphere of the event, with lots of enthusiastic young people all together, brought back warm memories of summer camp. That night we were escorted to bunk beds above a converted garage, and the men and women were put in separate rooms. As it turned out, getting a good night’s sleep was nearly impossible. Not only was it crowded, but also there were two loud snorers! The other newcomers and I slept very little. When morning came, an intense young man from the group house in Queens sat down and talked with me. I asked again when the van was going back to Queens. He told me, “We’re so sorry, but the brother left already much earlier this morning.” He told me that he too had been put off at first by some of the strange things he had heard and seen at his first workshop. He begged me not to have a closed mind but to give “them” a chance to present what he called the Divine Principle. “Please don’t judge them until you’ve had a chance to hear the whole thing,” he pleaded. He told me that if I left now, I would regret it for the rest of my life. His voice was so full of mystery and intrigue that it offset my suspicions and piqued my curiosity. “Now,” I said to myself, “I’ll finally get all my questions answered.” Or so I thought. In the morning we were led in calisthenics before breakfast. Afterward, we sang more songs. As we sat on the floor, a charismatic man with ice-blue eyes and a penetrating voice introduced himself and the ground rules for the weekend. He was the workshop director. We were told we had to spend all of our time together in the small groups to which we were assigned. There was to be no walking around the estate alone. Questions were to be asked only after a lecture was over, when we were back in our small group. He then introduced the lecturer, Wayne Miller.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  We had barely left the middle-class downtown area when it began to rain, a sudden shower with drops as big as peanuts. The crowds scattered like a flock of sparrows; in an instant, the street was deserted. I grabbed Poinsot by the sleeve and forced him to hurry. “We’re not very far from my home,” I shouted to him in the hurried tattoo of the rain splashing on the ground. “If you’d like, we can find shelter there...” So I dragged him home. It would have been wiser to have waited in a doorway until the shower was over, an autumn shower that was very heavy but brief. Still, I had the opportunity now, and we got home quite breathless and drenched by the time we reached our staircase. After the odor of warm earth in the rain, we suddenly encountered the usual stench of cat excrement on our stairs. Habit had made me ignore this detail that I was now sharply aware of again. Still, I was glad to find none of my brothers or sisters at home, all, it appeared, had been delayed by the rain. When I heard my mother busying herself in the kitchen, I decided to introduce her to Poinsot. I felt that I must reveal to him this other side of my life. I was not only his disciple in philosophy, a brilliant student, I was also the son of this woman. While he cast an absent-minded glance at my bookshelves, I went to fetch my mother. She smoothed her henna-reddened hair with the palms of her hands, adjusted her apron, and followed me. I said to Poinsot: “This is my mother.” And to my mother, who could understand no French, I said in our dialect: “He’s one of my teachers, the most intelligent among them all.” Poinsot held out a kindly hand and said: “How do you do, madame.” Mother was not accustomed to shaking hands and caught hold of Poinsot’s fingers, much as one grasps a kitchen utensil. But she had understood his greeting and replied in the same words: “How do you do?” They were both smiling, my mother with curiosity, Poinsot with embarrassment. As the silence that ensued seemed infinite to me because there was no hope of its being filled from either side, I hastened to throw a bridge across it. “You see,” I said to Poinsot, looking toward my mother so as to keep her interested, through my gestures, in what I was saying, “She’s still young, isn’t she? But she has already had eight children. ” “Yes, it’s rather surprising,” Poinsot replied as he looked her over. In dialect, I added hastily, for my mother’s benefit: “Monsieur Poinsot thinks you look very young.” At least this flattered her vanity.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Alice had asked her a lot of questions about her plans, and seemed to be scrutinizing her answers for signs of acceptability, while Roger smiled and nodded affably. At first Constance resented it, but soon, to her embarrassment, she found that she was flattered by Alice’s eventual approval. Alice had been especially kind when Constance was thrown out of her first apartment after two days of tenancy with a psychotic roommate, rushing to her assistance with advice and a huge garbage bag of Salvation Army–bound clothes. “Don’t leave New York because of this,” she said. “Everybody gets mangled a little during the first few months.” She huffed up the five flights of stairs to her apartment, dropped the keys, swore unattractively and opened the door to find that the heat was too high, the cats were running around with mysterious desperation, and Deana wasn’t home. The cats moiled loudly around her legs as she wrestled with can and opener; they squabbled for position as she put the blobs of cold meat-and-cornmeal byproducts before them. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You guys aren’t that hungry. Pigs.” She went into the living area, turned on the radio to her favorite noncommercial station and was assaulted by horribly optimistic fiddle music. She thought: This must be the folk music slot. She snapped her tongue, turned it off and paced around the room. Their downstairs neighbor was whistling in a pealing, urgent way that usually drove her crazy but now seemed homey and reassuring simply because of its familiarity. She began to mentally list all the mean things that Alice had ever said or done to her. For example, the time Constance was overcome by a severe toothache, which turned out to be an exposed nerve, and had to walk out of a movie that she was watching with Alice. Alice had insisted on leaving with her, then complained all the way home about missing the movie. “Well, it was great riding the subway with you,” she snapped as Constance staggered toward her building clutching her jaw. But Alice wasn’t just a straight-out bitch. It wasn’t that simple. Her neighbor rattled his castanets with ominous urgency. Constance slumped on the miserable old mattress that she and Deana had covered with fabric and large pillows and used as a couch. The mattress depressed her because it was like something that hippies would have in their apartment and because it was the same silly mattress that, in another life, had squeaked and rattled under the various activities of the two thousand and one dates. Yet, somehow she’d become attached to it, even though it was so mushy that when she sat on it, it felt as if her internal organs were collapsing into one another. She collapsed across it now, supporting herself on one elbow planted deeply in the mattress, and surveyed the dustballs collecting under the desk and chair.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Secondly, because thereby the very words of the Virgin are rendered more credible by which she asserted her virginity. Thus Ambrose says: “Belief in Mary’s words is strengthened, the motive for a lie is removed. If she had not been espoused when pregnant, she would seem to have wished to hide her sin by a lie: being espoused, she had no motive for lying, since a woman’s pregnancy is the reward of marriage and gives grace to the nuptial bond.” These two reasons add strength to our faith. Thirdly, that all excuse be removed from those virgins who, through want of caution, fall into dishonor. Hence Ambrose says: “It was not becoming that virgins should expose themselves to evil report, and cover themselves with the excuse that the Mother of the Lord had also been oppressed by ill-fame.” Fourthly, because by this the universal Church is typified, which is a virgin and yet is espoused to one Man, Christ, as Augustine says (De Sanct. Virg. xii). A fifth reason may be added: since the Mother of the Lord being both espoused and a virgin, both virginity and wedlock are honored in her person, in contradiction to those heretics who disparaged one or the other. Reply to Objection 1: We must believe that the Blessed Virgin, Mother of God, desired, from an intimate inspiration of the Holy Ghost, to be espoused, being confident that by the help of God she would never come to have carnal intercourse: yet she left this to God’s discretion. Wherefore she suffered nothing in detriment to her virginity. Reply to Objection 2: As Ambrose says on Lk. 1:26: “Our Lord preferred that men should doubt of His origin rather than of His Mother’s purity. For he knew the delicacy of virgin modesty, and how easily the fair name of chastity is disparaged: nor did He choose that our faith in His Birth should be strengthened in detriment to His Mother.” We must observe, however, that some miracles wrought by God are the direct object of faith; such are the miracles of the virginal Birth, the Resurrection of our Lord, and the Sacrament of the Altar. Wherefore our Lord wished these to be more hidden, that belief in them might have greater merit. Whereas other miracles are for the strengthening of faith: and these it behooves to be manifest.